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"""These Characters are people we know—they're our quirky neighbors, our creepy bosses, our blind dates from hell. Sharp-tongued Theophrastus, made sharper than ever in this fresh new edition, reminds us that Athenian weirdness is as ageless as Athenian wisdom."" –Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at Cambridge University, presenter of BBC's Civilisations The more things change, the more they stay the same: Theophrastus' Characters, a classical Greek text newly translated for a modern audience, is a joyful festival of fault-finding. The book outlines 30 characters, each crystallizing a human flaw all readers will immediately recognize, and is a humorous survey of failings, follies, and bad behavior taken straight off the streets of Athens and brought into our everyday fraught and divisive social and political scene. Brilliantly illustrated by acclaimed artist Andre Carrilho, this is an irresistible treasure of a book. WHEN ARISTOTLE WROTE that ""comedy is about people worse than ourselves,"" he may have been recalling a hard-edged gem of a treatise written by his favorite student, Theophrastus.Theophrastus' Characters is a joyous festival of fault-finding: a collection of thirty closely observed personality portraits, defining the full spectrum of human flaws, failings, and follies. With piquant details of speech and behavior taken straight off the streets of ancient Athens, Theophrastus gives us sketches of the mean, vile, and annoying that are comically distorted yet vividly real. Enlivened by Pamela Mensch's fresh translation—the first widely available English version in over half a century—Theophrastus' Characters transports us to a world populated by figures of flesh and blood, not bronze and marble. The wry, inventive drawings help envoke the cankered wit of this most modern of ancient texts. Lightly but helpfully annotated by classicist James Romm, these thirty thumbnail portraits are startlingly recognizable twenty-three centuries later. The characters of Theophrastus are archetypes of human nature that remain insightful, caustic, and relevant."

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Theophrastus, a Greek philosopher and pupil of Aristotle, was born around 372 BC, died around 287. When Aristotle was forced to retire from Athens in 323, Theophrastus became the head of the Lyceum, the academy Aristotle had founded. Under Theophrastus the enrollment of pupils and auditors rose to its highest point. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Theophrastus was one of the few Peripatetic philosophers who fully embraced Aristotle's metaphysics, physics, physiology, zoology, botany, ethics, politics, and history of culture. His general tendency was to strengthen the systematic unity of those subjects and to reduce the transcendental or Platonic elements of Aristotelianism as a whole. He was a prolific writer and his works, many lost, include Inquiry into Plants, Growth of Plants and treatises attributed to him on fire, winds, signs of weather, scents, sensations, and other subjects. His Charakteres, written around 320 BC, consists of thirty brief and vigorous character sketches delineating moral types derived from studies that Aristotle had made for ethical and rhetorical purposes. Pamela Mensch, a translator of ancient Greek literature, has now produced her version of Theophrastus's Characters: An Ancient Take on Bad Behavior. These include the Dissembler, Flatterer, Yokel, Sycophant, Newshound, Miser, Busybody, Vulgar Man, Social Climber, Coward, and twenty more. Theophrastus's observations are--with small adaptions--as appropriate today as they were 2,300 years ago: The Talker is the sort who plumps himself down next to someone he doesn't know and starts praising his own wife; he goes on to describe the dream he had the night before, and then relates in detail what he had for dinner, The Busybody is the sort who stands up and promises what he can't deliver. In court when it's agreed that his argument is just, he overdoes it and loses his case. The Complainer grumbles at Zeus not because it's raining but because it didn't rain sooner. The Shameless Man is the sort who, after shortchanging someone, goes back to ask him for a loan. The Tactless Man is the sort who comes to solicit advice from someone who's busy. He serenades his sweetheart when she's down with a fever. He approaches a man who's just had to forfeit bail money and asks him to post bail for him. The book includes a useful Introduction and endnotes by James Romm, professor of classics at Bard College, that puts the author into an historic context. Romm points out that unlike every other ancient Greek author whose work survives, Theophrastus observes the Athenians' food, their clothes, their purchases, the decor of their homes. He notices objects we never hear of elsewhere, like the spurs worn by the Social Climber to show he's wealthy enough to ride in the cavalry . . . . Aside from Theophrastus's delightful comments, the book is a lovely object to hold, a delight of book design by Don Quaintance. And it includes apt illustrations of each character by Andre Carrilho, a designer, illustrator, and caricaturist from Lisbon. Characters would make a splendid gift for the right person. (I wouldn't give it to someone who will see herself in it.) It would make a good gift for oneself if only to remind yourself what you don't want to be. --Amazon If there's anything new to learn from Characters, a series of personality portraits written by the ancient Greek Theophrastus (c. 371 - c. 287 BC), it is that gluttons, chatterboxes, drunks, idiots, and others are not unique to any time or place in human history. This robust little volume of character sketches has been widely published and translated since its first appearance twenty-three centuries ago....Translated by Pamela Mensch with vibrant pen-and-ink illustrations by acclaimed caricature artist Andr Carrillo, this edition includes insightful annotations by Bard College classics professor and Guggenheim recipient James Romm. --Literary Features Syndicate These Characters are people we know--they're our quirky neighbors, our creepy bosses, our blind dates from hell. Sharp-tongued Theophrastus, made sharper than ever in this fresh new edition, reminds us that Athenian weirdness is as ageless as Athenian wisdom. --Mary Beard, author of SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome Andr Carrilho is one of the most original caricaturists working today, and in Characters his swank surprises in every instance. Ahead of even his own curves, this contemporary artist turns out to be the perfect illustrator to point up the timelessness of the ancient Greek's witty observations. --Edward Sorel, author of Mary Astor's Purple Diary At a time when bad behavior flourishes, even among our leaders, these dead-on portraits of boors, braggarts, and blowhards have never felt more current. --Francine Prose, author of Lovers at the Chameleon Club

This well-chosen collection of Seneca's writings on death demonstrates James Romm's gift for making the people and ideas of antiquity vivid for general readers. The introduction is graceful, the translations are accurate and readable, the annotations are nicely judged, and the epilogue featuring Tacitus's account of Seneca's suicide is indispensable. --Robert A. Kaster, Princeton University (review quote for previous work)

Author Information

James Romm is an author, reviewer, and the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College in Annadale, New York. His reviews and essays have appeared in the London Review of Books and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. His books include The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought (Princeton University Press, 1992), Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the Bloody Fight for His Empire (Vintage, 2012), Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero (Vintage, 2014), The Age of Caesar: Five Roman Lives (W. W. Norton, 2017), and How to Die: An Ancient Guide to the End of Life (Princeton University Press, 2018).

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