Greek and Roman Classics: A Guide to Understanding the Classics

Even if you have the time and energy to read the entire original work, this study guide will provide worthwhile summaries for those who get bogged down in detail and need an overview of each work or chapter. For instance the Iliad, the author gives a one and a half page summary of each chapter with a brief comment explaining things like why a particular god appears in the scene or the meaning of a particular cultural practice. The chapters are labelled by the important happenings so you don't miss anything in the fine print like "Hector flees", "the funeral of Patroclus", "Hector desecrated", or "the gods intervene" Personally I like to read the original first, then the notes to see if I agree with them and to keep all the details straight. Don't tell your professor you're reading Monarch notes, they don't like it even though they're written by professors; just read them and look good in the class discussion. I find the Monarch more sophisticated than some other published notes. From the table of contents: Greek-- Iliad, Odessy, Greek Lyric Poetry (Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho, Anacreon, Pindar), Greek Tradgedy (Aeschylus: Prometheus bound, Agamemnon, Choephoroe, Eumenides; Sophocles: Ajax, Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra, Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus; Euripedes: Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus, Torjan Women, Electra, Bacchae); Greek Comedy (Aristophanes: Clouds, Frogs, Lysistrata); Greek History (Herodotus: the histories, Thucydides: the peloponnesian war);Greek Philosophy (Plato: the republic, symposium, the apolgy, crito, Phaedo) Aristotle: Physics, the metaphysics, the ethics, politics, poetics) Roman-- lucretius: on the nature of things; catullus: the poems, Virgil: aenid; horace:odes; livy: history; ovid: metamorphoses; tacitus: annals