First published in 1909, in an era of receding interest in Classical authors, this volume aimed to encourage a renewed interest in the Classics through shared emotion, humanity and the everyday. Attributing the disinterest to a lack of familiarity and a public difficulty for empathising with antiquity, Clark believed literature of the day owed a great deal to the Classical authors, and that its techniques could only be fully understood through their example. He chose Theophrastos, a philosopher and sketch artist, Herodas, a writer of mimes, and the Thebes tablet, a dialogue, with the hope that they would demonstrate how vividly changeless the nature of men and women can be. These translations were designed to be popular and readable, with nothing obscure for the light reader, in order to encourage rediscovery of literature’s Classical roots.
