Our new Aris & Phillips Classical Texts Online collection is not only a huge compendium of classical writing featuring the towering achievements of Greek and Latin literature, but is also a wonderful resource that enables students and scholars alike to access and gain insight into the Greek and Roman world through its literature, history and philosophy. The General Editor Professor Alan Sommerstein succinctly summarises:

‘Comprising over 150 volumes and featuring works by 36 major and nearly 50 fragmentary authors, with a range stretching from the Aegean in the time of King Midas to England in the time of Richard Coeur de Lion, this extensive selection from Liverpool University Press’s world-known Aris & Phillips Classical Texts series, now makes its début in digital form.’

The history of the series

Aris & Phillips Classical Texts published its first volume in 1980; Aristophanes: Acharnians is still in print today. The series was conceived by Adrian and Lucinda Phillips, working initially with Lucinda’s father, John Aris. Their idea was to provide a high-quality library of classical texts, with substantial commentaries and introductions, together with text and facing-page translations to aid students and those without Latin and Greek. The series benefitted enormously from the careful stewardship of its original General Editor, Professor Malcolm Willcock, a role he held until his death in 2006, the editorship subsequently passing to first Professor Christopher Collard followed by Professor Alan Sommerstein. In 2023, the series numbers over 150 volumes and continues to grow. Now available as a digital collection, it includes over 80 volumes that have been digitized for the first time.

Distinguished writers ancient and modern

The Classical Texts series publishes many seminal editions including Alan Sommerstein’s complete twelve-volume edition of Aristophanes, eighteen volumes representing the entire corpus of Euripides, Edith Hall’s Aeschylus: Persians, Jenny March’s Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrannus, Peter Rhodes’ volumes of Thucydides and Herodotus, Chris Rowe’s Plato: Symposium and the ongoing Greek Orators sequence.

Reconstructing Fragmentary Texts

A feature of the series in recent years has been the inclusion of volumes that painstakingly reconstruct fragmentary texts, making these works that were lost for many centuries available for analysis and appreciation. This is a development welcomed by former series editor Christopher Collard:

‘It is my particular pleasure that the Classical Texts now accommodate eight volumes of Greek dramatic fragments, tragic and satyric; they are a unique enterprise.’

The Cornucopia of Life through Classics

All life is on display in the range of material in the series – from tragedy to comedy, historical prose to skilful rhetoric, biting satire to elegiac love poetry. I’ll give the last word to Alan Sommerstein, who is currently at work on a new edition of his complete Aristophanes, on seeing life through the lens of the great comedian:

‘Aristophanes offers us a wonderfully positive attitude to life […] :, Nothing is beyond imagination; no one is contemptible (except those who choose to make themselves so); everything that can be seen and felt and experienced is of interest, and capable of generating happiness through laughter; and we are what our past has made us, though our nature also impels us to reach out for an ideal future.  If that credo can be said to be implicit in Aristophanes’ text – and […] I think it can – then the study and performance of that text can surely be a force for good, whether or not we are willing to laugh at everything the dramatist invites us to laugh at, and whether or not his vision of an ideal future exactly corresponds to any of ours.’

— Clare Litt, Senior Commissioning Editor for Classics & Medieval Studies

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Find out more about the new digital collection or the print book series.

Proposals are warmly invited for the series; please contact Clare Litt, the commissioning editor for Aris & Phillips Classical Texts, or visit our website for more information.

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