TOP-100 audiobooks online, page 48

Terence's six plays are comedies written while he was a slave to a Roman senator. NOTE: the main plot elements in Hecyra are quite unacceptable today: Pamphilus has just married a woman he does not recognize that he had earlier raped in a drunken fit; nor does she recognize him. ...

The fable is a small narrative, in prose or verse, which has as its main characteristic the aim of conveying a moral lesson (the "moral"), implicitly or, more normally, explicitly expressed. Even though the modern concept of fable is that it should have animals or inanimated o...

Parallel Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans is a series of biographies of famous men, arranged in tandem to illuminate their common moral virtues or failings. The surviving lives contain twenty-three pairs of biographies, each pair consisting of one Greek and one Roman, as well...

Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis, known in English as Juvenal, was a Roman poet active in the late 1st and early 2nd century AD. The details of the author's life are unclear, although references within his text to known persons of the late 1st and early 2nd centuries AD fix his terminus ...

Julia Cloud, the oldest--and most responsible--child of her family, helped raise her four siblings due to their mother's long-time illness and father's death. After faithfully nursing two ill brothers (who died), she then cared for her invalid mother for many years. When Julia...

The Consolation of Philosophy was written about 524 A.D. and has been called one of the most popular and influential books ever written. The book is presented as a dialogue between Boethius, the author, and Lady Philosophy, his tutor. Through her teaching, Boethius learns the tru...

The Rainbow Trail is a sequel to The Riders of the Purple Sage. Both novels are notable for their protagonists' mild opposition to Mormon polygamy, but in The Rainbow Trail this theme is treated more explicitly. The plots of both books revolve around the victimization of women in...

The novel opens with Carl Foster, a recently qualified doctor, coming to London to try and make his fortune. He meets a famous tenor, Signor Alresca, who suffers a dreadful injury backstage and Foster tends to him. He thus meets the lead soprano, Rosetta Rosa, and falls hopelessl...

On the Nature of Things, written in the first century BCE by Titus Lucretius Carus, is one of the principle expositions on Epicurean philosophy and science to have survived from antiquity. Far from being a dry treatise on the many topics it covers, the original Latin versio...

De doctrina Christiana, On Christian Doctrine, is a famous treatise by Augustine of Hippo, consisting of four books that describe how to interpret and teach the Scriptures. The first three books, published in 397, set three tasks for Christian teachers and preachers: to discover ...

As Jowett relates in his brilliant introduction, 95% of Plato's writing is certain and his reputation rests soundly on this foundation. The Alcibiades 1 appears to be a short work by Plato with only two characters: Socrates and Alcibiades. This dialogue has little dramatic verisi...

Captain Blood is an adventure novel by Rafael Sabatini, originally published in 1922. It concerns the sharp-witted Dr. Peter Blood, an Irish physician, who is convicted of treason in the aftermath of the Monmouth rebellion in 1685, and enslaved on the Caribbean island of Barba...