Mythology - Homer - Vergil - Ovid - Dante - Milton - Herodotus - Thucydides - Gibbon - Lucian - Juvenal - Plautus - Sophocles - Plutarch - Shakespeare

Resources for the Classical Tradition

• Traditio Classicorum: The Fortuna (influence) of Classical Authors to the Year 1650 by Charles H. Lohr

Resources for Classical Mythology

• Perseus: The most useful site for studying ancient Greece and Rome.Includes maps, texts, pictures and more.
• Classical Myth: An excellent survey of Greek mythology.
• Bulfinch's Mytholgy: The old standard, available on-line.
• Greek Mythological Link: an amazingly comprehensive site; better for tracking down details and variants. between myths than for a narrative presentation of myths.
• Theoi Project: a guide to Greek gods, spirits, and monsters.
• Diotima: Devoted mainly to the study of women and gender in antiquity.
• Classics and Mediterranean Archaeology: A comprehensive catalogue of sites related to Classics.
• Encyclopedia Mythica is an encyclopedia of mytholgy, folklore, and legend.

• The Homer Homepage: a useful collection of texts, links, and more (although, sadly, many of the links are broken).
• The Chicago Homer: a multilingual database that uses the search and display capabilities of electronic texts to make the distinctive features of Early Greek epic accessible to readers with and without Greek.
• Selections from the Iliad read in Greek
• A brief summary of the Iliad and its principal characters
• A list of deaths in the Iliad
• The Trojan War in Ancient Art
• FAQs about Odyssey Bks 1-12 and 13-24
• Pronunciation Guide for characters in the Odyssey.
• Useful interactive map of Odysseus's voyage.
• Achilles, Odysseus, Agamemnon: Homer on Military Leadership, a paper delivered at the Pentagon
• The official website of Troy movie
• A page promoting the (wildly incorrect) theory that Troy stood near Cambridge, England
• Homer's Odyssey (to the tune of Yellow Submarine)
• Links about Helen
• Parallels between the Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses
• A review of Christopher Logue's continuing project to re-imagine the Trojan War in modern verse.

• The Vergil Home Page: well-organized links to texts, recordings, essays, background readings, and bibliographies.
• A collection of links about Vergil from the useful Vergil.org
• A collection of legends about Vergil (prophet, wizard, miraculous birth, etc.) drawn from William Harris's The Secret Life of a very private Poet
• A Map of Aeneas's wanderings; Maps of the Underworld and Aeneas's Italy
• Selections from the Aeneid read in Latin.
• Bibliography of Virgil in Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance
• Correspondence of Dido & Aeneas: an epistolary exchange between Dido and Aeneas, as imagined by an anonymous Elizabethan poet.

Resources for the Study of Ovid:

• The Metamorphoses illustrated by famous European artists.
• Images from the 1640 Sandys and 1703 Baur editions of Ovid's Metamorphoses
• Goltzius's drawings of Metamorphoses Book 1
• Ovid Illustrated: The Renaissance Reception of Ovid in Image and Text featuring Metamorphoses illustrations
  by Virgil Solis
• Outline of the Metamorphoses
• Pygmalion in literature and art

• Digital Dante:Your first stop for all Dante Information
• Danteworlds: an integrated multimedia journey--combining images, textual commentary, and audio--through the various regions of hell described in Dante's Inferno. Highly Recommended!
• A Chronology of Dante's Life
• A list of many maps and schematic descriptions of Dante's cosmos
• Dante's vivid description of the underworld have inspired many visual artists. Here's a nice collection of paintings, etchings, and drawings with the passages that inspired them.
• A collection of Dante texts in Latin and Italian
• A fan of the movie Hannibal? Here's an essay explaining its debt to Dante
• A list of Virgilian elements in the Inferno
• Been Bad? Take the Dante’s Infero Test to determine your place in Dante’s cosmos
• Many Dantesque touches can be seen in Rodin's "Gates of Hell"

• One of the most visual of poets, Milton has inspired many works of art
• A collection of the text, images, FAQs and more
• The story of Lilith: Adam's strong-willed first wife whose story was edited out of the Book of Genesis
• Several editions of Paradise Lost
• A Chronology of Milton's Life
• Outline of Milton’s Paradise Lost

• A great collection of introductions to Herodotus
• Commentary on the 28 episodes of the Histories
• Summaries of the 9 Books of the Histories (scroll down)
• Schematic Outline of Herodotus's Histories
• Maps of Herodotus's world
• Herodotus's Influence on the English Patient
• Complete Text of Herodotus's Histories

Resources for the Study of Thucydides:

• Short introduction to Thucydides
• A Guide to Key Passages in Thucydides
• Detailed introduction to Thucydides
• Complete text of Thucydides's Peloponnesian War

• Highlights from Volume I of Gibbon
• A collection of links about the Fall of Rome
• An alternative, recent interpretation of the Fall of Rome by J. O'Donnell
• The incredible Gibbon-o-matic! A random quote generator

• Brief Introduction to Lucian; another introduction
• An essay exploring Lucian's True History as Science Fiction
• Complete text of Lucian's True History

• Introduction to Juvenal
• An interesting essay of "Lessons from Juvenal" by Roger Kimball

• Meanings of the names in the Miles Gloriosus
• A ranked index of webpages on Roman theater
• Images of the Ancient Stage
• Comic Devices and Conventions in the Miles Gloriosus

• An introduction to the Theban Cycle: story of Oedipus and his children
• A more detailed survey of the Theban Cycle by the ancient mythographer Apollodorus
• A map of the Athenian Acropolis, showing the Theater of Dionysius
• Images of the Ancient Stage
• A collection of resources on Sophocles
• A good, brief introduction to Attic Drama
• 3-D Reconstruction of the Theater of Dionysus in Athens
• For a lighter take on tragedy, check out the great scholar and poet A.E. Housman's parody of Aeschylus, "Fragment of a Greek Tragedy"
• Ancient Images of the Sphinx
• Outline of Aristotle's Theory of Tragedy
• Summary of the German philosopher Hegel's influential interpretation of Antigone

• An introduction to Plutarch's Parallel Lives

• Brief biography of Julius Caesar
• Complete text of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar
• Complete text of Plutarch's Life of Caesar
• Caesar is assassinated in the portico to Pompey's Theater. Here's a excellent site featuring plans of the ancient theater and modern photographs of the site.
• Outline of the "3 Unities" that defined Renaissance theater
• Classical Sources for Shakespeare's Julius Caesar
• Shakespeare Illustrated explores 19th century paintings, criticism, and productions.
• Information about Mankiewicz's film version of Julius Caesar
• A discussion of Shakespeare's Classical plays