A commander on both land and sea, he led his armies to victory after victory.But like the heroes in a great Greek tragedy, he was a victim of his own pride, arrogance, excess, and ambition. Accused of crimes against the state, he was banished from his beloved Athens, only to take up arms in the service of his former enemies.For nearly three decades, Greece burned with war and Alcibiades helped bring victories to both sides — and ended up trusted by neither.Narrated from death row by Alcibiades’ bodyguard and assassin, a man whose own love and loathing for his former commander mirrors the mixed emotions felt by all Athens, Tides of War tells an epic saga of an extraordinary century, a war that changed history, and a complex leader who seduced a nation.

    Born into a stern farming family on the island of Keos, Simonides escapes his harsh childhood through a lucky apprenticeship with a renowned Ionian singer. As they travel through 5th century B.C. Greece, Simonides learns not only how to play the kithara and compose poetry, but also how to navigate the shifting alliances surrounding his rich patrons. He is witness to the Persian invasion of Ionia, to the decadent reign of the Samian pirate king Polykrates, and to the fall of the Pisistratids in the Athenian court. Along the way, he encounters artists, statesmen, athletes, thinkers, and lovers, including the likes of Pythagoras and Aischylos. Using the singer's unique perspective, Renault combines her vibrant imagination and her formidable knowledge of history to establish a sweeping, resilient vision of a golden century.

    In the months that followed, ten thousand men--trained and hardened in three decades of war in Greece--would engage in pitched battles, witness untold horrors, and begin a desperate march across he desert, over raging rivers, and into the jaws of hell itself. By the time it was over, some would be alive, others dead, and one among them would emerge and the greatest hero of all...In a novel of high adventure and riveting historical drama, Michael Curtis Ford brings to life an amazing true story from Greek antiquity--Xenophon's march of the ten Thousand. A tale of war and peace, of loyalties and betrayals, and of a soldier's love for a mysterious and dangerous woman, The Ten Thousand captures the eternal spirit of courage--in the face of impossible odds.

    -- and embellishes it with his own ironic humor, brilliant insights, and piercing observations. We meet a vast array of historical figures in a staggering novel of love, war, philosophy, and adventure . . . "There isn't a page of CREATION that doesn't inform and very few pages that do not delight."-- John Leonard, The New York Times

    Written with ideas on The White Goddess as a cultural/anthropological backdrop to the ancient Greek tale. What the Golden Fleece really was—a cloak tossed to earth by a drunken Zeus, a sheepskin book of alchemic secrets or the gilded epidermis of a young human sacrifice named Mr. Ram—nobody knows. But Graves is quite sure that, whatever the Golden Fleece was, the voyage of Jason & his Argonauts really happened. His story shows the legendary cruise as one of the bawdiest, bloodiest, most boisterous expeditions of all time. In I, Claudius & its Claudius the God sequel, Graves brought the teeming life of Claudian Rome so vividly alive that they became bestsellers. In the not-so-successful Wife to Mr. Milton, his blend of imagination & scholarship projected his readers into 17th-Century England & the bedchamber temper tantrums of the blind poet-politician. With Hercules & shipmates, Graves becomes an ancient Greek, moving among demigods & goddesses, myths & monsters with an easy familiarity & a wealth of erudite detail. Both sometimes seem too much of a good thing. Atomic-age readers, ill-attuned to the leisurely, formal talk of myth-age Greeks, may find themselves skipping some of the longer speeches. Most of the Argo's 50-oar crew were princes, each with a special talent & gift of the gods. The only woman aboard was a princess: Atalanta of Calydon, a virgin huntress who could outrun any man in Greece. Argus, who built the Argo, was the world's finest shipwright. Castor & Pollux, sons of Leda & Zeus-as-swan, were champion prizefighters. Nauplius, Poseidon's son, was an unrivaled navigator. Orpheus could make sticks & stones dance to his lyre. Hercules of Tiryns was the world's strongest man. He would've captained the Argonauts were it not that in moments of insanity he murdered friend & foe alike. Captaincy devolved on Jason of lolcos—a man nobody liked or trusted, but who had a power denied to all the others: women instantly fell in love with him. Even surly Hercules agreed it a quality worth all the rest. Backed by divine blessings & equinoctal winds, the Argonauts set sail. On the Island of Lemnos, peopled solely by women, they generously stopped off to help out with spring sowing. Nine months later, 200 children were born, of whom no less than 60 were said to be the spitting image of Hercules. On Samothrace, they were initiated into the sacred mysteries. The Goddess of All Being mated with the Serpent Priapus to be delivered of a bull. Then the sacred nymphs leapt on them & scratched & bit until even Hercules passed out. Thereafter, the Argonauts glowed with "a faint nimbus of light." The Argonauts boldly pushed on thru the dread Hellespont & entered the Black Sea. To their dismay, Hercules deserted, summoned home to perform another of his mighty labors. "Holy Serpents!" he growled. "Tell me what this time?" The job—cleaning the Augean Stables—didn't take long. He stayed around afterwards with the Lydian high priestess—who in due time bore male triplets. In gratitude, she taught him to spin, tying up his hair in blue braids. He was crazy about it, admitting confidentially he'd always wanted to be a woman. The Argonauts went on without Hercules. Reaching Colchis, Aphrodite won the Fleece for them. She made her son Eros wait behind a pillar with his bow until handsome Jason strode into the King of Colchis' palace. Eros shot Medea thru the heart, & the smitten princess helped to get the Fleece from her father's temple. Mythology's most famous voyage had reached its goal, but Graves takes 150 more pages to wind things up.

    Now, Margaret George, the highly acclaimed bestselling historical novelist, has turned her intelligent, perceptive eye to the myth that is Helen of Troy.Margaret George breathes new life into the great Homeric tale by having Helen narrate her own story. Through her eyes and in her voice, we experience the young Helen's discovery of her divine origin and her terrifying beauty. While hardly more than a girl, Helen married the remote Spartan king Menelaus and bore him a daughter. By the age of twenty, the world's most beautiful woman was resigned to a passionless marriage until she encountered the handsome Trojan prince Paris. And once the lovers flee to Troy, war, murder, and tragedy become inevitable. In Helen of Troy, Margaret George has captured a timeless legend in a mesmerizing tale of a woman whose life was destined to create strife and destroy civilizations.

    . . whom dreamers find always at the end of their dreams."-- Theophile Gautier, 1845Arrestingly beautiful and fiercely intelligent, Cleopatra VII of Egypt was barely more than a teenager when she inherited the richest empire in the world--one that stretched from the scorching deserts of lower Egypt to the shining Mediterranean metropolis of Alexandria, with its famed libraries, storehouses, and treasuries. Imperiled at every turn by court conspiracies and Roman treachery, the young queen was forced to flee Alexandria and live in exile while a foreign army overran her city and her own siblings plotted her downfall. With nothing to lose, Cleopatra brazenly sought a partnership with the only man who could secure Egypt's safety: Julius Caesar, a wily politician and battle-hardened general with a weakness for women. The result was a passionate love affair that scandalized Rome and thrust Cleopatra into the glittering but deadly world of imperial intrigue and warfare-- a world that she would mesmerize and manipulate even after Caesar was gone.At the height of her power and fame, Cleopatra fell in love with Caesar's protégé and successor, Marc Antony, a handsome general known as much for his drunken hedonism as for his victories in  battle. Brash, irresistible, and fatally unreliable, Antony's once-strong hold on the Roman Empire was slipping fast, and with it slipped Cleopatra's fortunes. When the tide had finally, irrevocably turned against her, the proud queen plotted a last, spectacular maneuver that was to save her children, her empire, and her place in the pantheon of gods. Colin Falconer's bold, sensuous prose takes the reader inside the walls of Alexandria's great palaces and into Cleopatra's very heart, creating a vivid portrait of an unforgettable woman who thrived and triumphed in a world ruled by men. This is the story of a legendary woman's most glorious time, a story that blazes through thousands of years of history to capture the imagination of readers today.From the Hardcover edition.

    Roma recounts the tragedy of the hero-traitor Coriolanus, the capture of the city by the Gauls, the invasion of Hannibal, the bitter political struggles of the patricians and plebeians, and the ultimate death of Rome’s republic with the triumph, and assassination, of Julius Caesar.     Witnessing this history, and sometimes playing key roles, are the descendents of two of Rome’s first families, the Potitius and Pinarius clans:  One is the confidant of Romulus. One is born a slave and tempts a Vestal virgin to break her vows. One becomes a mass murderer. And one becomes the heir of Julius Caesar. Linking the generations is a mysterious talisman as ancient as the city itself.     Epic in every sense of the word, Roma is a panoramic historical saga and Saylor’s finest achievement to date.

    B. Guthrie Jr.'s epic adventure novels set in the American West. Here he introduces Boone Caudill, Jim Deakins, and Dick Summers: traveling the Missouri River from St. Louis to the Rockies, these frontiersmen live as trappers, traders, guides, and explorers. The story centers on Caudill, a young Kentuckian driven by a raging hunger for life and a longing for the blue sky and brown earth of big, wild places. Caught up in the freedom and savagery of the wilderness, Caudill becomes an untamed mountain man, whom only the beautiful daughter of a Blackfoot chief dares to love.

    Book by Colleen McCullough

    These dreams foretold impending war—a war that only Helen has the power to avert. To do so, she must defy her family and betray her betrothed by fleeing the palace in the dead of night. In need of protection, she finds shelter and comfort in the arms of Theseus, son of Poseidon. With Theseus at her side, she believes she can escape her destiny. But at every turn, new dangers—violence, betrayal, extortion, threat of war—thwart Helen’s plans and bar her path. Still, she refuses to bend to the will of the gods.A new take on an ancient myth, Helen of Sparta is the story of one woman determined to decide her own fate.The sequel to Helen of Sparta will be published by Lake Union Publishing in June 2016.

    His mission is to find the assassin of the statesman Ephialtes, the man who brought democracy to Athens and whose murder has thrown the city into uproar. It's a job not made any easier by the depressingly increasing number of dead witnesses.But murder and mayhem don't bother Nico; what's really on his mind is how to get closer (much closer) to Diotima, the intelligent and annoyingly virgin priestess of Artemis, and how to shake off his irritating twelve year-old brother Socrates.The Pericles Commission is the first in an exciting new series by first-time novelist Gary Corby, who takes us to Ancient Greece at one of the most exciting times in history. In this wonderfully approachable, historically rich novel, Athens is brought vividly to life in a mystery engaging from the first page to last.

    After conquering the Roman city of Saguntum, Hannibal wages his campaign through the outposts of the empire, shrewdly befriending peoples disillusioned by Rome and, with dazzling tactics, outwitting the opponents who believe the land route he has chosen is impossible. Yet Hannibal's armies must take brutal losses as they pass through the Pyrenees mountains, forge the Rhone river, and make a winter crossing of the Alps before descending to the great tests at Cannae and Rome itself. David Anthony Durham draws a brilliant and complex Hannibal out of the scant historical record?sharp, sure-footed, as nimble among rivals as on the battlefield, yet one who misses his family and longs to see his son grow to manhood. Whether portraying the deliberations of a general or the calculations of a common soldier, vast multilayered scenes of battle or moments of introspection when loss seems imminent, Durham brings history alive.

    saw the corrupt and bloody reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, as well as the Year of the Four Emperors. It also saw the rise of Vespasian, the destitute son of a provincial senator who brought peace to the empire after years of strife, court intrigue, and murder. Written from the perspective of Caenis, a female slave who was Vespasian's forbidden love, the future emperor advances in his climactic struggle for power. But as Vespasian brings hope to the people of Rome...he brings only despair to the one woman who loves him most.

    Standing in the battle line - the wall of bronze - for the first time, alongside his father and brother, he shares in a famous and unlikely victory. But after being knocked unconscious in the melee, he awakes not a hero, but a slave. Betrayed by his jealous and cowardly cousin, the freedom he fought for has now vanished, and he becomes the property of a rich citizen of Ephesus. So begins an epic journey from slavery that takes the young Arimnestos through a world poised on the brink of an epic confrontation, as the emerging civilization of the Greeks starts to flex its muscles against the established empire of the Persians. As he tries to make his fortune and revenge himself on the man who disinherited him, Arimnestos discovers that he has a talent that pays well in this new, violent world, for like his hero, Achilles, he is 'a killer of men'.