Physician and brother to Anna Letitia Barbauld, John Aikin was a broad-ranging and prolific literary man whose connections in the burgeoning late eighteenth-century print marketplace make him exemplary of emerging literary professionalism. His writings range through the subjects of science, medicine, reform, history, biography, geography, nature, conduct, children's and educational literature, politics, poetry, and literary criticism.

See Barbauld, Mrs. (Anna Letitia).

Roman general, politician, and chief partisan of Mark Antony after the defeat of Julius Caesar's assassins.

In Homer's Iliad, Agamemnon was a king of Mycenae and brother to Menelaus, whose wife Helen eloped to Troy with her lover Paris. Agamemnon commanded the united Greek armed forces in the Trojan War. As the Greeks were departing for Troy, they found that the winds were insufficient to set sail. In response to a prophesy that her sacrifice was demanded by the gods, Agamemnon slew his daughter Iphigenia. In revenge, Agamemnon was killed by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus on his return from Troy.

Aeschylus (c. 525 BC-456 BC) Greek playwright, born at Eleusis, near Athens, generally considered to be the earliest important writer of the Western theatrical tradition, the first playwright to achieve official recognition in ancient Greece.

English clergyman, writer, traveler, and father of Joseph Addison.

A poet and dramatist as well, Addison was the most popular of early eighteenth-century periodical essayist. He collaborated with Richard Steele on the Tatler (12 April 1709 to 2 January 1711), the Guardian (12 March to 1 October 1713), and especially the Spectator (1 March 1711 to 6 December 1712; second series, 18 June to 20 December 1714). He also conducted the Free-holder (23 December 1715 to 29 June 1716), the Whig Examiner (14 September to 12 October), and The Old Whig, which survived for only two numbers (19 March and 2 April 1719).

In Greek mythology and Homer's Illiad, a Greek hero of the Trojan War whose exceptional strength and valor made him almost unconquerable. Legend had it that his mother had dipped him in the River Styx, but inadvertently left one vulnerable spot, the heel by which she held him. He was killed by an arrow shot into this heel.

Friend, father-in-law, and successor of the Prophet Muhammad and the first Calaph of Islam.

German Moravian religious and social reformer, missionary to the Americas, and prolific theological writer, Zinzendorf authored hymns, poetry, philosophical treatises, and sermons.