"Carson calls her book An Oresteia—as opposed to the Oresteia. This isn’t the trilogy of Aeschylus. Rather, the book consists of plays by three different authors: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Electra, Euripides’ Orestes. Each takes up some aspect of the House of Atreus, whose members, relations and dependents included not only Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and Helen, but Orestes, Electra, Menelaus, Cassandra . . . Many of them, predictably, came to a bad end. Half a century separates Agamemnon from Orestes, and Carson, who supplies an introduction to each play, offers interesting speculation about how shifts in tone and perspective may reflect developments in Athenian history. Perhaps equally striking, however, is the continuity in her trilogy. In American poetry, anyway, 50 years is a long time (it would bridge the gulf between, say, Robert Frost and John Ashbery), and Carson’s intelligent compilation—an Oresteia—attests to our enduring fascination in watching the highest-born families laid low."—Brad Leithauser, The New York Times Book Review

"Burckhardt's was one of the most profound and original historical minds that ever existed. This reconstruction of his work on ancient Greece is a wonderful contribution to our wisdom and knowledge."—Robert Conquest, author of The Harvest of Sorrow

"Unfailingly modern: swift, cinematic, sexually explicit, and ravishingly beautiful. This poetic masterpiece, a psychologically acute portrait of the Homeric hero Achilles . . . imbues [Homer] with a post-Freudian emotional sensibility, focusing more on the nuances of individual motivation than on the grandeur of the action."—The Atlantic Monthly

"As fresh-minted and sparkling as his deservedly praised Odes of Horace and his rendering of Gilgamesh . . . Ferry's translation wonderfully preserves the exquisite harmonies of the mode while giving it a vigorous edge of reality."—Robert Taylor, The Boston Globe

"We finally have an English Horace whose rhythmical subtlety and variety do justice to the Latin poet's own inventiveness, in which emotion rises from the motion of the verse . . . To sense the achievement, one has to read the collection as a whole . . . and they can take one's breath away even as they continue breathing."—Rosanna Warren, The Threepenny Review

"There have been other English accounts of this hero with a thousnad descendants, but this is the first one that is as much poetry as scholarship."—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

"Writing primarily in fluid iambic pentameter and with a simplicity of vocabulary and expression that brilliantly combines fluency and clarity, Ferry reproduces the thought and tone of . . . Rome's most sophisticated poet."—Frederic Koeppel, The Commercial Appeal

Winner of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award

"This is a masterpiece and will surely rank as one of the best translations of a classic in the English language . . . This is for every reader in our time and possibly for all time."—Library Journal