The ancient Greeks' concept of "the hero" was very different from what we understand by the term today. In 24 installments, based on the Harvard course Nagy has taught and refined since the 1970s, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours explores civilization's roots in Classical literature-a lineage that continues to challenge and inspire us.

Volume I of the Loeb Hippocrates presents an exemplary selection of works by or attributed to the "Father of Medicine" that illustrate his fundamental contributions to the theory, philosophy, and practice of medicine. Included are Ancient Medicine; Airs, Waters, Places; Epidemics 1 and 3; Precepts; Nutriment; and the famous Hippocratic Oath.

This book is a complete translation of the fragments of the pre-Socratic philosophers given in the fifth edition of Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker.

In Secret History the Byzantine historian Procopius (late fifth century to after 558 CE) attacks the sixth century CE emperor Justinian and empress Theodora and alleges their ruinous effect on the Roman empire. Procopius' pen is particularly sharp in portraying Theodora's lewdness, duplicity, cruelty, spite, vanity and pride.

In his reading of the Shishuo xinyu, the most important anecdotal collection of medieval China, Jack W. Chen presents an extended meditation on the anecdote form, both what it affords in terms of representing a social community and how it provides a space for the rehearsal of certain longstanding philosophical and cultural arguments.

American urbanites once lived alongside livestock and beasts of burden. But as cities grew, human-animal relationships changed. The city became a place for pets, not slaughterhouses or working animals. Andrew Robichaud traces the far-reaching consequences of this shift-for urban landscapes, animal- and child-welfare laws, and environmental justice.

Animal Fables of the Courtly Mediterranean is a treasure trove of widely translated stories on how to conduct oneself and succeed in life. The new Byzantine Greek text and English translation presented here is based on a twelfth-century work that contains unique prefaces and reinstates stories omitted from the earliest Greek version.

Tacitus (c. 55-c. 120 CE), renowned for concision and psychology, is paramount as a historian of the early Roman empire. What survives of Histories covers the dramatic years 69-70. What survives of Annals tells an often terrible tale of 14-28, 31-37, and, partially, 47-66.

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species is one of the most important and yet least read scientific works in the history of science. The Annotated Origin is a facsimile of the first edition of 1859, and is accompanied by James T. Costa's marginal annotations, drawing on his extensive experience with Darwin's ideas in the field, lab, and classroom.

Serving prison time with hard labor for the crime of gross indecency, Oscar Wilde wrote some of his most powerful works. A savage indictment of society, and testimony to private sufferings, his prison writings illuminated by Nicholas Frankel's notes reveal a different man from the dandy and aesthete who shocked or amused the English-speaking world.

Anonymous Old English Lives of Saints includes narratives from the eleventh and twelfth centuries about locally venerated saints like the abbess Seaxburh, as well as familiar ones like Nicholas and Michael the Archangel. This volume presents new Old English editions and modern English translations of twenty-two unattributed saints' Lives.

A representation of Irish poetic achievement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from poets such as Austin Clarke and Samuel Beckett who were writing while Yeats and Joyce were still living.