RE: Need help choosing Greek/Roman authors
April 25, 2015 at 5:15 pm
(This post was last modified: April 25, 2015 at 5:18 pm by Mudhammam.)
(April 25, 2015 at 1:28 pm)Pyrrho Wrote: I am particularly fond of Seneca's Letters 70 & 77:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_lett.../Letter_70
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_lett.../Letter_77
I have not compared translations, so I have no specific advice, but I have no objections to the translation used in the links, by Richard Mott Gummere.
So I looked up the chronology of the authors I listed (adding Tertullian and Plotinus) and came up with my reading order:
B.C.E
*Epicurus 341 - 270
Cicero 106 - 43
*Lucretius 99 - 55
Catullus 84 - 54
Virgil 70 - 19
Ovid 43 - 17-18 C.E.
Philo 25 B.C.E. - 50 C.E.
Seneca 4 B.C.E. - 65 C.E.
C.E.
Pliny the Elder 23 - 79
Plutarch 46 - 127
*Epictetus 55 - 135
*Marcus Aurelius 121 - 180
Clement of Alexandria 150 - 215
Tertullian 155 - 240
Plotinus 204 -270
Diogenes Laertius (first half of third century)
Augustine of Hippo 354 - 430
*Included in the Oates' compilation
By that time I should be done with the Greeks and Romans and will begin moving into the Medieval Philosophers, which I'll make a fresh thread (this will be months from now, obviously). All that being said, I just ordered 6 books off Amazon to get things going:
Cicero - The Nature of the Gods (Oxford World's Classics)
Cicero - Selected Letters (Oxford World's Classics)
Catullus - The Complete Poems (Oxford World's Classics)
Ovid - The Metamorphoses
Philo - The Works of Philo: Complete and Unabridged, New Updated Edition
Seneca - Letters from a Stoic (The Epistles of Seneca)
There's almost no better feeling than that which accompanies the knowledge that 6 separate packages will arrive in the mail at random intervals throughout the next 3 weeks!
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza