Based on Viking Age poems, The Saga of the Volsungs combines mythology, legend and sheer human drama. At its heart are the heroic deeds of Sigurd the dragon slayer who acquires magical knowledge from …
Written in the thirteenth century, Njal's Saga is a story that explores perennial human problems-from failed marriages to divided loyalties, from the law's inability to curb human passions to the terr…
De tous les poètes latins, Catulle est sans doute celui qui a rendu avec le plus de fougue, de sincérité et de violence les éternelles péripéties du désir et de l'amour. Né aux alentours de 84 avant J…
The Mabinogion (Welsh pronunciation: mabɪˈnɔɡjɔn) is a collection of 11 prose stories collated from medieval Welsh manuscripts. The tales draw on pre-Christian Celtic mythology, international folktale…
Perhaps more than any other writer, Juvenal (c. AD 55-138) captures the splendour, the squalor, and the sheer energy of everyday Roman life. In The Sixteen Satires he evokes a fascinating world of who…
The Agricola is both a portrait of Julius Agricola - the most famous governor of Roman Britain and Tacitus' well-loved and respected father-in-law - and the first detailed account of Britain that has …
Completed in 1136, The History of the Kings of Britain traces the story of the realm from its supposed foundation by Brutus to the coming of the Saxons some two thousand years later. Vividly portrayin…
Egil's Saga tells the story of the long and brutal life of tenth-century warrior-poet and farmer Egill Skallagrímsson: a morally ambiguous character who was at once the composer of intricately beautif…
On 15 August 778, Charlemagne’s army was returning from a successful expedition against Saracen Spain when its rearguard was ambushed in a remote Pyrenean pass. Out of this skirmish arose a stirring t…
In 49 B.C., the seven hundred fifth year since the founding of Rome, Julius Caesar crossed a small border river called the Rubicon and plunged Rome into cataclysmic civil war. Tom Holland’s enthrallin…
Perhaps the strangest and most strikingly modern work to survive from the ancient world, The Satyricon relates the hilarious mock epic adventures of the impotent Encolpius, and his struggle to regain …
In The Persian Expedition, Xenophon, a young Athenian noble who sought his destiny abroad, provides an enthralling eyewitness account of the attempt by a Greek mercenary army - the Ten Thousand - to h…
Having dutifully written the official war history of Justinian's reign, Procopius turned round and revealed in The Secret History the other faces of the leading men and women of Byzantium in the sixth…
