Need help choosing Greek/Roman authors

[Pyrrho]

If you are wanting books about the ancient Greeks, a truly great one is Before and After Socrates by F.M. Cornford. The book is very short, and very expensive for how short it is. But it is worth the purchase price for the chapters on the Presocratics and on Socrates. He is concise and clear and very informative. This may well be the best introduction to the Presocratic philosophers ever written. Cornford was a great scholar.

Thanks for the suggestion. Are you familiar with G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven's The Presocratic Philosophers? I recently read that and it was pretty great. They basically went through the relevant Presocratics in considerable depth, including basically every important source document we have for each one. After Herodutos, and before I jump back into Plato to read Gorgias, Meno, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias, Ion, Menexenus, Clitophon, and Republic (which then I'll be taking another break from Plato), I'm going to read Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, an unfinished work by Nietzsche that was published posthumously. Anyways, I think I'll be ready to bid the Presocratics farewell for a while, but I'll keep that one in mind for a later date (my list of wanted books seems to grow exponentially...)

Before and After Socrates by F.M. Cornford is a very different kind of book from The Presocratic Philosophers by Kirk, Raven, and Schofield. Cornford's book is essentially the written form of four lectures, and it is giving a broad overview of what is going on, rather than dealing with the details. If you will pardon an overused metaphor, it is about the forest, not about the trees. If you are wanting to look at the specific source materials, then you are not wanting to look at Before and After Socrates by Cornford. But I think he is a better introduction to the topic, as he is brief and also has a very good perspective on the overall project that the ancient Greeks were doing, as well as its importance in human thought. Cornford's book is not like a summary of Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, so you might want to take a look at it, if you can find a copy at a decent price. To return to the overused metaphor, he has more to say about the forest than one finds in The Presocratic Philosophers by Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, but there is very little information about the trees. For something with more details, then one would want to move on to something else, like what you have already read.

A book more like the The Presocratic Philosophers by Kirk, Raven, and Schofield is Philosophy Before Socrates by Richard D. McKirahan, Jr., which I prefer, as it seems better organized and clearer and coheres a bit better. If my memory is right (it has been a while since I read McKirahan; I see from looking at Amazon, that there is now a second edition which I have not seen), he seems to have a better appreciation for leaving things open to multiple interpretations and is less inclined to push his own particular interpretations. Also, I do not recall him repeatedly misusing the word "bisexual," which is quite displeasing in Kirk, Raven, and Schofield. (In a silly science fiction show, like the episode "The Trouble with Tribbles" in Star Trek, it is mostly funny when the word "bisexual" is misused, but when it is misused repeatedly in a scholarly work about presocratic philosophers, it is rather unsettling, as one wonders what other words they might be misusing.) But it is, for the most part, covering pretty much the same material.

Given what you have already read, you might find it more illuminating to read some of the sources for books like The Presocratic Philosophers and Philosophy Before Socrates, such as Herodotus' Histories and Diogenes Laertius' Lives of Eminent Philosophers. In doing so, one gets a better feel for how seriously one should take their pronouncements about specific individuals, as one may observe how they treat things generally. What one finds, of course, is that the evidential material about the presocratics leaves a lot to be desired. But you should have a decent idea of that from Kirk, Raven, and Schofield.