Editorial
A curated list of the critical editions, open archives and reference works the editorial team works with. New sources are added cautiously, after a human editor has confirmed they belong here.
This page is the canonical record of where Virtue & Power reads from. It is intentionally short. Every classical entry on the site is rooted in one of the primary texts catalogued below, normally via the named critical edition and almost always with cross-reference to one of the open-access digital archives so that readers can verify a passage themselves.
We have written more about the standards behind the catalog — on citation, translation and the no-invented-quotations rule — on the editorial policy page.
A note on copyright. The Greek and Latin texts themselves are ancient and not under copyright; many translations are, often for substantially longer than readers expect. Where we mark something public domain, we mean the work or the specific edition is reliably out of copyright in major jurisdictions. Where we mark something mixed, the text is public-domain but specific modern translations associated with it may not be. Where we do not know with confidence, we say unverified rather than guess.
The standard critical edition of the Greek text. Citation of both epics is by book and line — Odyssey 9.105 means book 9, line 105 — and line numbers refer to the Greek. Most verse translations do not match the Greek line count, which is worth knowing before checking a reference.
The standard critical edition of Plato in Greek (Oxford Classical Texts, 5 vols.). Cited via Stephanus pagination, the page-and-letter scheme established by Henri Estienne's 1578 Geneva edition that all serious citations of Plato still use.
The Berlin Academy edition that supplied the Bekker numbers (e.g. NE 1103a) by which every serious citation of Aristotle is still made.
The standard Oxford Classical Texts edition of Xenophon's complete works in Greek. Includes the historical works (Hellenica, Anabasis), the Socratic works (Memorabilia, Symposium, Apology, Oeconomicus), the Cyropaedia, and the shorter treatises. Cited by work, book and chapter.
The standard Oxford Classical Texts edition of the Iliad and Odyssey in Greek, in five volumes. The standard citation is by book and line (e.g. Iliad 1.1).
The standard scholarly edition of the Parallel Lives in Greek (Bibliotheca Teubneriana). Cited by the name of the Life followed by chapter and section (e.g. Alexander 1.1). Copyright status of individual Teubner volumes varies and has not been verified here.
The Oxford Classical Texts of Cicero — the speeches, philosophical works (De Officiis, De Re Publica, De Legibus, De Finibus, Tusculan Disputations), letters, and rhetorical works. Cited by the conventional short titles + book / section (e.g. De Officiis 1.20; Phil. 2.110; Att. 1.16).
Caesar's own narrative — De Bello Gallico (the Gallic Wars) and De Bello Civili (the Civil War) — cited by book and chapter (e.g. BG 6.13). The single most important first-person source for a Roman statesman of the late Republic.
Plato's last and longest dialogue, the design of a workable second-best city governed by law. Saunders (Penguin) and Griffith (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) are the standard English versions; the Greek is cited by Stephanus pagination from Burnet's Oxford text.
The founding work of constitutional analysis, generalising from the comparative material of scores of Greek city constitutions. Barker (rev. Stalley, Oxford World's Classics) and Reeve (Hackett) are the standard English translations; cited by Bekker number. The companion to the Nicomachean Ethics.
The standard scholarly critical editions of Greek and Latin texts in their original language. The reference set most commonly cited in academic work.
Plain prose with no verse ambitions, and securely in the public domain, which is why this platform uses it for any extended excerpt. Butler's introduction argues that the poem was composed by a woman — a thesis with essentially no scholarly support that should not be taken as part of the translation's authority.
Deliberately archaising Victorian prose. Public domain and widely mirrored, but its biblical register imposes a solemnity the Greek does not have; use with awareness of what it adds.
Facing-page Greek and English. The most convenient way to check a reference against the original without reading continuous Greek. Later revised editions are in copyright.
Augustus's first-person record of his reign, inscribed across the empire; the fullest surviving copy is the Monumentum Ancyranum at Ankara. Cooley's edition gives Latin and Greek with full commentary. Cited by chapter (e.g. RG 34 for the auctoritas/potestas formulation). The regime's own memory, to be read against Tacitus.
The private Stoic notebook of the philosopher-emperor, written partly on the Danube campaign. Cited by book + section (e.g. Med. 2.1). Pierre Hadot's The Inner Citadel is the indispensable philosophical commentary; Gregory Hays's Modern Library translation is the most fluent reading version.
The most detailed surviving handbook of the late-Roman / early-Byzantine army. The traditional attribution to the emperor Maurice is convention rather than established fact. Dennis's translation is the standard and only general English reference. Cited by book + chapter (e.g. Strat. 11 for the survey of Rome's adversaries).
Clay foundation cylinder from Babylon, now in the British Museum, recording Cyrus's capture of the city and his restoration of cults and deported peoples. A conventional Mesopotamian royal inscription, not the 'first charter of human rights' of modern myth; read against the Babylonian Chronicle.
Darius I's trilingual cliff relief and inscription narrating his accession and the suppression of the revolts of 522-521 BCE. Royal apologetic, to be read with caution; also the text Henry Rawlinson used to decipher cuneiform. Cited by column and paragraph.
The fullest law-code of the ancient Near East, carved on a basalt stele now in the Louvre. Roth's 'Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor' (Scholars Press, 2nd ed. 1997) is the standard scholarly translation, setting it among the earlier Sumerian codes. Cited by provision number; the prologue and epilogue carry the legitimating frame.
The foundational Confucian text, a layered compilation of sayings and dialogues. Lau (Penguin) and Slingerland (Hackett, 2003, with traditional commentary) are the standard accessible English translations. Cited by book and passage (e.g. Analects 2.3).
Foundational Legalist treatise drawing on the Qin reforms of Shang Yang (d. 338 BCE). Pines's 'The Book of Lord Shang' (Columbia, 2017) is the current scholarly translation and study. Read as the practical program behind the Qin centralisation and as a frontal rejection of custom and the authority of antiquity.
The synthesising masterwork of Chinese Legalism, fusing law (fa), method (shu) and positional power (shi). Watson's 'Han Feizi: Basic Writings' (Columbia) is the standard accessible selection; Liao's older translation covers the full text. The most explicit ancient theory of the impersonal state.
Book 1 discusses whether the Odyssey's wanderings can be located on a real map, and Book 10 the identification of the Ionian islands. Strabo is sceptical of literal-minded mapping while granting that the poet worked from real knowledge of the sea — the earliest sustained critical treatment of the question this platform's guides take up.
A traveller's account of Greek sites, cults and monuments, and a principal source for what Greeks of the Roman period believed about their own heroic past and where they located it. Evidence for reception rather than for the Bronze Age.
Sallust's two surviving monographs are the principal narrative source for the conspiracy of Catiline and for the Jugurthine War — the latter giving us our most extended portrait of Gaius Marius. His moralising frame (Roman virtue declining under the corrosion of imperial wealth) shaped how the late Republic was read for centuries after.
Twelve biographies running from Caesar through Domitian. Read alongside Plutarch and Tacitus; Suetonius is more anecdotal and less analytical but preserves material the others omit. Cited by emperor + chapter (e.g. Aug. 28; Iul. 76).
The two great surviving works of the Roman imperial historian — the Annales (Tiberius through Nero) and the Historiae (69–96 CE, partly lost). The sharpest ancient analysis of what unbounded power did to political character. Cited by book + chapter (e.g. Ann. 4.32).
Tacitus's two short monographs: the Agricola, a biography of his father-in-law and a study of public service under a bad emperor, and the Germania, an ethnography of the peoples beyond the Rhine whose modern reception history is itself a cautionary tale. Cited by chapter (e.g. Agr. 30; Germ. 7).
Livy's monumental history of Rome from its founding. Books 1–10 and 21–45 survive (with periochae summaries of the rest). The principal source for the early Republic, Numa, the regal period, and the Roman idealisation of civic virtue in the years before Marius. Cited by book + chapter (e.g. Liv. 1.18 for Numa).
The Greek historian who explained the rise of Rome to a Greek audience. Book VI is the locus classicus for the anakuklōsis (cycle of regimes) and for the analysis of the Roman mixed constitution that shaped subsequent constitutional thought. Cited by book + chapter (e.g. Plb. 6.11).
The earliest extended Greek history, in nine books. The principal ancient source for the Persian kings (Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius, Xerxes), for the world they conquered, and for the Greek wars that followed. Cited by book + chapter (e.g. Hdt. 1.108 for Cyrus).
The lost Persian history of a Greek physician at the Achaemenid court, surviving only in Photius's epitome and scattered quotations. Sensational and frequently unreliable, doubted already in antiquity; used with great caution as a counterpoint to Herodotus. Cited by Jacoby fragment number (FGrHist 688).
The classical historical analysis of power and political dynamics. Pericles' Funeral Oration (Book II) is the locus classicus for the Athenian self-conception under his leadership. Cited by book + chapter + section (e.g. Thuc. 2.65 on Pericles).
The standard statement of oral-formulaic theory, setting out the results of the fieldwork Lord conducted with Milman Parry among South Slavic epic singers. It established that oral composition-in-performance of long narrative verse is possible and produces formulaic diction. It did not establish how a poem of the Homeric epics' scale emerged from such a tradition, and that question remains open.
The demonstration that Homeric diction is an economical traditional system — that the noun-epithet formulae are distributed by metrical need with a thrift no individual writer would impose on himself. The single most consequential intervention in the modern study of Homer.
The founding document of the modern Homeric Question. Wolf argued the poems were assembled from shorter oral songs and that writing was not available in a form permitting composition on this scale. The Analyst programme of the nineteenth century followed from it.
The argument that the society of the poems — household-based, organised around gift exchange and personal followings, without bureaucracy — belongs to the Early Iron Age rather than to the Mycenaean Bronze Age. The dating remains disputed; the structural description has been enormously influential and is why this platform does not use the poems as evidence for Mycenaean society.
Opens with the scar of Odysseus at Odyssey 19.393-466 and uses it to characterise Homeric style as a fully illuminated foreground with no depths and no perspective. Contested, and still the standard entry point for discussion of how the poem narrates.
The study that made metis a category in its own right, tracing cunning intelligence across Greek thought from Homer to the sophists. The standard starting point for the concept.
Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Fagles and Emily Wilson are all in copyright and none is reproduced on this platform. Lattimore is the most literal in line and word order; Fitzgerald and Fagles read most fluently as English poetry; Wilson's, published in 2018 and the first published English translation of the poem by a woman, uses iambic pentameter and matches the Greek line for line, producing a markedly faster and plainer poem. The choice of translation changes the work more than most readers expect.
The foundational presentation of the Linear B material following Ventris's 1952 decipherment. The tablets are administrative records in an early form of Greek and are the primary documentary evidence for the Late Bronze Age Aegean. They establish the language and the palace bureaucracy; they do not mention any Homeric character.
The standard Greek lexicon, known by the abbreviation LSJ. Older editions are out of copyright and are mirrored on Perseus, which is the most convenient way to look up Greek terms used in our entries (aretē, dikaiosynē, sōphrosynē, phronēsis, andreia, eudaimonia and the rest).
Open-access digital collection of Greek and Latin texts hosted by Tufts University. Useful for locating passages and for working between original and a (typically older, public-domain) translation. Individual translations have their own rights status; check before quoting.
An MIT-hosted archive of older English translations of classical works. Translations are largely nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century and out of copyright in many jurisdictions; check each work individually.
An archive of works in the public domain in the United States. Useful for early modern editions and historical translations of classical works (Jowett's Plato, Ross's Aristotle in older Oxford translations, etc.).
A long-running, scholarly digital archive of Latin and Greek texts in the Roman world — full texts of Polybius, Plutarch's Roman Lives, the Augustan History, Cassius Dio, Suetonius, Livy and many others, in English translation (largely the Loeb editions out of copyright in the United States) with hyperlinked references. Particularly valuable for the historiographical layer.
Peer-reviewed scholarly encyclopedia, freely accessible. Each entry is signed and dated. Useful for orienting on the current state of scholarship on a thinker, work or theme; not a substitute for the primary texts themselves.
Peer-reviewed open-access philosophy encyclopedia. Complementary to the Stanford Encyclopedia; sometimes more accessible as a first orientation.
The familiar small green (Greek) and red (Latin) volumes with facing-page translations. Many texts in the Loeb are themselves in the public domain in their original language; the *translations* in modern Loeb volumes are typically still under copyright. Cite the Greek or Latin by line / Bekker / Stephanus number rather than by Loeb page.
Catalog last revised 2026-05-18. Inclusion in this list is not an endorsement of every claim a source makes; it is an indication that the source is one Virtue & Power consults and would point a reader towards.