The Portable Greek Reader by W H Auden

The Portable Greek Reader by W H Auden

It is commonplace to say that our civilization is built on the ruins of Greece. W. H. Auden's splendid anthology locates the truth behind the truism, while filling in the gaps in our knowledge of a people who gave us so much of our cultural legacy.

Every page in The Portable Greek Reader contains some fundamental precursor of the ways in which we think about heroism, destiny, love, politics, tragedy, science, virtue, and thought itself, Included are excerpts from the mythologies of Hesiod; the martial epics of Homer; the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, and Heraclitus; Aesop's fables; poems by Pindar and Sappho; the scientific writings of Euclid, Galen, and Hippocrates; and the history of Thucydides. Presented in their most elegant and authoritative translations, and accompanied by Auden's brilliant introduction, these selections recreate the Greek world in all its splendor, strangeness, and sophistication.

Engaging and full and intelligent . a command performance, brought off with considerable aplomb.
--The New York Times

Auden was born in 1907 in York, England. In 1930, he released his first book of poems, which was followed by a dozen volumes of shorter and longer poems. He wrote books about his journeys to Iceland (with Louis MacNeice) and wartime China (with Christopher Isherwood) and worked on three plays with Christopher Isherwood. He moved to New York in 1939 and became an American citizen in 1946. He wrote opera libretti for Igor Stravinsky, Hans Werner Henze, and Nicolas Nabokov alongside his colleague Chester Kallman.

Auden returned to Oxford from his winter residence in New York in 1972. In 1973, he died in Vienna.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780140150391
ISBN 10	0140150390
Title	The Portable Greek Reader
Author	W H Auden
Series	Portable Library
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Penguin Putnam Inc
Year published	1977-08-25
Number of pages	736
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.