1. Complete Works of Hesiod
This collection brings together the poetry associated with Hesiod, especially the Theogony and Works and Days. The poems describe the genealogy of the gods, the struggle for divine order, the myth of Prometheus and Pandora, and the harsh moral economy of labour, justice and farming life.…
2. Conversations of Socrates
Xenophon’s Socratic writings present Socrates through remembered conversations, courtroom defence and practical moral instruction. The volume gives a less abstract but highly important portrait of Socrates than Plato’s dialogues, placing him among friends, students, critics and household concerns in classical Athens.
3. Electra and Other Plays
Electra waits in poverty for her exiled brother Orestes, then joins him in killing Aegisthus and their mother Clytemnestra to avenge Agamemnon. In The Suppliant Women, the mothers of the Argive dead appeal to Theseus to recover their sons’ bodies from Thebes, forcing Athens to decide…
4. Essays
Plutarch’s essays, often collected as the Moralia, range across ethics, religion, politics, education, biography, marriage, superstition and literary criticism. The volume shows a Greek intellectual writing under Roman rule while preserving older philosophical and civic traditions for readers interested in moral conduct and public life.
5. Fall of the Roman Republic
This Plutarch selection follows six men whose careers shaped the end of the Roman Republic, usually including Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar and Cicero. It is useful for readers who want the people and political choices behind late-republican civil conflict, rather than a battle-by-battle military history.…
6. Five Dialogues
Plato’s Five Dialogues brings together Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno and Phaedo. The collection follows Socrates from arguments about piety and virtue through his trial, imprisonment and death in 399 BC, while also presenting the questioning method through which he exposes contradictions in conventional beliefs. Across the…
7. Gorgias
Plato’s Gorgias stages a confrontation between Socrates and advocates of rhetoric, power and political success. The dialogue asks whether persuasive speech can be separated from justice, and whether the life of public influence is morally superior to the examined life.
8. History of Rome
This volume contains Livy’s account of Rome’s earliest history in Books 1–5 of Ab Urbe Condita. It begins with foundation legend, Trojan ancestry, Romulus, the kings of Rome and the expulsion of monarchy, then follows the early Republic through social conflict, war with neighbouring peoples and…
9. Jason and the Argonauts
Jason and the Argonauts recounts the voyage of Jason and the heroes who sail aboard the Argo to Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece. Jason undertakes the quest after Pelias, who has taken the throne of Iolcus from Jason’s family, offers to surrender power if…
10. Medea and Other Plays
Medea and Other Plays brings together four tragedies by Euripides: Medea, Alcestis, The Children of Heracles and Hippolytus. Each examines a different conflict between family duty, personal desire, civic responsibility and divine power. Medea centres on Jason’s abandonment of the woman who enabled him to win…
11. On Sparta
This volume presents ancient writing on Sparta, especially Xenophon and Plutarch, with attention to law, education, discipline, kingship and civic identity. The book gives readers the idealised and critical traditions through which Sparta became a model of austerity, military order and political difference in Greek thought.
12. Orestes and Other Plays
Ion follows a young servant at Apollo’s sanctuary in Delphi who is drawn into a dispute over parentage when Creusa and Xuthus seek an heir. Orestes begins after the killing of Clytemnestra, as Orestes and Electra face execution and attempt to force help from Menelaus by…
13. Plato Six Pack
This anthology brings together six works associated with Plato’s account of Socrates and his wider philosophy: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Symposium and the Allegory of the Cave from the Republic. The first four form a loose sequence around Socrates’ prosecution, defence, imprisonment and death, moving from…
14. Prometheus Bound and Other Plays
Prometheus Bound and Other Plays brings together Prometheus Bound, The Suppliants, Seven Against Thebes and The Persians, four tragedies traditionally associated with Aeschylus. Although their subjects range from myth to recent history, each examines the exercise of power and the consequences of resistance, exile, inherited violence…
15. Symposium
Plato’s Symposium turns a drinking party into a sequence of speeches on love, beauty and philosophical ascent. Socrates’ account of Diotima’s teaching gives the dialogue its central movement from erotic desire to the contemplation of beauty itself, while the arrival of Alcibiades returns philosophy to the…
16. The Aeneid
Virgil’s Aeneid follows the Trojan prince Aeneas after the destruction of Troy. Leading a band of survivors across the Mediterranean, he searches for the Italian homeland in which his descendants are destined to establish the people from whom Rome will arise. Storms, warfare and divine intervention…
17. The Age of Alexander
This Plutarch selection collects Greek lives from the world before, during and after Alexander’s rise. It is useful for people-centred accounts of fourth-century Greece and Macedon, including the political world around Demosthenes, Phocion and Alexander, the fall of the independent city-state order and the campaigns that…
18. The Annals of Imperial Rome
Tacitus’ Annals traces the Roman Empire from the death of Augustus through the Julio-Claudian dynasty, concentrating on the reigns of Tiberius, Claudius and Nero. Although portions of the work are lost, the surviving books provide one of the most influential accounts of first-century imperial politics, combining…
19. The Bacchae and Other Plays
The Bacchae and Other Plays brings together tragedies in which Euripides examines the collision between political authority, family loyalty, religious belief and uncontrolled violence. His rulers repeatedly discover that power cannot protect them from inherited guilt, divine intervention or the consequences of their own decisions, while…
20. The Conquest of Gaul
Julius Caesar’s The Conquest of Gaul records the campaigns he fought between 58 and 50 BC across territories corresponding broadly to modern France, Belgium, Switzerland and parts of Germany. Written in the third person, the account follows Roman operations against Gallic and Germanic peoples, Caesar’s expeditions…
21. The Enneads
Plotinus’s Enneads present the central texts of Neoplatonism, moving from the material world through soul and intellect toward the One. The work belongs to late antique philosophy and became a major bridge between classical Platonism, Christian thought and medieval metaphysics.
22. The Histories
Herodotus’s Histories is a major source for the Greco-Persian Wars and the wider world that led to them. It covers Persian, Lydian, Egyptian, Scythian and Greek settings before moving into the Ionian Revolt, Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea. The work is valuable for readers wanting narrative…
23. The Iliad
The Iliad is an ancient Greek epic traditionally attributed to Homer and set during the final year of the Trojan War. Rather than narrating the whole conflict, it concentrates on a brief period shaped by the anger of Achilles. After Agamemnon takes Briseis from him, Achilles…
24. The Last Days of Socrates
This Plato collection follows Socrates through accusation, trial, imprisonment and death. The dialogues treat piety, civic obedience, philosophical vocation and the soul, turning the execution of Socrates into one of the central moral and intellectual dramas of classical Athens.
25. The Makers of Rome
This Plutarch selection presents Roman lives as sources for the character, ambitions and public consequences of leading figures in the Republic. The book is useful for readers following the people behind Roman political crisis, military command and moral exempla, though each life is shaped as biography…
26. The Odyssey
Homer’s Odyssey follows Odysseus as he struggles to return to Ithaca after the Trojan War. While Penelope fends off suitors who consume his household and Telemachus searches for news of his father, Odysseus is delayed by gods, monsters and his own companions’ mistakes. His wanderings include…
27. The Rise and Fall of Athens
This Plutarch collection gives biographical sources for Athens from legendary Theseus through Solon, Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon, Pericles, Nicias, Alcibiades and Lysander. The lives cover the Persian Wars, the growth of Athenian power, the Peloponnesian War, Sicilian Expedition and the city’s eventual defeat. It is useful for…
28. The Satyricon
Petronius’s Satyricon is a fragmentary Roman prose-and-verse fiction following Encolpius through a world of sex, fraud, dining, performance and social pretension. Its most famous section, Trimalchio’s dinner, satirises wealth, freedmen and elite imitation under the early empire.
29. The Satyricon and the Apocolocyntosis
This volume pairs Petronius’s Satyricon with Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis, two satirical works from the Julio-Claudian world. One exposes social absurdity through comic fiction, while the other mocks the deification of Claudius, giving the reader a sharp view of literary satire under imperial power.
30. The Three Theban Plays
The Three Theban Plays brings together Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. Though written separately, the tragedies can be read as a connected account of the destruction of the Theban royal house, beginning with Oedipus’s discovery that he has unknowingly fulfilled the prophecy…
31. The Voyage of Argo
Apollonius of Rhodes’s Voyage of Argo, or Argonautica, recounts Jason’s expedition from Iolcus to Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece. His crew includes many of the best-known heroes of Greek myth, among them Heracles, Orpheus, Castor and Polydeuces. Their voyage carries them through hostile kingdoms,…
32. Theaetetus
Plato’s Theaetetus is a dialogue on knowledge, perception, judgement and false belief. Socrates questions the young mathematician Theaetetus in a searching but unresolved inquiry, making the work central to Platonic epistemology and the dramatic portrait of Socrates as philosophical midwife.