Reprint of the original, first published in 1836.

The Greek satirist Lucian was a brilliantly entertaining writer who invented the comic dialogue as a vehicle for satiric comment. This lively new translation is both accurate and idiomatic, and the introduction highlights Lucian's importance in his own and later times.

Madeleine de Scudéry (1607-1701) was the most popular novelist in her time, read in French in volume installments all over Europe and translated into English, German, Italian, and even Arabic. But she was also a charismatic figure in French salon culture, a woman who supported herself through her writing and defended women's education. She was the first woman to be honored by the French Academy, and she earned a pension from Louis XIV for her writing. Selected Letters, Orations, and Rhetorical Dialogues is a careful selection of Scudéry's shorter writings, emphasizing her abilities as a rhetorical theorist, orator, essayist, and letter writer. It provides the first English translations of some of Scudéry's Amorous Letters, only recently identified as her work, as well as selections from her Famous Women, or Heroic Speeches, and her series of Conversations. The book will be of great interest to scholars of the history of rhetoric, French literature, and women's studies.

Seneca's dialogues--as his epistolary essays have traditionally been known--offer an ideal path into the philosophical thought of first-century Rome's most famous Stoic, whose compelled suicide in 65 CE (by order of his former pupil Emperor Nero) drew comparisons to the death of Socrates. Notable for, among other things, their portrait of a providential universe and defense of the life of virtue, the nine dialogues included in this volume illustrate the deeply intertwined cosmological and moral arguments of ancient Rome’s chief philosophical alternative to Epicureanism and Academic Skepticism. Peter J. Anderson's new translation conveys the distinctive character of Seneca's style, while striving for accuracy and consistency in its renderings of key terms. His Introduction discusses the dialogues as works of art and situates them in the context of ancient Stoic philosophy as well as the wider philosophical scene. Notes and a glossary are also included.