Gilbert Highet was a legendary teacher at Columbia University, admired both for his scholarship and his charisma as a lecturer. Poets in a Landscape is his delightful exploration of Latin literature and the Italian landscape. As Highet writes in his introduction, “I have endeavored to recall some of the greatest Roman poets by describing the places were they lived, recreating their characters and evoking the essence of their work.” The poets are Catullus, Vergil, Propertius, Horace, Tibullus, Ovid, and Juvenal. Highet brings them life, setting them in their historical context and locating them in the physical world, while also offering crisp modern translations of the poets’ finest work. The result is an entirely sui generis amalgam of travel writing, biography, criticism, and pure poetry—altogether an unexcelled introduction to the world of the classics.
This brilliant and eloquent book by a distinguished scholar and critic examines the history, the limits, and the promise of the human mind and the knowledge of which it is capable. Professor Highet explores the meaning of our culture from the intellectual and moral monuments of the Greeks, Romans, and Judeo-Christians, and our contemporary thinkers. Out of this book comes a clear definition of knowledge and insights into the strength and limitations of the mind.
Literary satire assumes three main forms: monologue, parody, and narrative (some fictional, some dramatic). This book by Gilbert Highet is a study of these forms, their meaning, their variation, their powers. Its scope is the range of satirical literature—from ancient Greece to modern America, from Aristophanes to Ionesco, from the parodists of Homer to the parodists of Eisenhower. It shows how satire originated in Greece and Rome, what its initial purposes and methods were, and how it revived in the Renaissance, to continue into our own era. Contents: Preface. I. Introduction. II. Diatribe. III. Parody. IV. The Distorting Mirror. V. Conclusion. Notes. Brief Bibliography. Index. Originally published in 1962. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
In the Aeneid men, women, gods, and goddesses are characterized by the speeches assigned to them far more than by descriptions of their appearance or behavior. Most of the speeches are highly emotional and individualized, reminding us of the most powerful utterances of Greek tragedy. Gilbert Highet has analyzed all the speeches in the Aeneid, using statistical techniques as well as more traditional methods of scholarship. He has classified the speeches; identified their models in earlier Greek and Latin literature; analyzed their structure; and discussed their importance in the portrayal of character. He finds that Vergil used standard rhetorical devices with discretion, and that his models were poets rather than orators. Nevertheless, this study shows Vergil to have been a master dramatist as well as a great epic poet. Originally published in 1972. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Werner Jaeger's classic three-volume work, originally published in 1939, is now available in paperback. Paideia, the shaping of Greek character through a union of civilization, tradition, literature, and philosophy is the basis for Jaeger's evaluation of Hellenic culture. Volume I describes the foundation, growth, and crisis of Greek culture during the archaic and classical epochs, ending with the collapse of the Athenian empire. The second and third volumes of the work deal with the intellectual history of ancient Greece in the Age of Plato, the 4th century B.C.--the age in which Greece lost everything that is valued in this world--state, power, liberty--but still clung to the concept of paideia. As its last great poet, Menander summarized the primary role of this ideal in Greek culture when he said: "The possession which no one can take away from man is paideia.
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