Fiction : Classics

We come into contact with the Classics daily: in our culture, politics, medicine, architecture, language and literature. What are the roots of these influences and how do our interpretations differ from their original reception? This introduction begins with a visit to the British Museum. more...

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A poet who hated an age of decadence, armed conflict, and departure from tradition, Aristophanes' comic genius influenced the political and social order of his own fifth-century Athens. But as Moses Hadas writes in his introduction to this volume, 'His true claim upon our attention is as the most brilliant and artistic and thoughtful wit our world has known. more...

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Comus is a Masque drama by John Milton. The play as all characters on stage and when their turn comes to present a part in the action they speak while everyone else remains. Comus is a prowling magician of Satanic proportions who comes across a Lady in the forest. He invites her to be entertained with liquor with which he expects to awaken her lust and pride, both great sins. He is adept with compliments and is a master of rhetorical combinations and slick at debate. She allows herself to be the victim of his artfully meandering words as he leads her to his cave. Once there she repositions herself out of his strong point--debate--and braces herself within the discussion of divinely inspired passion because in this presentation she avows the role of virtuous display. By doing this she extricates herself from Comus' lair and his flattering discourse. The audience leaves, understanding that Comus' rhetoric can be neutralized when confronted with sanctity and eloquence. There is religious significance as the Lady encounters Comus. Because she is an "unconquer'd virgin" she has no escape to his enticements, but once she is trapped by his deceit, her salvation lies in her obedience to Christ and her family. This drama is a scintillating account of the temptations which waylay everyone and the strategies needed to avoid them. more...

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Written in 1880, this little-known and charming novel is a light drawing-room comedy about the romantic entanglements of Americans traveling through Europe. Bernard Longueville, an Englishman in Europe, meets various people and visits different places, and the reader is swept along with him in this tour. more...

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Hank Morgan awakens one morning to find he has been transported from nineteenth-century New England to sixth-century England and the reign of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Morgan brings to King Arthur’s utopian court the ingenuity of the future, resulting in a culture clash that is at once satiric, anarchic, and darkly comic. more...

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