Böcker i Cambridge Library Collection - Classics-serien

Classical topographer Sir William Gell (1777-1836) first came to public attention with his Topography of Troy (1804). Based on his travels around Bunarbashi, near to where Schliemann would subsequently excavate, the work became a standard treatise. Byron even wrote: 'Of Dardan tours let dilettanti tell, / I leave topography to classic Gell.' A noted conversationalist and intellectual intermediary, Gell became a Fellow of the Royal Society and, indeed, a Member of the Society of Dilettanti. He also served, in 1803, on a diplomatic mission to the Ionian Islands; his subsequent journey, with the archaeologist Edward Dodwell, through the Peloponnese - then known as the Morea - became the subject of several later books, including Narrative of a Journey in the Morea (1823; also reissued in this series) and this 1817 publication. Comprising a survey of routes through the area, and their natural and archaeological landmarks, it sheds light on both contemporary Greece and the practicalities of early topographical study.

Classical scholar Robinson Ellis (1834-1913) studied at Balliol College, Oxford, under Benjamin Jowett, before becoming a Fellow of Trinity and, in 1893, Corpus Professor of Latin. His 1876 Commentary on Catullus (also reissued in this series) publicised the Codex Oxoniensis but overlooked its significance and was criticised by other scholars in the field. Nevertheless, his commentaries became standard texts, including this 1881 publication of Ovid's Ibis. A vitriolic invective poem, written in exile, aimed at an enemy whose identity remains unclear, and invoking Callimachus' lost poem of the same name, it is probably Ovid's least-known work. This edition, including text, scholia, and Ellis's prolegomena and critical apparatus, illuminates nineteenth-century traditions of classical scholarship.

Revised by Adolf Michaelis, the third edition of German philologist Otto Jahn's Greek text of Sophocles' Electra was published in 1882. Sophocles (c.496-406 BCE) wrote his great tragedy towards the end of his career; it is one of only seven of his estimated 123 works to survive. Taking place in Argos, the play portrays the revenge taken by Electra and Orestes, following the murder of their father Agamemnon, on their mother Clytemnestra and stepfather Aegisthus. Jahn (1813-69), who also produced a renowned scholarly biography of Mozart, was Professor of archaeology at Leipzig - until his removal for involvement in the 1848 uprisings - then Director of the Academic Art Museum at Bonn, and Professor of Archaeology at Berlin. This highly regarded edition, with extensive critical apparatus and commentary throughout, remains an authoritative resource for readers interested in the history of philology, textual criticism, and Classical Greek literature.

Maurice Platnauer (1887-1974) published this seminal study of the metrical practices of the great Augustan elegists in 1951, and it is yet to be superseded. Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford, between 1956 and 1960, Platnauer examined every conceivable aspect of the versification of the three principal Latin elegiac poets, Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid, scrutinising in turn their prosody, word use and idiom. The book contains numerous tables of statistics comparing the frequency of various metrical and idiomatic usages among the three authors, including the placement of caesuras, use of elision, dactylic opening feet and polysyllabic line endings. This wealth of technical detail is offset by Platnauer's keen appreciation of the ultimate poetic purpose of these prosodic investigations: he explicitly hopes that the book will prove to be of use not only to teachers, but also to the 'not yet quite extinct genera' of writers of Latin verse.

Sir James Frazer (1854-1941) is best remembered today for The Golden Bough, widely considered to be one of the most important early texts in the fields of psychology and anthropology. Originally a classical scholar, Frazer also published this five-volume edition of Ovid's Fasti in 1929. It contains the text and a parallel English translation, with commentary on the six books, indexes, illustrations, and plans. Frazer's interest in Ovid's unfinished final poem arose from his wide-ranging studies of ancient literature and the origins of myth. The work describes the origins of the Roman calendar with its sacred days, and ranges from the deeds of major gods and heroes to the strange rites involved in placating the goddess of mildew. Volume 5 contains indexes to the translation and commentary, 88 plates, and maps of Rome. Other works by Frazer are also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection.