Ancient, Classical & Medieval Literature

Kurukshetra is a Hindi classic. It gives an extraordinary account of the Kurukshetra war mentioned in the Mahabharata. It describes in vivid details the armed confrontation that took place between the Pandavas and the Kauravas....

A lean, fleet-footed translation that recaptures Homer’s “nimble gallop” and brings an ancient epic to new life....

George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion is a fussy unmarried professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins, who claims that he could train an uneducated person off the street to speak so that he or she could pass as a member of the aristocracy. His pick is Eliza Doolittle, who sells flowers....

Little is known about the Ancient Greek oral poet Homer, the supposed 8th century BC author of the world-read Iliad and his later masterpiece, The Odyssey....

John Lithgow has compiled an outstanding collection of memorable poems and has gathered his famous friends to read them....

The Tirukkural (honoured Kural) is one of the world's greatest literary and philosophical masterpieces. Composed in Tamil by Tiruvalluvar sometime between 2 BCE and 5 CE....

Hamlet, which dates from 1600-1601, is the first in Shakespeare's great series of four tragedies....

This beautiful collection of 196 of his poems, previously unavailable in English and now translated by native Persian speakers Maryam Mafi and Azima Melita Kolin, will appeal to Rumi lovers everywhere who want a guidebook for their inner journey....

Oedipus Rex is an Athenian tragedy by Sophocles that was first performed about 429 BC. Noted classicist Gilbert Murray is the translator of this version of the play....

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....

Is reality stable? What is happiness? How shall we best live our lives? In this series of 24 lectures, Professor Roochnik invites you to join this eternal discussion....

Julius Caesar is one of Shakespeare’s most compelling Roman plays. The plot against Caesar and the infamous assassination scene make for unforgettable listening....

Together, Hafez, a giant of world literature; Jahan Malek Khatun, an eloquent princess; and Obayd-e Zakani, a dissolute satirist, represent one of the most remarkable literary flowerings of any era. Here Dick Davis, an award-winning poet widely considered "our finest translator of Persian poetry" (The Times Literary Supplement), presents a diverse selection of some of the best poems by these world-renowned authors and shows us the spiritual and secular aspects of love, in varieties embracing every aspect of the human heart.

The moral cesspool that Rome had become in the first century AD is the subject of The Satyricon by Petronius. The work itself was originally quite a long one, perhaps as long as a thousand pages. The extant portion, however, is only a small fraction of the original. The work contains a mixture of prose and verse, serious and comic elements, and erotic and decadent passages. It possesses a sophisticated humor and a very ironic tone. It is the creation of a Roman gentleman whose insights were keen.