Need help choosing Greek/Roman authors

[Mudhammam]

Can I assume you've read Virgil's Aeneid as well?

I own it but haven't read it yet. I'm about 1/3 of the way through Plato's complete writings at the moment. I'm trying to go through them in something of chronological order.

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I recommend getting an old copy of The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers: The Complete Extant Writings of Epicurus, Epicetus, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius edited by Whitney J. Oates. You can buy this from web sites that sell used books, and it can be currently had from Amazon for about $22 including shipping, though you may be able to find it cheaper elsewhere. It contains a very good translation of Epicurus' works, which I highly recommend to everyone.

Thanks. Lucretius was great. This will go well with The Presocratic Philosophers by Kirk and Raven in my collection. That gave a pretty good analysis of the thinkers in that era.

For one of your books on Aristotle, I recommend The Nicomachean Ethics translated by W.D. Ross, put out by Oxford. You can currently buy a paperback of that from Amazon for about $7.

For Plato, I would go with the Euthyphro, Apology, Crito and Phaedo, which you can get all together in a Dover Thrift Edition for about $3. They call this The Trial and Death of Socrates, and it is the Benjamin Jowett translation. Jowett is one of the most poetic translators of Plato, and is well-suited for a work like the Apology.

You can also find most of these works online, for free.

That Aristotle is on my list. I loved all four of those Plato's works, especially Apology. That to me represents the literary craftsmanship of Plato while Parminides reveals his complete mad genius. There's a few others I've enjoyed so far too, including The Sophist. I'm almost to the Republic but I'm taking a break and reading about earlier mythology, such as the Egyptian, Akkadian, Sumerian, etc. works. Then I have Histories by Herodotus to go through, and an early work by Nietzsche on the Presocratics that he never finished and was published posthumously, before I return to Plato... which is all part of my project to go through the main characters in Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy. It's quite the task so I appreciate the suggestions to help me narrow things down. Ill probably be much more selective than I've been with Plato and the ancient Near Eastern texts.

I still might claim that nothing earlier than Plato that I've read touches Homer in his masterpieces. That to me is what divine inspiration ought to look like.