Library
Editorial guides to the foundational works of classical philosophy, statecraft, history and religion.
The entries below are editorial guides to the works themselves: what each work is, how it is structured, how it has been transmitted, and the citation convention appropriate to it. They are not summaries; they are meant to be read alongside the primary text, not in place of it.
Late Republic and early Augustan, c. 27 BCE onward
by Titus Livius (Livy)
Livy's monumental history of Rome from the founding to his own day — 142 books originally, of which 35 survive intact — read for two thousand years as the great repository of Roman *exempla* and as the most sustained ancient defence of civic virtue as a national inheritance.
Late Roman Republic, 58–51 BCE
by Gaius Julius Caesar
Caesar's seven-book first-person account of the Gallic campaign of 58–51 BCE, published while the war was still in progress — at once a military dispatch, a literary masterpiece of Latin prose, and a political instrument intended to shape Roman public opinion about a command the Senate could not control.
Classical Greece, 4th century BCE
by Xenophon
Xenophon's "Education of Cyrus" — a long pseudo-biographical study of the founder of the Persian Empire, often regarded as the first sustained ancient treatment of how a leader is formed.
Late Roman Republic, 44 BCE
by Marcus Tullius Cicero
Cicero's three-book treatise on duty, written in the autumn of 44 BCE as he stood publicly against Antony — the most complete ancient statement of what a senator, magistrate or citizen owes to the Republic, and the single classical text that did the most work in the European moral tradition for the two millennia after.
Late Roman Republic, 54–51 BCE
by Marcus Tullius Cicero
Cicero's six-book dialogue on the mixed constitution and the dignity of public service, composed 54–51 BCE — partly lost, partly preserved in the closing *Somnium Scipionis*, partly recovered by Angelo Mai from a Vatican palimpsest in 1819.
Hellenistic, mid-2nd century BCE
by Polybius of Megalopolis
Polybius's forty-book history of Rome's rise to Mediterranean dominance in the third and second centuries BCE — surviving in part, with Book VI standing as the single most influential ancient analysis of constitutional balance and the foundation document of the European tradition of mixed-constitutional thought.
Archaic Greece
by Homer (attrib.)
The earlier of the two great Homeric epics — a poem of the wrath of Achilles set in the final year of the Greek war against Troy, and the foundation of Greek literary and moral education.
Classical Greece, 4th century BCE
by Xenophon
Xenophon's "Recollections of Socrates" — a four-book portrait and defence of his teacher that, together with Plato's dialogues, is our principal source for Socrates.
Classical Greece, 4th century BCE
by Aristotle
Aristotle's treatise on the good for human beings — the founding work of virtue ethics and the source of the doctrine of the mean.
Roman Empire, late 1st to early 2nd century CE
by Plutarch
Plutarch's Parallel Lives — paired Greek and Roman biographies, organised for comparison and for the study of character through what people did. The principal source through which later Europe learned to read the late Roman Republic.
Classical Greece, 4th century BCE
by Plato
Plato's dialogue on justice in the soul and the city — the central inquiry in classical political philosophy, traditionally dated to the middle period of his writing.
Late Roman Republic, c. 43–42 BCE
by Gaius Sallustius Crispus
Sallust's short historical monograph on the conspiracy of 63 BCE — written a generation later from political retirement, framed as a study not of one criminal act but of the moral conditions that made the act possible, and the first surviving Roman history written as a literary genre.
Late Roman Republic, c. 41–40 BCE
by Gaius Sallustius Crispus
Sallust's second historical monograph — the war Rome fought against Jugurtha of Numidia between 112 and 105 BCE, treated as the occasion that exposed the corruption of the senatorial nobility and made the career of Gaius Marius possible.