The Wind in the Portico: Horrors from Classical Antiquity Kindle Edition

The remarkable imagination of Greek and Roman authors extended in many directions, but it is not well known that one of the areas where classical authors excelled was in the production of literary horror. From Homer’s Circe to the sorceress Medea in Euripides’ play to the werewolf episode in Petronius’ Satyricon, many of the themes utilized in modern horror fiction derive from classical sources. Edward Lucas White depicted the baleful Sirens in “The Song of the Sirens”; E. M. Forster tells of Pan in “The Story of a Panic”; Rudyard Kipling, in “‘The Finest Story in the World,’” exhibits a character who recalls a past life as a Greek galley slave. H. P. Lovecraft, John Buchan, and others draw upon Roman myth and history for their terrors. Many poets—Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Algernon Charles Swinburne, George Sterling, Clark Ashton Smith, and others—also seek to evoke horrors from classical antiquity. This is the first anthology to include both ancient and modern portrayals of classical horror, edited by S. T. Joshi, a noted scholar on weird fiction and on classical literature. Read more