Marcus Aurelius

Feb 7, 2025

My notes on the first book of the Old Testament

Feb 3, 2025

1. Bhagavad Gita
2. Mahabharata
3. Gilgamesh
4. The Old Testament
5. Homer: Iliad, Odyssey
6. Herodotus: Histories
7. Sophocles: Plays
8. Aeschylus: Plays
9. Euripides: Plays (Hippolytus, The Bachantes, Electra, The Phoenician Women)
10. Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War
11. Plato: Dialogues
12. Aristotle: Poetics, Physics, Ethics, De Anima
13. Alexandrian Poetry: The Greek Anthology
14. Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
15. Plutarch: Lives [presumably Parallel Lives]
16. Virgil: Aeneid, Bucolics, Georgics
17. Tacitus: Annals
18. Ovid: Metamorphoses, Heroides, Amores
19. The New Testament
20. Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars
21. Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
22. Catullus: Poems
23. Horace: Poems
24. Epictetus: Discourses
25. Aristophanes: Plays
26. Claudius Aelianus: Historical Miscellany, On the Nature of Animals
27. Apollonius Rhodius: Argonautica
28. Michael Psellus: Fourteen Byzantine Rulers
29. Edward Gibbon: The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire
30. Plotinus: The Enneads
31. Eusebius: Ecclesiastical History
32. Boethius: Consolations of Philosophy
33. Pliny the Younger: Letters
34. Byzantine verse romances
35. Heraclitus: Fragments
36. St. Augustine: Confessions
37. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica
38. St. Francis of Assisi: The Little Flowers
39. Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince
40. Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy (Tr. By John Ciardi)
41. Franco Sacchetti: Novelle
42. Icelandic sagas
43. William Shakespeare (Anthony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Macbeth, Henry V)
44. François Rabelais
45. Francis Bacon
46. Martin Luther: Selected Works
47. John Calvin: Institutio Christianae religionis
48. Michel de Montaigne: Essays
49. Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
50. René Descartes: Discourses
51. Song of Roland
52. Beowulf
53. Benvenuto Cellini
54. Henry Adams: Education of Henry Adams
55. Thomas Hobbes: The Leviathan
56. Blaise Pascal: Pensées
57. John Milton: Paradise Lost
58. John Donne
59. Andrew Marvell
60. George Herbert
61. Richard Crashaw
62. Baruch Spinoza: Treatises
63. Stendhal: Charterhouse of Parma, Red and Black, The Life of Henry Brulard
64. Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
65. Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy
66. Choderlos de Laclos: Les Liaisons Dangereuses
67. Baron de Montesquieu: Persian Letters
68. John Locke: Second Treatise on Government
69. Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations
70. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics
71. David Hume: Everything
72. The Federalist Papers
73. Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason
74. Søren Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling, Either/Or, Philosophical Fragments
75. Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes From the Underground, The Possessed
76. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
77. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust, Italian Journey
78. Astolphe-Louis-Léonor, Marquis de Custine: Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia
79. Eric Auerbach: Mimesis
80. William H. Prescott: Conquest of Mexico
81. Octavio Paz: Labyrinths of Solitude
82. Sir Karl Popper: The Logic of Scientific Discovery, The Open Society and Its Enemies
83. Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power

Jan 13, 2025

Gilgamesh is king of Uruk; he is ⅔ god and ⅓ man and is a tyrannical ruler and big-time rapist. It’s going to be a challenge to find philosophical and stoic parallels, I think!

Dec 29, 2024

Bhagavad Gita

The Gita is a power struggle between two sides of a family: Dhritarashtra, the Kauravas, and their cousins, the Pandavas.

Dec 1, 2024

Mahabharata

Book 2 (Sabha Parva) of the Mahabharata