To Persians, the fourteenth-century poems of Hafiz are not classical literature from a remote past, but cherished love, wisdom, and humor from a dear and intimate friend. Perhaps, more than any other Persian poet, it is Hafiz who most fully accesses the mystical, healing dimensions of poetry. Daniel Ladinsky has made it his life's work to create modern, inspired translations of the world's most profound spiritual poetry. Through Ladinsky's translations, Hafiz's voice comes alive across the centuries singing his message of love.

My verse resembles the bread of Egypt—night passes over it, and you cannot eat it any more. Devour it the moment it is fresh, before the dust settles upon it. Its place is the warm climate of the heart; in this world it dies of cold. Like a fish it quivered for an instant on dry land, another moment and you see it is cold. Even if you eat it imagining it is fresh, it is necessary to conjure up many images. What you drink is really your own imagination; it is no old tale, my good man. Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–73), legendary Persian Muslim poet, theologian, and mystic, wrote poems acclaimed through the centuries for their powerful spiritual images and provocative content, which often described Rumi’s love for God in romantic or erotic terms. His vast body of work includes more than three thousand lyrics and odes. This volume includes four hundred poems selected by renowned Rumi scholar A. J. Arberry, who provides here one of the most comprehensive and adept English translations of this enigmatic genius. Mystical Poems is the definitive resource for anyone seeking an introduction to or an enriched understanding of one of the world’s greatest poets. “Rumi is one of the world’s greatest lyrical poets in any language—as well as probably the most accessible and approachable representative of Islamic civilization for Western students.”—James W. Morris, Oberlin College

In this exciting interpretation of the Odyssey , the late renowned scholar Seth Benardete suggests that Homer may have been the first to philosophize in a Platonic sense. He argues that the Odyssey concerns precisely the relation between philosophy and poetry and, more broadly, the rational and the irrational in human beings. In light of this possibility, Bernardete works back and forth from Homer to Plato to examine the relation between wisdom and justice and tries to recover an original understanding of philosophy that Plato, too, recovered by reflecting on the wisdom of the poet. At stake in his argument is no less than the history of philosophy and the ancient understanding of poetry. The Bow and the Lyre is a book that every classicist and historian of philosophy should have.

The most accurate and poetic translation of the world's greatest epic, which is now a film by Academy Award winner Christopher Nolan! “This may be the best translation of The Odyssey yet."—Edith Hall, The Telegraph A magnificent feat of translation, hailed by classicists and poets alike as a “momentous achievement”: “thrilling,” “rich and rhythmical,” “superb,” “mesmerizing,” “searingly faithful—yet absolutely original.” With this edition of Homer’s Odyssey, the celebrated author, critic, and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn brings the great epic to vividly poetic new life. Widely known for his essays on classical literature and culture in The New Yorker and many other publications, Mendelsohn gives us a line-for-line rendering of The Odyssey that is both engrossing as poetry and true to its source. Rejecting the streamlining and modernizing approach of many recent translations, he artfully reproduces the epic’s formal qualities—meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance—and in so doing restores to Homer’s masterwork its archaic grandeur. Mendelsohn’s expansive six-beat line, far closer to the original than that of other recent translations, allows him to capture each of Homer’s dense verses without sacrificing the amplitude and shadings of the original. The result is the richest, most ample, most precise, and most musical Odyssey in English, conveying the beauty of its poetry, the excitement of its hero’s adventures, and the profundity of its insights. Supported by an extensive introduction and the fullest notes and commentary currently available, Daniel Mendelsohn’s Odyssey is poised to become the authoritative version of this magnificent and enduringly influential masterpiece.

The philosophers of the Hellenistic schools in ancient Greece and Rome (Epicureans, Stoics, Sceptics, Academics, Cyrenaics) made important contributions to the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of psychology. This volume, which contains the proceedings of the Fifth Symposium Hellenisticum, describes and analyses their contributions on issues such as: the nature of perception, imagination and belief; the nature of the passions and their role in action; the relationship between mind and body; freedom and determinism; the role of pleasure as a goal; the effects of poetry on belief and passion. Written with a high level of historical and philosophical scholarship, the essays are intended both for classicists and for specialists interested in the philosophy of mind.