Apollo & Dionysus

The House

Apollo & Dionysus Editions publishes the works that have outlasted the age that produced them: epics, dialogues, meditations, treatises, novels.

These books are usually approached as monuments: admired, assigned, rarely opened. We would rather give them back the condition they had when they were written, which is to say new. Nothing is simplified. Nothing is dressed up.

Every edition gives the complete text in a new translation by François Dante, introduced and accompanied, so that a reader coming to Homer or Marcus Aurelius for the first time has a way in, and a reader returning to them has something more.

Apollo, the god of form and of light; Dionysus, the god of wine and of excess. Nietzsche saw tragedy born of their meeting. Most great books, we think, are made of both, and an edition should honour each: the clarity of the page, and the force of what is written on it.

Each edition

  1. IPrefaceWhy the book matters, and how to enter it.
  2. IIAbout the authorA life, briefly, and the circumstances of the work.
  3. IIIComplete textNever abridged, never adapted.
  4. IVSummaryThe argument or the story, for orientation and for return.
  5. VAnalysisA reading of the work: its form, its ideas, its afterlife.