Reading companion for Diodorus Siculus's Bibliotheca Historica — the most ambitious universal history to survive from antiquity, the sole continuous Greek narrative of the wars of the Diadochi, and the largest single repository of lost Hellenistic historiography.
Euripides' Cyclops — the only complete satyr play to survive from antiquity — a burlesque of Odysseus's escape from Polyphemus, performed by a chorus of satyrs and their father Silenus, and the sole intact witness to the fourth genre of the Athenian stage.
Four comedies of Aristophanes — the sex-strike politics of Lysistrata, the festival travesty of Thesmophoriazusae, the communist fantasy of Ecclesiazusae, and the redistributive dream of Plutus — spanning Old Comedy at its height and the threshold of its transformation.
Reading companion and full text of Epictetus: Discourses, Books I–II, translated by W. A. Oldfather — Loeb Classical Library volume 131, first published in 1925 by Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, presenting the first two of the four surviving books of Arrian's record of Epictetus's classroom teaching, with the original Greek on facing pages, notes, and a substantial introduction to the philosopher's life and thought.
Reading companion and full text of Epictetus: Discourses, Books III–IV, with the Encheiridion and Fragments, translated by W. A. Oldfather — Loeb Classical Library volume 218, first published in 1928 by Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, completing the four surviving books of Arrian's record of Epictetus's teaching and adding the Encheiridion and the principal surviving fragments, with Greek text on facing pages and editorial notes throughout.
Three plays by Euripides — the lament of the vanquished in Trojan Women, a thriller of recognition and escape in Iphigenia among the Taurians, and a meditation on divine paternity and civic identity in Ion — representing the full range of his dramatic imagination.
Reading companion and full text of A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus, with the Encheiridion, translated by George Long — drawn from Long's complete 1877 translation and presented here in the 1890 G. P. Putnam's Sons edition, gathering the most essential of the surviving discourses alongside the complete Encheiridion, the brief handbook of Stoic principles that Arrian distilled from his teacher's classroom and that has never ceased to be read.
Reading companion and full text of Livy's Ab Urbe Condita, Volume V (Books 21–22), translated by B. O. Foster — the opening of the Second Punic War, from Hannibal's oath through the crossing of the Alps, the battles of Trebia and Lake Trasimene, and the catastrophe of Cannae.
Reading companion and full text of Livy's Ab Urbe Condita, Volume VI (Books 23–25), translated by F. G. Moore — the aftermath of Cannae, the defection and eventual siege of Capua, the fall of Syracuse and death of Archimedes, and the reverses in Spain.
Reading companion and full text of Livy's Ab Urbe Condita, Volume VII (Books 26–30), translated by F. G. Moore — the turn of the Second Punic War, from the rise of Scipio Africanus in Spain through the Battle of the Metaurus, the African campaign, and the final confrontation at Zama.
Reading companion and full text of Seneca's Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, Volume VI (Epistles 93–124), translated by Richard M. Gummere — the concluding portion of Seneca's great letter-collection, written in the final years of his life under Nero, addressing questions of death, virtue, the good life, the value of precepts, and the relationship between philosophy and action.
Reading companion and full text of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, translated by George Long and introduced by W. L. Courtney, in the Blackie and Son edition — twelve books of private philosophical notes written in Koine Greek by the Roman Emperor during the last decade of his life, never intended for publication, and representing the most intimate record of Stoic practice in the ancient world.
Reading companion and full text of the Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, Volume I, translated by Franz Rosenthal and published as Bollingen Series XLIII (Pantheon Books, 1958) — the first volume of the first complete English translation of Ibn Khaldun's fourteenth-century introduction to universal history, which established the foundations of the philosophy of history, sociology, and the comparative study of human civilizations.
Reading companion and full text of Aristotle's Parts of Animals, Movement of Animals, and Progression of Animals (Loeb Classical Library 323), translated by A. L. Peck and E. S. Forster — three of Aristotle's major biological treatises: the first an enquiry into the bodily parts of animals and the teleological principles that govern their design, the second a short but philosophically rich analysis of the causes of animal locomotion in general, and the third a systematic study of how different kinds of animals actually move.
Reading companion and full text of Sophocles, Volume I (Loeb Classical Library 20), translated by F. Storr — the three Theban plays in the order they appear in the manuscript tradition: Oedipus the King, the founding masterpiece of tragic recognition; Oedipus at Colonus, the poet's final work, produced posthumously; and Antigone, the first of the three to be composed and the one in which the conflict between divine and human law receives its definitive dramatic statement.
Reading companion and full text of Suetonius's De Vita Caesarum (The Lives of the Caesars), Volume I, translated by J. C. Rolfe — biographies of Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula, combining official record, anecdote, and scandal into the foundational portraits of Rome's first rulers.
Reading companion and full text of Suetonius's De Vita Caesarum (The Lives of the Caesars), Volume II, translated by J. C. Rolfe — biographies of Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian, spanning the dissolution of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the convulsions of 69 CE, and the rise and fall of the Flavians.
Reading companion and full text of Boethius: The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy (Loeb Classical Library 74), the Tractates translated by H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand, the Consolation in the English translation of 'I. T.' (1609) revised by H. F. Stewart — the five opuscula sacra that attempt to reconcile Platonic philosophy with Christian theology, and the work Boethius composed in prison awaiting execution, which became the most widely read philosophical text of the medieval millennium.
Full text of Anna Comnena's Alexiad — the only major historical work authored by a woman in the medieval period, and the indispensable Byzantine account of the reign of Alexios I Komnenos and the First Crusade.
Full text of Aeschylus's Oresteia — the only surviving ancient Greek tragic trilogy — tracing the House of Atreus from Agamemnon's murder through the founding of Athenian civic justice.