Legendary Tales of Antiquity Finally Available in English

Three beautiful hardcover books: the Aleksander Starter Kit

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The three books in this bundle are:

Seven Against Thebes

To the heroes beneath the walls of Troy, the heroes of the Theban War were peerless and unattainable role models. What was that war? Who fought it and why? What do we know about the possible historical facts underlying the ancient myth? And how did the ancients of the 4th century BC - Athenians, Thebans, Spartans - think about the myth? How was it relevant to them? How is our own past relevant to us?

The Last Olympiad

A rich and highly readable panorama of the intellectual life of the Roman Empire about to fall. Here they are, debating topics ranging from the moral consequences of bathing and chariot races to national character and demon possession:

the zany, crafty, and weird doctors of the Church: Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine
the dyspeptic historian Ammianus Marcellinus
three fanatic historians of the Church
the grumpy rhetorician Libanius
the blood-thirsty pagan scholar-defenders of the Alexandrian Serapeum
the author of a rabid anti-Christian diatribe which somehow miraculously survived to our times (The Lives of Sophists)
and the quirky and mysterious figure of "Jorge Luis Borges of ancient Rome" (Authors of Imperial History)

A Meeting in Oea

The quirkiest serious book about Plato ever written by a scholar. Or anyone. Meet Apuleius, Rome's all-time best-selling author (of The Golden Ass, no less!), a Platonic scholar, a part-time magician, and a dowry-hunter, as he works on his treatise on Plato at night and schemes to marry a rich African widow by day.