TheLibrary

A tyrant king and the wild man sent to humble him become inseparable, and when one of them dies the other goes looking for a way to not. Recovered from Mesopotamian clay tablets, it is among the oldest surviving works of literature we have.

The Rig Veda is the oldest of the four sacred Hindu texts (Vedas) and one of the world’s oldest religious scriptures, composed in Vedic Sanskrit around 1500–1000 BCE. It consists of 1,028 hymns (sūktas) and 10,600 verses organized into 10 books (mandalas), which were preserved through an intricate oral tradition before being written down around 300 BCE. Wendy Doniger selects a hundred and eight hymns and annotates them as literature and history, rather than as devotional poetry. Strange, difficult to comprehend, and much deeper than its reputation.

The poem covers a few weeks in the tenth year of the siege of Troy and is really about Achilles sulking, then grieving, then doing something unforgivable to Hector's body. It ends with Priam kissing the hands of the man who killed his son.

Ten years after Troy, Odysseus is still trying to get home, and the poem spends as much time on the household he left behind as on the monsters. Penelope outwits her suitors at the loom while her husband lies his way across the Mediterranean.

Hesiod runs the universe from Chaos forward through the generations of gods to Zeus taking power, castrations and swallowed children included. It is the closest thing Greek religion has to an official account of where everything came from. The link is to the Oxford volume that pairs it with Works and Days.

Hesiod addresses the poem to Perses, who cheated him out of an inheritance, and turns it into a work of advice: when to plough, when to sail, why the gods hid an easy living from men. The Pandora story and the five ages of man are both here. The link is to the Oxford volume that pairs it with the Theogony.

Dialogues and teachings probing what underlies the world and whether the self within is identical to it, arriving at formulations like tat tvam asi, you are that. Composed over centuries and the seedbed for most later Indian philosophy.

Carson prints what survives and marks the gaps with brackets, so the absences become part of the reading.

Cataract couching, reconstructive nose surgery and over a hundred instruments, described with hard-to-dispute precision.

Thirteen short chapters on terrain, spies, deception and timing, insisting throughout that supreme excellence is breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting. Read as often in boardrooms as in staff colleges, which says as much about boardrooms as about the book.

Agamemnon comes home and is murdered, his son kills his mother for it, and the Furies pursue him until Athena convenes a jury and the cycle stops. The only complete Greek tragic trilogy that survives.

Antigone buries her brother against Creon's decree and is walled up alive for it, and the play refuses to let either of them be simply right. Hegel read it as tragedy's purest case of two goods colliding. The link is to the Oxford volume collecting it with Oedipus the King and Electra.

Herodotus sets out to explain why Greeks and Persians went to war and detours through Egyptian embalming, Scythian burials and gold-digging ants. He repeatedly reports a story and then tells you he is not vouching for it, which is why he gets called both the father of history and the father of lies.

Jason leaves Medea for a better marriage, and she destroys everything he has, including their children. Euripides gives her the clearest speech in the play about what marriage costs women, which is what makes the ending so hard to sit with.

Thebes is dying of plague, Oedipus swears to find the killer of the previous king, and every witness he questions brings him closer to the answer he cannot survive. Aristotle treated it as the model of how a tragedy should be built. The link is to the Oxford volume collecting it with Antigone and Electra.

The women of Greece agree to withhold sex until their husbands end the Peloponnesian War, and seize the treasury on the Acropolis to fund the strike. Staged while the actual war was still going badly for Athens.

Short exchanges between Confucius and his students, assembled after his death, circling ritual, learning, filial duty and what makes a person worth following. There is no argument to follow, only a sensibility that accumulates.

Eighty-one brief chapters on the way that cannot be named, water as the model for strength, and governing by not interfering. One of the most translated books in the world, and every translation is arguably a different book.

Thucydides covers the war between Athens and Sparta as a participant and an exile, and reconstructs the speeches on both sides. The Melian Dialogue, where Athens tells a small island that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, is still quoted in international relations seminars.

Socrates defends himself against charges of corrupting the young and impiety, declines every chance to soften his case, and tells the jury an unexamined life is not worth living. They sentence him to death and he treats it as an open question whether that is bad. The link is to Penguin's Last Days of Socrates, which collects it with Euthyphro, Crito and Phaedo.

Six Athenians take turns defining eros over wine, Aristophanes explains that humans were once spherical and got split in half, and then a spectacularly drunk Alcibiades arrives to talk about Socrates instead. Funnier than its reputation suggests.

Socrates spends his final hours arguing that the soul survives the body, then drinks the hemlock while his friends fall apart around him. Whether the arguments work is still debated; the closing scene is not. The link is to Penguin's Last Days of Socrates, which collects it with Euthyphro, Apology and Crito.

Two early dialogues: what makes an act pious, and whether virtue can be taught. Both end without an answer, which is the point.

Socrates and his companions build an ideal city in speech to work out what justice means, and end up with philosopher kings, censored poetry and the allegory of the cave. Much of what Western political philosophy argues about starts here, including the parts that are hard to defend.

Aristotle works through how city-states are actually governed, what makes each form decay, and why he thinks a large middle class is the most stable arrangement. He also defends natural slavery, which is worth reading precisely because it shows how a careful mind gets something catastrophically wrong.

Aristotle works out what nature, change, place, time and cause are by argument alone, and arrives at the four causes and the unmoved mover. Wrong about a great deal, and the framework Europe reasoned inside for roughly two thousand years.

Aristotle argues that virtue is a habit you build by practice, sitting between two extremes, and that the goal is a flourishing life rather than a blameless one. The long section on friendship is the part most readers do not expect to find moving.

Aristotle takes tragedy apart into plot, character and the rest, argues that plot matters most, and introduces the terms still in use: mimesis, catharsis, the reversal and the recognition. Every screenwriting manual since is downstream of it.

Aristotle on character, emotion and proof as the three appeals. The other half of the subject that logic alone cannot cover.

A manual on running a kingdom covering taxation, agriculture, law, spycraft and when to break a treaty, attributed to Chanakya and rediscovered only in 1905. It is more administratively detailed than Machiavelli and considerably colder.

Parables, tall tales and jokes arguing that our categories are far shakier than we think, including the butterfly dream and a cook who carves an ox by feel. Where the Tao Te Ching is gnomic, Zhuangzi is playful, and it is the more enjoyable read.

Two sets of cousins fight over a kingdom and destroy nearly everyone, with the Bhagavad Gita sitting inside it as Arjuna's crisis on the battlefield. The moral weather is genuinely ambiguous, which is why it keeps getting retold. The link is to Ganguli's Volume 1; Gutenberg carries the full prose translation across several volumes.

Rama is exiled, Sita is taken by Ravana, and an army of monkeys crosses to Lanka to get her back. The trial by fire at the end has been contested for centuries, and regional retellings differ so sharply that there is no single Ramayana.

Four hundred and twenty-three verses on craving, anger, mindfulness and the mind as the forerunner of all things, arranged by theme. Among the most widely read Buddhist texts, and short enough to finish in an afternoon and reread for years.

Definitions, postulates and proofs. Two thousand years of mathematicians learned rigour from these pages.

Mencius argues with kings and rival philosophers, and grounds morality in the spontaneous impulse to save a child falling into a well.

Han Fei holds that people respond to reward and punishment and nothing else, and designs a state accordingly. Machiavelli seventeen centuries early.

Arjuna refuses to fight his own relatives, and Krishna answers him across eighteen chapters on action, detachment and devotion. Lifted out of the Mahabharata and read on its own for centuries. The link is to Edwin Arnold's Victorian verse translation, The Song Celestial.

Sima Qian chose castration over suicide in order to finish it. Biography, annals and treatises covering two thousand years.

Lucretius sets out Epicurean physics in Latin hexameters: everything is atoms and void, the gods are indifferent, and death is nothing to us because there is no one left to suffer it. Lost for centuries, rediscovered in 1417, and it changed what the Renaissance thought was possible to think.