Product Description: The "custom of the castle" imposes strange ordeals on knights and ladies seeking hospitality—daunting, mostly evil challenges that travelers must obey or even defend. This seemingly fantastic motif, first conceived by Chrètien de Troyes in the twelfth century and widely imitated in medieval French romance, flowered again when Italian and English authors adopted it during the century before Shakespeare's plays and the rise of the novel...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: A classical epic of fratricide and war, the Thebaid retells the legendary conflict between the sons of Oedipus―Polynices and Eteocles―for control of the city of Thebes. The Latin poet Statius reworks a familiar story from Greek myth, dramatized long before by Aeschylus in his tragedy Seven against Thebes...read more