The poems of the Poetic Edda have waited a long time for a modern English translation that would do them justice. Here it is at last (Odin be praised!). These amazing texts from a 13th-century Icelandic manuscript are of huge historical, mythological, and literary importance....

This widely studied play is one of the "best sellers" of the Shakespeare canon....

Carved close to the original Greek, acclaimed classicist Caroline Alexander's new translation is swift and lean, with the driving cadence of its source....

The Song of Roland is acknowledged today as the first masterpiece of French vernacular literature and one of the world’s greatest epic poems....

In The Oresteia, Aeschylus dramatizes the myth of the curse on the royal house of Argos....

The Knight's Tale of medieval wars and chivalry is the first tale told to the pilgrims as they set out to Canterbury....

An Ideal Husband is an 1895 comedy by Oscar Wilde which revolves around blackmail and political corruption....

On the Shortness of Life is a moral essay written by Seneca, a Roman Stoic philosopher, sometime around the year 49 AD, to his father-in-law Paulinus. The philosopher brings up many Stoic principles on the nature of time, namely that people waste much of it in meaningless pursuits....

Ovid's sensuous and witty poetry brings together a dazzling array of mythological tales, ingeniously linked by the idea of transformation - often as a result of love or lust - where men and women find themselves magically changed into new and sometimes extraordinary beings....

When sleep was at its deepest, night at its blackest, up from the mist-filled marsh came Grendel stalking....

In the hands of Sophocles, the master dramatist, the anguished tale of a man fated to kill his father and marry his mother retains its power to shock and move beyond any Freudian reference....

This multicast dramatisation of Arabian Nights: Volume 1 is an Audible Original reenvisioning of three iconic tales - with a twist....

Xenophon of Athens (c. 430 BC - 354 BC) was an Athenian historian, philosopher, and soldier. "Hiero", one of Xenophon’s minor works, is a dialogue between Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, and the lyric poet Simonides, as a response to the assumption that a tyrant's life is more pleasant than that of a commoner. "On Horsemanship" is one of his two treatises on horsemanship. Military training and the duties of the cavalry commander are dealt with in the other, "Hipparchicus", while "On Horsemanship" deals with the selection, care, and training of horses in general.

The 12 Lays of Marie de France offer one of the most striking collections of short narrative poems of the 12th century - two centuries before Chaucer. Written in Anglo-French, they contain beguiling and entertaining stories of love and romance, of chivalry and adventure with sometimes even a magical twist. They are especially unique in early literature by being ascribed to a female poet, Marie de France: in the very first Lay - 'Guigemar' - is the introductory line: ‘Hear my Lords, what Marie says, who does not wish to be forgotten in her time.’