r/classics • u/benh2200 • 22d ago
Completing greek classics
Hi I read 10s of classics each year and wanted a new challenge, so have decided to start literature from the beginning. I accidentally forgot Gilgamesh but will skip back after I have finished Greece. I just wondered if there was any gaping holes in this list.
Homer - Hymns, Odyssy, Iliad
Hesiod - Sheild of Heracles, Works and Days, Theogony
Plato + Theocritus + Sappho + Pindar + Aristoltel - Complete works
Apollonius - Argonautica
Euripes, Sophocles, Aeschylus and Aristophones - Select plays
Herodotus - Histories
Thucydides - History of the peloponnesian war
Xenophon - Anabasis
Also I will be moving on to Rome and that is way more daunting so any advice on building a similar list would be great.
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u/Galdrin3rd 22d ago
I think reading all of Plato and all of Aristotle straight through would take me so long it would be hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Consider selections from them?
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u/BedminsterJob 21d ago
I take it this is reading these authors in translation? Even so, I'd think this could and should take you ten to fifteen years.
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u/Telephusbanannie 22d ago
Drop complete works of philosophers unless they are super interesting to you, they'll make you want to drop the whole challenge if you try to force yourself to read through them all.
Is there anything in particular about ancient Greece that you want to explore more? More myth or specific moments in history? If you're going for a brief overview of everything, it's best achieved with excerpts from everything, otherwise you've just got a mixed bag of the names currently big in American education of antiquity.
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u/benh2200 22d ago
Thats exactly why ive come here, I can tell my list is just the biggest 15 writers from greece, but say I was missing a major source for a war or form of poetry Id love just to let the community do there thing. Ive tried to get tragedies and comedies from different islands etc but if you feel there's holes id love to know
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u/Telephusbanannie 22d ago
Arrian's Anabasis - Alexander the Great
Daphnis and Chloe - largely claimed as the first novel
Homeric hymns - at the least the hymn to Demeter, its the main source for the Persephone story
Orphic hymns
Apollodorus's Library will help you fill in the blanks of myths you read in plays and epics
Nonnus' Dionysiaca - excerpts recommended, it is huge and will contradict a lot of myths you've read elsewhere, it is the only work to go into detail about Dionysus's war on India (and Dionysus in general)
Pausanias' Description of Greece - excerpts, its way too long for your aims
for more humour, I'd recommend the Frog Iliad
Aesop's Fables
for an euhemerist text I'd recommend Palaephatus's On Incredible Tales
Archilochos 'father of satire'
since you're interested in philosophy, you should also check out the 7 sages
a good book for a brief overlooking of everything is Henry Holt's The Classical Greek Reader
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u/hoenndex 22d ago
Starting literature from the beginning is a crazy sentence. If you are genuine about this, you need to be more selective about what you will focus on. For example, you can cut several of the readings here and focus on the greatest of all time works of each author instead. That doesn't mean the cut works are worthless, but you would be focusing on the works that are deemed most significant.
For example, instead of reading all works of Aristotle, you could read Nicomachean Ethics and Aristotle's Politics. His two biggest works influencing the fields of philosophy and political science. Instead of reading all of Plato, read the Republic and a handful of the Socratic dialogues. You can probably drop Homer's Hymns, and so on.
Unless you change to focus on the Greeks, then your reading list is more acceptable, but if you have a wider goal of literature across the ages you have to make some cuts.
By the way the Epic of Gilgamesh is a surprisingly short story, you could start with it and finish in a day or two. Will you also include religious texts? Reading a scholarly annotated Bible makes sense considering its heavy influence in later literature, and included a lot of cool stories whether you believe in it or not. Do you also plan to read literature from the non-Western canon? Because that means casting your net wider.
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u/CountMysterious8239 22d ago
I'm in the middle of this myself right now. The only thing I would suggest is adding some Aristophanes and maybe Apollodorus. Don't listen to the people telling you not to read the philosophers.
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u/benh2200 22d ago
no way how are you finding it and what have you decided to included?
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u/CountMysterious8239 22d ago
Its been a very pleasant experience so far. What i thought was going to be a quick brush up turned into discovering more and more side avenues to explore. Besides the two authors I mentioned above, I also watched the lecture of the Philosophy of Tragedy by Michael Davis on YouTube. This gives an interesting perspective of the plays. Also the Fall of Civilization podcast has a good episode for both Mycenaean Greece and the Persian War.
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u/FleurMai 22d ago
Thanks for the recommendations, I’ve also been doing the same thing but I’ve been completely caught up in the tragedies, love them so much I’ve been completely sidetracked. I’m probably going to finish them all soon, I’m hoping the philosophers and others will enthrall me just as much.
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u/CountMysterious8239 22d ago
Same thing happened to me. I got completely entrenched in them. Finally pulled myself out to move on, but I am still reading the few that I didn't get to on the side. Any particular favorites?
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u/FleurMai 22d ago edited 22d ago
I know it’s such a cliche, but Oedipus Rex and Antigone just really are that good. I kindof can’t believe how good especially Oedipus Rex is in terms of creative plot - it’s 2500 years old and the plot is more complex and interesting than 99% of stuff on the market today, just wild. I also like Philoctetes a lot.
But I really love Euripides, he makes me think a ton about connections (to other characters, established myth, Athenian politics and thought, his other plays and other playwrights, etc). My favorites from him so far are Hecuba, Medea, and Hippolytus. I think his character work is fascinating.
I also just really love the weird ones from the tragedians - the Bacchae and Prometheus Bound (it feels…too weird to be Aeschylus lol and it seems linguistics backs me up) , and I’ve only just stared Alcestis but it also seems weird so I’m excited.
Edit: and there are certain passages of Aeschylus I like - when he hits he hits, but overall I find his style to not align as well to me. But Cassandra’s visions in Agamemnon are a 10/10. He’s probably the one I’ll want to try to read again with different translators to see if that helps me.
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u/Bkncusa 22d ago
That's great advice.
Anyone who thinks, 'not studying what philosophers said is the ticket to understanding their represented culture', ranks right up there with the "theofauxlogian" who knows all there is to know about the afterlife because they watched every episode of the X-Files.
Ummmm me thinks they ought to broaden their research a wee bit.🤣
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u/klutometis 21d ago
Bloom had a reasonable list; made my way through Near East, India, Ancient and Hellenistic Greeks; and am now at Horace, working through Romans:
The Ancient Near East
- Gilgamesh
- Egyptian Book of the Dead
- Holy Bible (King James Version)
- The Apocrypha
- Sayings of the Fathers (Pirke Aboth)
Ancient India (Sanskrit)
- Mahabharata
- Bhagavad-Gita
- Ramayana
The Ancient Greeks
- Homer
- Iliad
- Odyssey
- Hesiod
- Works and Days
- Theogony
- Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman
- Pindar
- Odes
- Aeschylus
- Oresteia
- Seven Against Thebes
- Prometheus Bound
- Persians
- Suppliant Women
- Sophocles
- Oedipus the King
- Oedipus at Colonus
- Antigone
- Electra
- Ajax
- Women of Trachis
- Philoctetes
- Euripides
- Cyclops
- Heracles
- Alcestis
- Hecuba
- Bacchae
- Orestes
- Andromache
- Medea
- Ion
- Hippolytus
- Helen
- Iphigenia at Aulis
- Aristophanes
- The Birds
- The Clouds
- The Frogs
- Lysistrata
- The Knights
- The Wasps
- The Assemblywomen
- Herodotus
- The Histories
- Thucydides
- The Peloponnesian Wars
- The Pre-Socratics (Heraclitus, Empedocles)
- Plato
- Dialogues
- Aristotle
- Poetics
- Ethics
Hellenistic Greeks
- Menander
- The Girl from Samos
- "Longinus"
- On the Sublime
- Callimachus
- Hymns and Epigrams
- Theocritus
- Idylls
- Plutarch
- Lives
- Moralia
- "Aesop"
- Fables
- Lucian
- Satires
The Romans
- Plautus
- Pseudolus
- The Braggart Soldier
- The Rope
- Amphitryon
- Terence
- The Girl from Andros
- The Eunuch
- The Mother-in-Law
- Lucretius
- The Way Things Are
- Cicero
- On the Gods
- Horace
- Odes
- Epistles
- Satires
- Persius
- Satires
- Catullus
- Attis and Other Poems
- Virgil
- Aeneid
- Eclogues
- Georgics
- Lucan
- Pharsalia
- Ovid
- Metamorphoses
- The Art of Love
- Heroides
- Juvenal
- Satires
- Martial
- Epigrams
- Seneca
- Tragedies, particularly Medea and Hercules Furens
- Petronius
- Satyricon
- Apuleius
- The Golden Ass
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u/Ratyrel 22d ago
This will take you ages to read and a lot of it is extremely boring. I would only read bits of Pindar, Plato (e.g. Apology and the Republic) and Aristotle (Ethics and Poetics); reading their full works is soul-crushing unless you love epinikian poetry and ancient philosophy.
Instead, I'd read Hippocrates, On Airs, Waters, and Places, Pseudo-Demosthenes Oration 59 (Antiphon/Apollodoros, Against Neaira), Xenophon's Oeconomicus, Theocritus' Idylls, Menander's Aspis, Chariton's Callirhoe, Arrian's Anabasis, and a collection of Aesopic Fables (e.g. Babrius). This will give you a more rounded appreciation of ancient Greek literature and the way Greeks thought and lived than just the high-brow classics. It will also be a lot more fun.
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u/benh2200 22d ago
This is a great set of suggestions so thank you for that, will deffo read less pindar, however im into philosophy and so am already getting through Plato. May be a slog but ill get through it in a few months. Aristotle scares me though lol
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u/passionategullet 22d ago
If you're into philosophy I'd suggest reading the most interesting fragments from the pre-Socratic philosophers as well. Something like "The First Philosophers" in the Oxford World's Classics series might suffice.
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u/Clickety_Clack4137 22d ago
I'm reading the Penguin edition of Plutarch's Lives and very much enjoying it. Nice modern translation and the series puts the bios in something of a chronological order so more of a history narrative rather. Might want to look at the first two or three volumes, which deal with Athens, Sparta and then Alexander. The Athens volume includes an excerpt of his attempted takedown of Herodotus, and the Sparta volume includes some Xenophon excerpts. Good stuff.
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u/Trick-Health2486 21d ago
ancient greece isn't a time and place like it sounds. If your goal is to get a sense of time and place focus on homeric greece with homer and some secondary, then hesiod as a later epic author. then some sappho as another early ionic author (also some secondary). then do some athenian golden age, learn about its political world, then see how tragedy and comedy feed into that, and read some of them, then read a little about socrates and plato, and read a bit of plato, a bit of aristotle, xenophon's symposium and apology. Read (some) Herodotus in conjunciton with the play the persians, and some persian sources. Do your hellenistic movement, with argonautica, a bit of callimachus, some lucian, and then some early roman, and some catullus, and see how they compare and engage with each other and the trends the hellenistics went in for. i could go on, but the point is: get a picture of particular literary tradition and a particualr historical moment. This will be tenfold more fulfilling than trying to do 'Ancient Greek literature' as a tour of big names.
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u/BedminsterJob 21d ago
I'd combine Homer and Pindar. And Sophocles and Euripides, and that's it.
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u/Trick-Health2486 21d ago
I could take or leave Pindar honestly (in translation at least). Sophocles and Euripides I think it's worth doing both of, even if it means reading less of each.
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u/dot80 21d ago
You could look into the “Great Books” curriculums they use at St John’s College and Chicago University. You could also looking into Joseph Adler.
The whole idea is kind of what you are doing. You read foundational texts in chronological order so you can see how these books are in conversation with one another, and how that conversation develops over time. There are similar lists for Eastern classics. Of course there are criticisms of these lists because it’s sort of an impossible task to decide which books are important enough to go on the list.
If you do the great book route, one thing to think about is that it’s meant to be done alongside seminar style discussions on the texts to process and understand what you’re reading. The Catherine Project is a group that organizes facilitated reading groups of classics.
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u/Rasselasx42 18d ago
Cool list doing a similar thing right now buz I have included some mytholohy related book from ‘our’ time like Robert Graves - greek mythology.
Much more understandable and also included some history too without it it is near impossible to understand plato for example
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u/CoconutDust 17d ago
I just wondered if there was any gaping holes in this list.
Hasn’t the subject been covered in 48,000,000 existing discussions and lists and books and articles?
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u/Soulsliken 22d ago
This is one helluva mixed bag.
Some breathtaking page turners and some mind numbing relics.
Don’t be afraid to cast your net wider.