Showing titles in Ancient, Classical & Medieval Literature

Full-cast productions of Seneca’s most famous tragedies, plus letters from the Roman philosopher read by Paul Scofield Stoic philosopher and playwright Lucius Annaeus Seneca lived through the reigns of Caligula and Claudius, and was tutor and adviser to Nero, before his untimely suicide in...

A full-cast dramatization of the classic Russian novel. Satan and his retinue, including a seven foot tall skinny fellow with a pince-nez , an obnoxious cigar smoking black cat and a beautiful naked vampire visit Moscow in the 1920s, taking with them chaos and insanity where ever they go.

Homer's masterpiece tells the story of Odysseus, the ideal Greek hero, as he travels home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, a journey of 10 years and countless thrilling adventures. Rich in Greek folklore and myth, featuring gods and goddesses, monsters and sorceresses, The Odyssey has enchanted listeners around the world for thousands of years.

Hamlet, which dates from 1600-1601, is the first in Shakespeare's great series of four tragedies. In writing this extraordinary play Shakespeare effectively re-invented tragedy after an interval of roughly two thousand years - you would have to go back to the Greek dramatists of 5th century Athens to find anything of comparable depth and maturity. This production features the voice of Anton Lesser as Hamlet along with a full cast.

Written around the 6th century BC by the sage Laozi and read by Emma Topping.

Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Windson Liong. This definitive recording includes an introduction by Martin Palmer. The Most Venerable Book (also known as The Book of History) is one of the Five Classics. For many centuries it was a central work for anyone wishing...

1469. For almost ten years, Edward IV has ruled with the Earl of Warwick's support, but now rebellion threatens the fragile peace. Heiress Isobel Fenton is determined not to be separated from her beloved manor of Beaumancote. But as unseen witness to a summary execution, she is propelled into the world of personal feud and national politics. She's left in the protection of the formidable Earl, who has begun to foment rebellion, but is set to marry his enemy's heir, Thomas Lacey.

Ovid’s sensuous and witty poem brings together a dazzling array of mythological tales ingeniously linked by the idea of transformation, often as a result of love or lust, in which men and women find themselves magically changed into new and sometimes extraordinary beings. Beginning with the...

The Song of Roland is acknowledged today as the first masterpiece of French vernacular literature and one of the world’s greatest epic poems. Written down around the year 1090, The Song of Roland finely crafted verses tell of the betrayal and defeat of Charlemagne’s beloved nephew at the Pass of Roncevaux in the Pyrenees and of the revenge subsequently sought on his behalf.

This 14th-century Italian poet was a model for many who followed him. His passionate sonnets to Laura became the epitome for love poetry. Over some 40 years he wrote 366 sonnets to Laura, whom he probably never even spoke to, and they remain immediate and affecting even now. Called "Rime Sparse (Scattered Rhymes)", they influenced Chaucer and many others.

In this original adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel, an encounter in Florence and an offer to exchange rooms brings George Emerson to the attention of Lucy Honeychurch. Their flirtation is cut short by Lucy’s chaperone, but when they meet again back home in England, Lucy must negotiate the demands of her station with the desires of her heart.

The earliest surviving works of ancient Greek literature, dating back to the early Archaic period, are the two epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. These two epics, along with the Homeric Hymns and the two poems of Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days, comprised the major foundations of the Greek literary tradition that would continue into the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods. This carefully selected collection contains: The Odyssey ; The Works and Days ; Theogony ; The Complete Poems of Sappho ; Medea ; Antigone ; Agamemnon ; The Choephori ; Eumenides.

Medea is an ancient Greek tragedy written by Euripides, based upon the myth of Jason and Medea and first produced in 431 BC. The plot centers on the actions of Medea, a former princess of the "barbarian" kingdom of Colchis, and the wife of Jason; she finds her position in the Greek world threatened as Jason leaves her for a Greek princess of Corinth. Medea takes vengeance on Jason by murdering Jason's new wife as well as her own children, after which she escapes to Athens to start a new life. 

Thomas Bulfinch introduces us to the gods of the Greek, Roman, and Norse mythologies. We learn their stories and we also observe the similarities between the deities of yore. Comparing these stories and characters to those of some modern religions may produce some surprising results!

By the time Shakespeare came to write Macbeth - almost certainly in 1605/1606 - he had already completed three of the great tragedies with which modern audiences are so familiar: Hamlet (1601), Othello (1603), and King Lear (1605). Each of those plays gives us an eponymous hero who is in some significant way flawed, but for whom we also inevitably feel deep sympathy, whatever his errors or crimes. But in MacBeth, Shakespeare has chosen for his tragic hero a man guilty of the most terrible crime imaginable to a Jacobean audience, that of regicide - the murder of a king.

“Probably the most finely accomplished and ... most enduring" translation (Los Angeles Times Book Review) of this essential work of world literature—from a renowned scholar and master teacher of Dante and an accomplished poet. “The Hollanders … act as latter-day Virgils, guiding us...

The Argonautica, also known as Jason and the Golden Fleece or Jason and the Argonauts, is the only surviving epic poem from Hellenistic Greece. It is a masterpiece whose story was well known to the audiences of the time. Virgil and other later poets were greatly influenced by it. Its author, Apollonius, was a well-known third century BC scholar living in Alexandria during the great age of Ptolomaic scholarship, and his bold attempt at writing a Homeric epic about Jason and his quest for the Golden Fleece faced a daunting audience of knowledgeable contemporaries.

Four neo-classical tragedies from the renowned French dramatist, with star-studded casts including Timothy West, Prunella Scales and Geraldine McEwan Jean-Baptiste Racine stands with Molière and Corneille as one of the three premier dramatists of 17th-century France. A foundational figure in...

Stanley Lombardo narrates the audiobook edition of his new verse rendering of the great Babylonian epic that includes material from the recently discovered “monkey tablet...

In 1958, 27 years after Aldous Huxley wrote "Brave New World", he took another look at his remarkable fable and résumé the development since. His understandings are most alarming in his time already. They are even more alarming almost another half century later and shockingly up-to-date, considering recent developments. His prophetic view proofs once more, how terribly precise and visionary it was.