The Portable Greek Reader

It is commonplace to say that our civilization is built on the ruins of Greece. W. H. Auden’s splendid anthology locates the truth behind the truism, while filling in the gaps in our knowledge of a people who gave us so much of our cultural legacy.

Every page in The Portable Greek Reader contains some fundamental precursor of the ways in which we think about hero'sm, destiny, love, politics, tragedy, science, virtue, and thought itself, Included are excerpts from the mythologies of Hesiod; t...