Ancient Classics

This audiobook contains the most exciting and essential parts of the Iliad, capturing the final 50 days of the Trojan war and bringing to life ancient men and heroic battles. It provides an integral beginning to the infamous journey of Odysseus. Translated by Stanley Lombardo.

In Stephen Mitchell's The Iliad, the epic story resounds again across 2,700 years, as if the lifeblood of its heroes Achilles and Patroclus, Hector, and Priam flows in every word. And we are there with them, amid the horror and ecstasy of war, carried along by a poetry that lifts even the most devastating human events into the realm of the beautiful. Mitchell's The Iliad is the first translation based on the work of the preeminent Homeric scholar Martin L. West.

Veinte años tardará Ulises, el rey de Ítaca, en volver a su patria. Luego de luchar en la guerra de Troya por diez años, siendo uno de los héroes, Ulises emprende el regreso a su tierra natal. Pero una ofensa al dios Poseidón lo alejará de su camino por otros diez años, siendo condenado a navegar sin rumbo y a vivir las más extrañas aventuras y vicisitudes en el camino. Así, en su retorno a Ítaca, Ulises desafiará monstruos y tempestades, se enfrentará a encantamientos y a las seductoras sirenas, sobreponiéndose al designio de los dioses, en su intento por volver a su hogar.

A Storytellers' reworking of Caesar's Commentaries as a new version. This follows the original line-by-line to create a modern voice that is faithful to Caesar's exacting text.

The Tempest is a beautiful and sweeping drama by William Shakespeare and is one of the Bard’s last plays. With a role written as a farewell to the theater, this emotional drama is a beautiful testament to Shakespeare’s talents as a storyteller and writer. The play centers around Prospero, a usurped ruler and powerful sorcerer who lives out his days on a remote island with few humans with whom to interact. Prospero seeks his revenge on his brother by causing his ship to wreck on his island, and the adventure of the play begins.

Julius Caesar is one of Shakespeare’s most compelling Roman plays. The plot against Caesar and the infamous assassination scene make for unforgettable listening. Brutus, the true protagonist of the play, is mesmerizing in his psychological state of anguish, forced to choose between the bonds of friendship and his desire for patriotic justice.

Paradise Lost is a well-known part of the English literary canon. Told as an epic poem in blank verse, Paradise Lost is John Milton’s retelling of the biblical story of Satan’s fall from grace and the beginning of humanity. In the beginning of Paradise Lost, Satan has been banished to Hell and is working to organize the angels who fell with him and create his new kingdom. While a constant angelic war rages, Satan begins to wield his influence on the first humans created on Earth, and soon tempts them into defying God by using wit and logic to tempt Eve.

The Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid) is best known for his epic poem Metamorphoses, a collection of myths and legends from Ancient Greece and Rome. His works continue to be widely read and admired, and he is regarded as one of the most significant poets of ancient Rome. Ovid’s love poems are both brilliant and evocative. In Amores, the romantic mysteriousness of elegiac love-poetry is exploded by his witty and ironic treatment of the form. Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris both lay down the rules for the game of love, which both sexes can play.

The stars and constellations are among the few remaining objects that appear to us just as they appeared to our distant ancestors. From anywhere on Earth, a person may view the celestial panorama simply by stepping outside at night and gazing upward. This nonfiction narrative presents the tales of the 48 classical constellations, compiled from literature spanning a thousand years from Homer to Claudius Ptolemy. These age-old tales have captured the human imagination from ancient times to the present.

Two and a half millennia after it was created, Homer's Odyssey remains one of humanity's most memorable adventure stories. In this re-creation of Homer's classic as a young adult novel, we see the aftermath of the Trojan War through the eyes of Alexi, a fifteen-year-old Trojan boy. Orphaned by the war and enslaved by Odysseus himself, Alexi has a very different view of the conquering heroes of legend.

Enjoy this amazing narration of Robert Frost's poetry, including his most famous poems, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, The Road Not Taken, among many others.

Led by his guide Beatrice, Dante leaves the Earth behind and soars through the heavenly spheres of Paradise. In this third and final part of The Divine Comedy, Dante encounters the just rulers and holy saints of the Church. The horrors of the Inferno and the trails of Purgatory are left far behind. Ultimately, in Paradise, Dante is granted a vision of God's Heavenly court - the angels, the Blessed Virgin, and God Himself.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest surviving literary work in the world. The epic poetry describes the ancient King Gilgamesh and his journey to discover the secret to eternal life.

It's never been easy to be a hero. When Beowulf arrives at Hrothgar's hall, he discovers that the hall is beset by Grendel, an evil creature that kills and pillages with impunity. Beowulf, in heroic fashion, bests Grendel in combat, then follows Grendel back to his lair to finish the job.

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge are brought to listeners here as part of the New Classics series by Camerado Media. This edition is narrated by award-winning producer-narrator Jason Rosette, with audio mastering by producer-musician Gone Marshall for an enhanced listening experience.

Among the oldest stories of human civilization, Aesop's fables are a collection of extended proverbs with moral messages attributed to the Greek slave Aesop, who lived in the fifth century BC. Children will delight in these basic human truths represented by talking animals and plants, and adults will marvel at the plainspoken language of these ancient tales.

After the death of their father, Oedipus, Antigone and Ismene return to Thebes. The ruler is their unyielding uncle by marriage, Creon, who assumed command after the death of the sons of Oedipus, Eteocles, and Polynices in a fratricidal struggle to take control of the city. Creon has the body of one brother buried with full civic honors but forbids the burial of the body of the other, whom he regards as a traitor. Antigone's challenge to Creon's decree, which she considers unjust, results in the extinction of the family line of Oedipus.

Cleopatra is one of the most famous women in history - and thanks to Shakespeare, one of the most intriguing personalities in literature. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom delivers exhilarating clarity and invites us to look at this character as a flawed human who might be living in our world. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are in high school and college and another when we are adults, Bloom explains his shifting understanding of Cleopatra over the course of his own lifetime.

This exciting full-cast presentation is like nothing you've ever heard before! Adventure begins on the sea as a spoiled rich boy falls from an ocean liner. Rescued by fisherman, an exciting journey of discovery begins as the boy sails the open seas, learning about friendship and the rewards of hard work.

Matthew Arnold praised the Iliad for its "nobility", as has everyone ever since - but ancient critics praised it for its enargeia, its "bright unbearable reality" (the word used when gods come to earth, not in disguise but as themselves). To retrieve the poem's energy, Alice Oswald has stripped away its story, and her account focuses by turns on Homer's extended similes and on the brief 'biographies' of the minor war-dead, most of whom are little more than names, but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably - and unforgotten - in the copiousness of Homer's glance.