Secondhand Ancient History & Classical Literature Bargain Book Box SP2786

Secondhand Ancient History & Classical Literature Bargain Book Box — 19 Books

Plato, Gibbon, Livy, Plutarch, Cicero, Euripides, and Hesiod in the same box — a classical education in paperback form. Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is here even in abridgement; Plato's Republic needs no argument for its inclusion; and the Norse shelf — Egils Saga in Christine Fell's distinguished translation and Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur in Robert Graves's introduction — extends the collection well beyond the Mediterranean world. Three books on the pyramids and two on prehistoric humanity give the archaeology strand real depth. A box for readers who want the ancient world on their shelves in readable, reliable editions.

1. The Mysteries of Egypt: Secret Rites and Traditions of the Nile — Lewis Spence — A popular account of ancient Egyptian religion, ritual, and sacred tradition from the early twentieth century. Spence writes with enthusiasm and considerable range, though readers should note his work sits closer to popular history than modern Egyptology.
2. The Megalith Builders of Western Europe — Glyn Daniel — Pelican. Glyn Daniel was one of the twentieth century's finest archaeological communicators, and this account of the people who built Stonehenge, Carnac, and the great passage tombs remains one of the most readable introductions to European prehistoric archaeology.
3. The Great Pyramid: A Miracle in Stone — Joseph A. Seiss — A nineteenth-century theological reading of the Great Pyramid's supposed prophetic significance — a classic of the speculative tradition surrounding Giza rather than mainstream archaeology, and fascinating as a document of Victorian mystical thinking about ancient monuments.
4. Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur — Mentor Classic. Keith Baines's modern rendition of Malory's great Arthurian compilation, with an introduction by Robert Graves — the complete legends of the Round Table made newly accessible without losing the grandeur of the original. Still the definitive popular edition.
5. The Pyramids of Egypt — I.E.S. Edwards — Pelican Original. This is the standard scholarly account — Edwards was Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, and this survey of pyramid construction, purpose, and history remains the most authoritative single volume on the subject written for a general readership.
6. The Republic — Plato — Penguin Classics. This is one of the foundational texts of Western civilisation — Plato's examination of justice, the ideal state, the philosopher-king, and the nature of the soul. Everything that has followed in political philosophy has had to reckon with what Plato argued here.
7. The Travels of Marco Polo — Penguin Classics, translated by R.E. Latham. This is the thirteenth-century account of Marco Polo's journey through Asia to the court of Kublai Khan — one of the most extraordinary travel narratives ever written, and the document that shaped Europe's imagination of the East for centuries.
8. Hesiod and Theognis — Penguin Classics. This brings together two foundational Greek poets — Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days, the earliest Greek accounts of the gods and of human labour, and Theognis's aristocratic elegies. Essential reading for anyone interested in how the Greeks understood the world before philosophy arrived.
9. The Rise of Rome — Plutarch — Penguin Classics. Plutarch's parallel lives of the Romans who built the Republic — Romulus, Numa, Coriolanus, and others — written with the biographical intelligence and moral seriousness that made him the most read ancient author in the Renaissance and a direct influence on Shakespeare.
10. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — Edward Gibbon — Classic World Literature edition. Even in abridgement, Gibbon's great history is one of the supreme achievements of English prose — ironic, panoramic, and written with an Enlightenment confidence that civilisation itself was the subject under examination. This is where the serious study of Rome in English begins.
11. Voices in Stone — Ernst Doblhofer — Paladin. This is the detective story of archaeological linguistics — the decipherment of lost scripts, from Egyptian hieroglyphics to Linear B, told through the lives and methods of the scholars who cracked them. A book that makes one of the great intellectual dramas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gripping and accessible.
12. Egils Saga — Translated and edited by Christine Fell. This is one of the great Norse sagas — the life of Egil Skallagrímsson, warrior, farmer, and poet, whose verses survive as some of the finest in Old Norse literature. Christine Fell was the distinguished Norse scholar whose translation brought Egil to life for English readers with rare fidelity.
13. Cicero: In Defence of the Republic — Penguin Classics. This gathers Cicero's great speeches in defence of the Roman Republic against its various enemies — some of the finest oratory in any language, and documents of the political crisis that ended in Caesar's dictatorship and Rome's transformation from Republic to Empire.
14. Herculaneum: The Excavations, Local History and Surroundings — A site guide to the excavations at Herculaneum, the city buried alongside Pompeii in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. Herculaneum is less visited and in many ways better preserved than its famous neighbour, and this guide opens its archaeology and history with care.
15. Medea and Other Plays — Euripides — Penguin Classics. This gathers Euripides's most psychologically intense dramas — Medea, Hecabe, Electra, Heracles — in which the playwright pushed Greek tragedy toward a psychological realism that still feels startlingly modern. Medea remains one of the most powerful characters in all drama.
16. The Grandeur that was Rome — J.C. Stobart — Four Square Book. Stobart's classic survey of Roman culture and civilisation — architecture, law, literature, religion, daily life — written with the broad command of a classicist who wants his subject to live for the general reader. First published in 1912 and revised through multiple editions.
17. The Early History of Rome — Livy — Penguin Classics. This covers Livy's account of Rome's origins through the wars with Carthage — the founding myths, the kings, the early Republic, Hannibal crossing the Alps. Livy writes Roman history as moral drama, and this is where the stories that have fascinated the Western imagination for two thousand years were first set down in their definitive form.
18. The Legacy of the Ancient World: Volume One — W.G. de Burgh — Pelican. This traces the triple legacy of Israel, Greece, and Rome — faith, freedom, and reason — in the formation of Western civilisation. A classic of mid-twentieth-century humanist scholarship, comprehensive and clearly argued.
19. On the Track of Prehistoric Man — Herbert Kühn — Grey Arrow. Kühn was a German prehistorian who wrote about cave art and the earliest evidence of human culture with the enthusiasm of someone who had seen it firsthand. This is a popular account of prehistoric humanity that retains its fascination.