Ancient literary criticism has always been a particularly inaccessible subject for the non-specialist student. This edition provides for the first time the principal texts in translation, giving the reader a full view of ancient literary criticism and its development. In addition to well-known texts such as Aristotle's Poetics, Horace's Art of Poetry, and Longinus's On Sublimity, the book includes complete versions of Aristotle's Rhetoric Book III, Demetrius's On Style, and Tacitus's Dialogue on Orators. It's shorter passages range from Homer to Hermogenes of Tarsus, in addition to selections from Plato, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Cicero, the two Senecas, and Quintilian.

• Beginnings; Plato; Aristotle; Demetrius; Cicero; Latin Criticism of Poetry; Greek Augustans; Declamation and the Senecas; Quintilian and Pliny; Tacitus, Dialogue on Orators; `Longinus', on Sublimity; Dio Chrysostom and Plutarch: The Greek Revival; Two Critics of History; Second- and Third-Century Texts; Later Greek Rhetoric; Indexes