He begins with the scientific facts: How was Pompeii destroyed? How did Mount Vesuvius become an active volcano? What happened during the eruption? How long did Pompeii lay buried and how was it finally rediscovered? What was Pompeii's history before the disaster?Then, Peter Connolly does what he does better than anyone--he rebuilds the past in words and pictures, allowing us to imagine what it was like to live in old Pompeii. Like an archaeological detective, he sifts through the ruins and artifacts to reconstruct one area of the town in minute detail. With maps and cross-sections, photographs, drawings, and engrossing, fact-filled text, Connolly takes us into the very homes of its citizens--into the kitchens, atriums, bedrooms and out into the gardens. We learn what the furniture looked like, how the homes were lighted and heated, what kind of jewelry was popular, and what the gladiators wore. We view the varied styles of architecture and decoration, attend a grand dinner party, visit local shops, go to the theater, to a public bath, and to the gladiators' arena. We gain an understanding of this ancient civilization, and begin to see how much was lost when the city fell prey to the tons of lava and ashes that fell on it during the devastating disaster.

    The first edition of The Best of the Achaeans bridged that gap, raising new questions about what could be known or conjectured about Greek heroes. In this revised edition, which features a new preface by the author, Gregory Nagy reconsiders his conclusions in the light of the subsequent debate and resumes his discussion of the special status of heroes in ancient Greek life and poetry. His book remains an engaging introduction both to the concept of the hero in Hellenic civilization and to the poetic forms through which the hero is defined: the Iliad and Odyssey in particular and archaic Greek poetry in general.

    He studied under Plato at Athens and taught there (367-47); subsequently he spent three years at the court of a former pupil, Hermeias, in Asia Minor and at this time married Pythias, one of Hermeias's relations. After some time at Mitylene, in 343-2 he was appointed by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son Alexander. After Philip's death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school (of "Peripatetics"), the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander's death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322.Nearly all the works Aristotle prepared for publication are lost; the priceless ones extant are lecture-materials, notes, and memoranda (some are spurious). They can be categorized as follows: I. Practical: Nicomachean Ethics; Great Ethics (Magna Moralia); Eudemian Ethics; Politics; Oeconomica (on the good of the family); Virtues and Vices.II. Logical: Categories; On Interpretation; Analytics (Prior and Posterior); On Sophistical Refutations; Topica.III. Physical: Twenty-six works (some suspect) including astronomy, generation and destruction, the senses, memory, sleep, dreams, life, facts about animals, etc.IV. Metaphysics: on being as being.V. On Art: Art of Rhetoric and Poetics.VI. Other works including the Athenian Constitution; more works also of doubtful authorship.VII. Fragments of various works such as dialogues on philosophy and literature; and of treatises on rhetoric, politics and metaphysics.The Loeb Classical Library(R) edition of Aristotle is in twenty-three volumes.

    

    By the Middle Ages they had all been lost. Happily papyrus finds in Egypt during the past century have recovered one complete play, substantial portions of six others, and smaller but still interesting fragments. Menander was highly regarded in antiquity and his plots, set in Greece, were adapted for the Roman world by Plautus and Terence. Geoffrey Arnott's new Loeb edition is in three volumes.Volume I contains six plays, including the only complete one extant, Dyskolos (The Peevish Fellow), which won first prize in Athens in 317 BCE, and Dis Expaton (Twice a Swindler), the original of Plautus' Two Bacchises.Volume II contains the surviving portions of ten Menander plays. Among these are the recently published fragments of Misoumenos (The Man She Hated), which sympathetically presents the flawed relationship of a soldier and a captive girl; and the surviving half of Perikeiromene (The Girl with Her Hair Cut Short), a comedy of mistaken identity and lovers' quarrel.Volume III begins with Samia (The Woman from Samos), which has come down to us nearly complete. Here too are the very substantial extant portions of Sikyonioi (The Sicyonians) and Phasma (The Apparition) as well as Synaristosai (Women Lunching Together), on which Plautus's Cistellaria was based. Arnott's edition of the great Hellenistic playwright has been garnering wide praise for making these fragmentary texts more accesible, elucidating their dramatic movement.