James Romm

The tragic story of ancient Greece's last democratic leader and his doomed fight to save Athens from Macedonian domination In the spring of 340 BCE, news arrived that Philip of Macedon had seized a town in central Greece, a base from which he could march on Athens. In the fierce debates about...

Plato is one of history's most influential thinkers, yet the image we have of him—an ethereal figure far removed from society and politics, who conjured abstract ideas in peaceful groves—is a fiction, created by Plato's admirers and built up over centuries. In Plato and the Tyrant, acclaimed...

A portrait of one of the ancient world’s first political celebrities, who veered from failure to success and back again....

Acclaimed classicist James Romm translates surviving pieces of timeless wisdom from the lost plays of ancient Athens. "The truly happy man ought to stay at home." "Hunger, and lack of coin, put a stop to love." "Hades, alone of the gods, does not enjoy bribes." These quotes―and hundreds of...

With piquant details of speech and behavior taken straight off the streets of ancient Athens, Theophrastus gives us sketches of the mean, vile, and annoying that are comically distorted yet vividly real, enlivened by Pamela Mensch's fresh translation.....