Mine

This is very republic heavy, especially the late republic. I don't necessarily think the late republic is more interesting or important than the foundation of the republic, but we do have far more good sources on the late republic & early empire. Any of the Plutarch biographies can be read in a couple of hours, and those that have survived antiquity are all readily available online in good translations. Sallust's The War With Cataline is also readable in one sitting and is tremendous fun. If you do decide to jump in with these ancient sources, you will find you lack a lot of context. I think you just have to roll with it.

• Parallel Lives - Plutarch

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  Some of my favourite stuff ever written. Maybe the most fun and approachable ancient history. A big collection of short biographies of the leading men of ancient Greece and Rome. The author is a diligent, wise and fair minded Greek philosopher writing around the time of Rome's zenith. He tries to draw moral lessons from the lives of these men - examples of virtues to be emulated and vices to be avoided. He condemns Caesar and Alexander for pride and ambition, for example, but cannot prevent himself from enjoying their exploits and excesses. A few centuries ago you would be considered a complete ignoramus if they you were not thoroughly familiar with the lives. Plutarch was of immense importance to the Founders, French revolutionaries etc. You cannot understand Napoleon, Jefferson, Hamilton, Robespierre and co. without having read Plutarch. The lives of the Grachii are a great place to start. if you are unfamiliar with Roman history and prepared to take the plunge, the life of Caesar is a good place to start if you want something that you are (probably) at least a little familiar with. If you are feeling more Greek start with Themistocles, which is the best of the bunch IMO. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/plutarch/lives/home.html - here are all the surviving lives freely available, courtesy of the university of Chicago. Penguin and Oxford have very good collections on the late Roman republic, and prime Athens.

• The Aeneid - Virgil

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  Imperial Rome needed an epic poem in the vein of the Homeric epics. The Robert Fagles translation is very good. Very much a product of its time and important to Augustus politically, lenses to keep in mind when reading it.

• The Metamorphoses - Ovid

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  More Imperial Roman poetry. Very interesting and peculiar, especially if you haven't read anything comparatively ancient before. It's not a narrative like The Aeneid so you can just dip into some of the poetry and get a feel for it.

• The War With Catiline - Sallust

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  Brilliant near contemporary account of the Catiline conspiracy - an attempt to overthrow the republic by a gang of wretches led by a few brilliant rogues. This episode of Roman history is paid much less attention than it should be, overshadowed by later events. Sallust is super biased, which is something to keep in mind, but its great. Can be read in one sitting.

• The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Edward Gibbon

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  Classic History. As important for its influence on the way we write history as for its inherent value. Gibbon does not hold your hand. It is enormously long so I have only yet read it in abridgement. If you want entertainment start with the parts about Atilla the Hun, if you want to hear Gibbons description of Rome at its height and analysis of the fall in short read the first few chapters.

• The Roman Revolution - Ronald Syme

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  Brilliant but serious and difficult history of the fall of the republic/ rise of the empire. Wouldn't go for it unless you are already familiar. It's more his analysis of events, presuming a certain preexisting familiarity with events in the reader. It was written against the backdrop of the rise of fascism in the 30s and it bears that mark. Augusts/Octavian is the main character. This book really makes you appreciate how much of a genius and bastard he was.

• From the Grachii to Nero - Howard Hayes Scullard

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  If you want to get into Rome, want something modern, and don't know where to start this is the book for you. It also has a lot for those already well acquainted. A standard textbook.

• The War with Hannibal - Livy

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• Parallel Lives - Plutarch

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  See my list for Rome above for an explanation. In terms of the Greeks I would start with the life of Themistocles.

• The Ancient Athenian Plays

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  Any of the Athenian tragedies can be read in a few hours. Oedipus Rex by Sophocles is absolute dynamite. Try to do it in one go, without distraction. We all know what is coming, and have done for a very long time, but it's still incredibly compelling. Antigone about Oedipus’ Daughter/half sister is also brilliant, though not as well known. The Oresteia by Aeschylus is a trilogy of tragedies, a weekend of reading and best read consecutively and uninterrupted. All the Athenian tragedies are mental, very interesting and very good reads. They allow you to step into the minds, morality and worldview of a completely alien culture. The classics remain classics because they still resonate with us, but they are also worth reading for how deeply strange they are: they allow us to step into a wholly alien, outrageous but complete civililsation. We get something similar from Homer's depiction of Achilles treatment of Hectors corpse, or Odysseus and the Suitors, but that feels less disconcerting because at that time the Greeks were savage. But Athens is the fount of western civ. It seems so wrong, at first, that they were so different to us. The core value of the tragedies is that by reading them carefully (and you really should try at least one from each of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides) we can begin to actually understand.

• The Iliad and The Odyssey - Homer

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  The argument I would use to convince a sceptic to read these is the magnitude of their impact on everything that came afterwards. These are the ur-texts of western literature; essentially every educated person of the last 2500 odd years was throughly familiar with both, from Alexander sleeping with the Iliad under his pillow to yank hockey players reading the Odyssey at the last winter Olymics. Knowing these epics will bring a lot more life to other works, and not just books. If you walk into a random old building anywhere in Europe there's a good chance you will find references in sculpture or paint to episodes from Homer. Aside from that they are tremendous works in their own right (Duh! They wouldn't have survived for two and a half millennia, painstakingly and lovingly transcribed and transmitted by dozens of generations, scribes with quills twitching by candle light, monks fleeing barbarians with only time to grab a few precious items, and you don't even have the gratitude to read them!) Fagle's translations are the best modern translations in English. I have tried others. One very popular and very recent translation is not worth a moment of your time, it is so far from the spirit of the original. The Iliad comes first chronologically, but I think the Odyssey is more fun and more interesting, so probably a better place to start.

• Anabasis - Xenophon

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  Xenophon was a student of Socrates and contemporary of Plato. This is his account of going to Persia, with the disapproval of his teacher, to fight as a mercenary for a want-to-be emperor. He gives a first hand account of his leadership of his fellow Greek mercenaries, after their leaders had been treacherously massacred, from the far side of Arabia back to the Mediterranean. A kind of ancient heart of darkness/apocalypse now.

• Histories - Herodotus

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  The father of history Literally the first history book in the sense that we understand the term, and what a great first effort. The focus is supposed to be the war to keep the persians out of greece, but he takes forever to get there One example of an anecodte in there thats been borne out... sailors south of the equator

For the hustlers

• The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test

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  Teaches the value of conformity

• Waiting for Godot

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  Teaches the value of impatience

• The Symposium - Plato

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  Teaches the proper position of romance

• The Táin

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  Teaches the value of friendship

• The Myth of Sisyphus

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  Teaches the imporance of the Grindset

• Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

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  Don't want to put both this and War and Peace. I know these can seem intimidating given their length and the fact they are "serious" 19th century Russian stuff written by a man with a terrifying beard, but they are just so brilliant. Anna Karenina is more conventionally a novel, war and peace is a big monster sprawling all over the place. But I love both. The good news is Tolstoy tends to write in short chapters and is constantly moving between his different narrative threads, so they are very rarely hard reading. With war and peace you may have to commit to giving it one hundred pages or before it really sucks you in.

• Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

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  For me the best novel written by an Englishman since the first world war. Did not know anything about it before I picked it up, so I won't say anything more.

• The Sun Also Rises

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  At some point in my teens, having only read history for a few years, I decided to read a proper novel to see what they were all about. I went into the Easons on shop street and recognised the name Hemingway, so I started here. Hemingway is great, (For Whom the Bell Tolls is also a banger, and he has many great short stories), but this is still my favourite of his. Simultaneously uber macho and uber romantic, stylish, exotic, exciting.

• The Brothers Karamazov

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  Yes I am pretentious. Surely one of the best novels ever written, but I do prefer Tolstoy.

pretty self explanatory

• The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test & The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe

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  Two super journalistic near novels by Wolfe. The first follows a group of Hippies rampaging around the west in the late 60s, just as the wave was breaking. The second is about American test pilots competing for positions on the first space flights. They are both exciting, fun, serious works. Wolfe's style is masterful and completely unique and he is worth reading for those reasons alone, but his eye for character and superb, absurd situations are equally fantastic. I think the Right Stuff is better, but go with whichever topic is more interesting to you.

• The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes

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• A Time of Gifts - Patrick Leigh Fermor

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• A History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell

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• Civilisation - Kenneth Clarke

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  Might be one of the only cases where the TV series is better than the book. When the BBC was moving to colour in the 60s Mr Clarke was given a very long leash to make a series about western culture from the dark ages to the then present. If you're the type to watch youtube while eating, watch this. There is nothing else like it.

• Romeo and Juliet

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  Bit of a niche one this one... We forget how good he is because we're constantly told he is the goat, and he is, but he did earn the reputation. This is my favourite of his, I haven't seen it in person yet, but even as a read it is beyond description great.

• Macbeth

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  Another obscure one

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson

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  Goated - read the original rolling stone piece.

• Meditations on Moloch - Scott Alexander

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• Night - Elie Wiesel

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  Memoir by a survivor of Auschwitz. Brilliant writer, very short, read in one go for maximum gut punch.

A gnarly century fr

• The War that Ended Peace - Margaret MacMillan

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  Brilliant book, read it while deciding what to study in college, so maybe I shouldn't be reading it (damn you MacMillan). About the outbreak of WWI, very much focused on the why and how the war started. Carefully lays the diplomatic chess board,

• A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 - Orlando Figes

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  A masterpiece history of the Russian Revolution. The term "important" is greatly overused, this work deserves it.

“On Saturday morning, 26 October, the hunt met at Sagamore Hill, and after the traditional stirrup cup set off over particularly rough country. High timber obstacles of five teet or more followed one upon another at a frequency of six to the mile. Some of these barriers were post-and-rail fences, as stiff as steel and deadly dangerous: even Filemaker, America's best jumper, began to hang back nervously. Roosevelt, riding a large, coarse stallion, led from the start. Careless of accidents which dislocated the huntmaster's knee, smashed another rider's ribs, and took half the skin off his brother-in-law's face," he galloped in front for fully three miles. Eventually his exhausted horse began to go lame; at about the five-mile mark it tripped over a wall and pitched over into a pile of stones. Roosevelt's face smashed against something sharp, and his left arm, only recently knit after the roundup fracture, snapped beneath the elbow. Yet he was back in the saddle as soon as the horse was up, and rushed on one-armed, determined not to miss the death. After five or six further jumps the bones of his broken arm slipped past one other, and it dangled beside him like a length of liverwurst; but this, and the blood pouring down his face, did not deter him from pounding across fifteen more fields. He had the satisfaction of finishing the hunt within a hundred yards of the other riders, and returned to Sagamore Hill looking "pretty gay... like the walls of a slaughter-house." Baby Lee, who was waiting at the stable for him, ran away screaming from the bloody monster, and he pursued her, chortling. Washed clean that night, his cut face plastered and his arm in splints, he presided over the Hunt Ball as laird of Sagamore. Edith Carow was his guest, and took her first cool survey of her future home. At midnight, Theodore Roosevelt turned twenty-seven. With his daughter asleep upstairs, his house full of music and laughter, and Edith at his side, he could abandon himself to bliss rendered piquant by pain. Later he wrote to Lodge: "I don't grudge the broken arm a bit... I'm always ready to pay the piper when I've had a good dance; and every now and then I like to drink the wine of life with brandy in it.””

— Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

Goat

“Some older members of the Legislature were less and less taken with Roosevelt. Time, as the deadlock dragged on, hung heavy on their hands, and they began to plot his humiliation. Chief among the bullies was "Big John" MacManus, the ex-prizefighter and Tammany lieutenant whom Roosevelt had so contemptuously characterized in his diary. One day MacManus proposed to toss "that damned dude" in a blanket, for reasons having vaguely to do with the dude's side-whiskers. Fortunately Roosevelt got advance warning. His feelings, with Alice newly installed in Albany, may well be imagined. Marching straight up to MacManus, who towered over him, he hissed, "I hear you are going to toss me in a blanket. By God! if you try anything like that, I'll kick you, I'll bite you, I'll kick you in the balls, I'll do anything to you—you'd better leave me alone." This speech had the desired effect. There was a second ugly incident, which proved conclusively that Roosevelt was not to be trifled with. Sporting a cane, doeskin gloves, and the style of short pea jacket popularly known in England as a "bum-freezer," he went walking along Washington Avenue with Hunt and William O'Neil, another young Republican Assembly-man. They stopped at a saloon for refreshments, and were confronted by the tall, taunting figure of J. J. Costello, a lammany member. Some insult to do with the pea jacket (legend quotes it as "Won't Mamma's boy catch cold?") caused Roosevelt to flare up. "Teddy knocked him down," Hunt recalled admiringly, "and he got up and he hit him again, and when he got up he hit him again, and he said, Now you go over there and wash yourself. When you are in the presence of gentlemen, conduct yourself like a gentleman.' » "I'm not going to have an Irishman or anybody else insult me," "I'm not going to have an Irishman or anybody else insult me," Roosevelt said later, still bristling,”

— Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

“Senator Henry Cabot Lodge has been heard yelling irritably at a portly object swaying in the sky, "Theodore! if you knew how ridiculous you look on top of that tree, you would come down at once." On winter evenings in Rock Creek Park, strollers may observe the President of the United States wading pale and naked into the ice-clogged stream, followed by shivering members of his Cabinet. Thumping noises in the White House library indicate that Roosevelt is being thrown around the room by a Japanese wrestler; a particularly seismic crash, which makes the entire mansion tremble, signifies that Secretary Taft has been forced to join in the fun. Mark Twain is not alone in thinking the President insane. Tales of Roosevelt's unpredictable behavior are legion, although there is usually an explanation. Once, for instance, he hailed a hansom cab on Pennsylvania Avenue, seized the horse, and mimed a knife attack upon it. On another occasion he startled the occupants of a trolley-car by making hideous faces at them from the Presidential carriage. It transpires that in the former case he was demonstrating to a companion the correct way to stab a wolf; in the latter he was merely returning the grimaces of some small boys.”

— Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

“"I don't mean to do one single thing during that month," said Roosevelt to his sister Corinne, "except write a life of Oliver Cromwell”. Roosevelt's thirteenth book and third biography, which one friend of the family described as a "fine imaginative study of Cromwell's qualifications for the Governorship of New York," was completed by 2 August. Even allowing for the fact that it was dictated, and that the author spent another month or so revising the manuscript, its speed of composition must be considered something of a record. What was more, Roosevelt did not have the month entirely to himself, as he had planned; McKinley summoned him to the White House for a consultation on the Philippines on 8 July, and he spent three days later in the month at Manhattan Beach trying to restore good relations with Senator Platt. Yet somehow he found time to produce sixty-three thousand words of English history, remarkable for clarity and grasp of detail if not for style.?' According to his stenographer, William Loeb, the Governor would appear in his study every morning with a pad of notes and a reference book or two, and proceed to talk "with hardly a pause," pouring out dates and place-names as copiously as any college professor. The British military attaché Colonel Arthur Lee, who was Roosevelt's houseguest at this time, remembered him calling in another stenographer and dictating gubernatorial correspondence in between paragraphs of Cromwell, while a barber tried simultaneously to shave him, yet there was no lack of continuity as the author's mind switched to and fro.”

— Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

“Roosevelt, who shared the ability to double-dictate with Napoleon, did not think his intellect was in any way remarkable. "I have only a second-rate brain," he said emphatically to Owen Wister, "But I think I have a capacity for action." When Wister repeated this remark to Lord Bryce many years later, the great scholar was unimpressed. "He didn't do justice to himself there, you know. He had a brain that could always go straight to the pith of any matter. That is a mental power of the first rank."”

— Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

“"Meanwhile the victorious Hannibal was surrounded by his officers offering their congratulations and urging him to take some rest during the remainder of the day and the ensuing night, and to allow his tired troops to do the same; Maharbal, however, the commander of his cavalry, was convinced that there was not a moment to be lost. 'Sir,' he said, 'if you want to know the true significance of this battle let me tell you that within five days you will take your dinner, in triumph, on the Capitol. I will go first with my horsemen. The first knowledge of our coming will be the sight of us at the gates of Rome. You have but to follow.' To Hannibal this seemed too sanguine a hope, a project too great to be, in the circumstances, wholly conceivable. 'I complement your zeal, ' he said to Maharbal; 'but I need time to weigh the plan which you propose.' 'Assuredly' Maharbal replied, 'no one man has been blessed with all God's gifts. You know, Hannibal, how to win a fight; you do not know how to use your victory.' It is generally believed that that day's delay was the salvation of the city and of the Empire.”

— Livy, The War with Hannibal

“Now I will tell you what I am going to do to my vineyard: I will take away its hedge, and it will be destroyed: I will break down its wall and it will be trampled”

— Isaiah, 5:3-5

“306 Greek ideal. — What did the Greeks admire in Odysseus? Above all, his capacity for lying, and for cunning and terrible retribution; his being equal to contingencies; when need be, appearing nobler than the noblest; the ability to be whatever he chose; heroic perseverence; having all means at his command; possession of intellect — his intellect is the admiration of the gods, they smile when they think of it — : all this is the Greek ideal! The most remarkable thing about it is that the antithesis of appearance and being is not felt at all and is thus of no significance morally. Have there ever been such consummate actors!”

— Nietzsche

“The hazards of war landed me among the crags of occupied Crete with a band of Cretan guerillas and a captive German general whom we had waylaid and carried off into the mountains three days before. The German garrison of the island were in hot, but luckily temporarily misdirected, chase. It was a time of anxiety and danger; and for our captive, of hardship and distress. During a lull in the pursuit, we woke up among the rocks just as the dawn was breaking over the crest of Mount Ida. We had been toiling over it, through snow and then rain, for the last two days. Looking across the valley at this flashing mountain-crest, the general murmured to himself: "Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte..." It was one of the ones I knew! I continued from where he had broken off: nec iam sustineant onus silvae laborantes geluque flumina constiterint acuto," and so on, through the remaining five stanzas to the end. The general's blue eyes had swiveled away from the mountain-top to mine - and when I'd finished , after a long silence, he said: "Ach so, Herr Major!" It was very strange. As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before: and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.”

— Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts

Education used to be meaningful, and a culture above common used to exist.

“For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be: Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales”

— Tenyson - Locksley hall