Robin Lane Fox

Monumental y excepcionalmente bien documentada, esta biografía de Alejandro Magno se sumerge en el misterio de uno de los más extraordinarios personajes de la historia, feroz conquistador de Asia y discipulo de Aristoteles, que termino por sentar, a traves de sus gestas, las bases mismas del helenismo. Lejos de ofrecer una mirada romantica y fantasiosa de la vida de Alejandro, Lane Fox recupera, con un lenguaje de insuperable maestria, todos los matices de una epoca historica, desde las tacticas de batalla hasta las costumbres culinarias y sexuales, y nos acerca asi a la dimension humana de uno de los mas grandes mitos de la historia de la humanidad.

A major new interpretation of how one of the great figures of Christian history came to write the greatest of all autobiographiesAugustine is the person from the ancient world about whom we know most. He is the author of an intimate masterpiece, the Confessions, which continues to delight its many admirers. In it he writes about his infancy and his schooling in the classics in late Roman North Africa, his remarkable mother, his sexual sins (Give me chastity, but not yet, he famously prayed), his time in an outlawed heretical sect, his worldly career and friendships and his gradual return to God. His account of his own eventual conversion is a classic study of anguish, hesitation and what he believes to be Gods intervention. It has inspired philosophers, Christian thinkers and monastic followers, but it still leaves readers wondering why exactly Augustine chose to compose a work like none before it.Robin Lane Fox follows Augustine on a brilliantly described journey, combining the latest scholarship with recently found letters and sermons by Augustine himself to give a portrait of his subject which is subtly different from older biographies. Augustines heretical years as a Manichaean, his relation to non-Christian philosophy, his mystical aspirations and the nature of his conversion are among the aspects of his life which stand out in a sharper light. For the first time Lane Fox compares him with two contemporaries, an older pagan and a younger Christian, each of whom also wrote about themselves and who illumine Augustines life and writings by their different choices.More than a decade passed between Augustines conversion and his beginning the Confessions. Lane Fox argues that the Confessions and their thinking were the results of a long gestation over these years, not a sudden change of perspective, but that they were then written as a single swift composition and that its final books are a coherent consummation of its scriptural meditation and personal biography. This exceptional study reminds us why we are so excited and so moved by Augustines story.

A thrilling study of the greatest of all epic poems, by one of the worlds leading classicistsHomers Iliad is the famous epic poem set among the tales of Troy. Its subject is the anger of the hero Achilles and its dreadful consequences for the warring Greeks and Trojans. It was composed more than 2,600 years ago, but still transfixes us with its tale of loss and battle, love and revenge, guided throughout by the active presence of the gods. Its beauty and profound bleakness are intensely moving but great questions remain: where, how and when it was composed and why it has such enduring power?In this compelling book Robin Lane Fox addresses these questions, drawing on a life-long love and engagement with the poem. He argues for a place, a date and a method for its composition, giving us a sense of alternative approaches and grounding his own in discoveries about long heroic poems composed elsewhere in the world, and the ever-growing evidence of archaeology.Unlike other books on the Iliad, this one combines the detailed expertise of a historian with the sensitivity of a teacher of it as poetry. Lane Fox goes on to consider hallmarks of the poem, its values, implicit and explicit, its characters, its women, its gods and even its horses. He argues repeatedly for its beautiful observation and addresses its parallel use of what is, to us, the natural world. Thousands of readers turn to the Iliad every year. In this superbly written and conceived tribute, Lane Fox expresses and amplifies what old and new readers can find in it. It is pervaded, he argues, by a poignant hardness which is not just a poetic trick. It is a deeply held view of the world.

The classical civilizations of Greece and Rome dominated the world for centuries and continue to intrigue and enlighten us with their inventions, whether philosophy, politics, theatre, athletics, celebrity, science or the pleasures of horse racing. Robin Lane Foxs spellbinding history spans almost a thousand years of change, from the foundation of the worlds first democracy in Athens to the Roman Republic and the Empire under Hadrian. Bringing great figures such as Homer, Socrates, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Augustus and the first Christian martyrs to life, exploring freedom, justice and luxury, this wonderfully exciting tour brings the turbulent histories of Greece and Rome together in a masterly study.

The Bible is moving, inspirational and endlessly fascinating - but is it true? Starting with Genesis and the implicit background to the birth of Christ, Robin Lane Fox sets out to discover how far biblical descriptions of people, places and events are confirmed or contradicted by external written and archaeological evidence. He turns a sharp historians eye on when and where the individual books were composed, whether the texts as originally written exist, how the canon was assembled, and why the Gospels give varying accounts even of the trial and condemnation of Jesus.

The myths of the ancient Greeks have inspired us for thousands of years. Where did the famous stories of the battles of their gods develop and spread across the world? The celebrated classicist Robin Lane Fox draws on a lifetimes knowledge of the ancient world, and on his own travels, answering this question by pursuing it through the age of Homer. His acclaimed history explores how the intrepid seafarers of eighth-century Greece sailed around the Mediterranean, encountering strange new sightsvolcanic mountains, vaporous springs, huge prehistoric bonesand weaving them into the myths of gods, monsters and heroes that would become the cornerstone of Western civilization.

This remarkable and daringly original book proposes a new way of thinking about the Greeks and their myths in the age of the great Homeric hymns. It combines a lifetimes familiarity with Greek literature and history with the latest archeological discoveries and the authors own journeys to the main sites in the story to describe how particular Greeks of the eighth century BC travelled east and west around the Mediterranean, and how their extraordinary journeys shaped their ideas of their gods and heroes. It gathers together stories and echoes from many different ancient cultures, not just the Greek - Assyria, Egypt, the Phoenician traders - and ranges from Mesopotamia to the Rio Tinto at Huelva in modern Portugal. Its central point is the Jebel Aqra, the great mountain on the north Syrian coast which Robin Lane Fox dubs the southern Olympus, and around which much of the action of the book turns. Robin Lane Fox rejects the fashionable view of Homer and his near-contemporary Hesiod as poets who owed a direct debt to texts and poems from the near East, and by following the trail of the Greek travellers shows that they were, rather, in debt to their own countrymen. With characteristic flair he reveals how these travellers, progenitors of tales which have inspired writers and historians for thousands of years, understood the world before the beginnings of philosophy and western thought.

How did Christianity compare and compete with the cults of the pagan gods in the Roman Empire? This scholarly work from award-winning historian, Robin Lane Fox, places Christians and pagans side by side in the context of civil life and contrasts their religious experiences, visions, cults and oracles. Leading up to the time of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, the book aims to enlarge and confirm the value of contemporary evidence, some of which has only recently been discovered.

La epopeya de Grecia y Roma.Robin Lane Fox enseña historia antigua en Oxford y es, además, un gran narrador. De esta afortunada combinación ha surgido un libro de historia del mundo clásico distinto, que tiene el rigor del buen trabajo academico -y ha merecido por ello los elogios de un especialista como Peter Jones- y la amenidad de un relato del que los criticos han dicho que es increiblemente entretenido y mas epico que la mejor pelicula de romanos. Porque, si algo caracteriza este fascinante recorrido del mundo de la antiguedad clasica desde Homero a Adriano, es precisamente la presencia constante del toque humano: su capacidad de evocar figuras como Socrates, Alejandro, Ciceron o Cesar y de hablarnos, a la vez, de la vida cotidiana de los ciudadanos, de los ultimos dias de Pompeya o de los juegos del circo, en unas paginas que nos devuelven el encanto de la mejor narrativa historica.