Thought and Memory

Tag: Classical antiquity

The City on the Tiber

Roman epic, history, and moral philosophy

In 146 BC a Roman army took Carthage and burned it, and the Roman commander, Scipio Aemilianus, stood watching the city of Hannibal burn and wept. He repeated Hector’s lines from the Iliad: a day will come when sacred Troy shall perish, and Priam and his people with it. Standing beside him was his friend Polybius, a Greek, who asked what he meant. Scipio answered that he feared the same would one day be said of Rome.

The last shelf ended with the Greek inheritance passing into Roman keeping, and that scene shows the transfer under way: a Roman general quoting Homer to a Greek historian over the ruins of Rome’s greatest enemy. Rome is where the inheritance first became conscious of itself as one. The Romans knew they had come late, read the Greeks as their masters, and set out to equal them in their own tongue; Virgil wrote a Roman Homer, and Cicero a Roman Plato. What they added was what the Greek cities never managed: the means to hold what they had won, by law, by arms, and by a hard sense of what a citizen owed.

This is the third shelf of the library described in Why Build a Library. Nearly every book on it was written in the Roman world, most of them by Romans. It opens with a single modern book on what the city was built on and with the poets’ account of its founding, then follows the Romans through the conquest of the Mediterranean, the fall of the Republic, and the empire that replaced it, and closes with what they thought a man should be.

What Rome Was Built On

The Ancient City, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges

Published in 1864 by a French historian, and still the boldest attempt to explain the classical city from its roots. Fustel argued that Greek and Roman institutions grew out of an older religion of the household: the sacred fire on the hearth, the cult of the family dead, and gods who belonged to one family alone. Property, inheritance, marriage, and citizenship all follow from it in his account, and the city itself appears as a federation of families before it is a state. Later scholarship has found his single primitive religion tidier than the evidence allows, but no book better explains why the Romans held their ancestors, their households, and their gods to be one thing.

What the Poets Made of It

Aeneas’ Flight from Troy (1598), by the Italian painter Federico Barocci, born in Urbino. Aeneas carries his old father out of the burning city with his son and wife beside him, and in Virgil the father carries the household gods. Three generations and the family’s gods leave Troy together. That is the whole of Virgil’s piety, and the religion Fustel de Coulanges found at the root of the Roman city.

The Aeneid, Virgil

Virgil wrote Rome’s answer to Homer on purpose. The first six books are an Odyssey, the wanderings of the Trojan Aeneas after the fall of his city; the last six are an Iliad, his war to found a new home in Italy. Its hero is not Achilles, who chooses glory for himself, but pius Aeneas, who carries his father and his household gods out of burning Troy and gives up love, rest, and his own wishes to the destiny of a people not yet born. Virgil died in 19 BC with the poem unrevised and asked that it be burned; Augustus refused, and Europe read it as its own epic for the next eighteen centuries.

Metamorphoses, Ovid

Fifteen books of transformation, more than two hundred stories running from the making of the world out of chaos to the deification of Julius Caesar. Most of the myths are Greek, but for most of Europe’s history this was the book through which readers met them: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Titian, and Bernini all took their Daphne, Actaeon, and Pygmalion from Ovid’s Latin. Where Virgil wrote the poem of duty and the founding, Ovid wrote the poem of change and desire, in the same reign. He had nearly finished it when Augustus exiled him to the shore of the Black Sea, and he closed it by predicting that wherever Rome’s power reached, he would be read.

How Rome Took the World

The Histories, Polybius

A Greek statesman, taken to Rome as one of a thousand hostages in 167 BC, set out to explain to his countrymen how Rome had brought nearly the whole inhabited world under its rule in less than fifty-three years. He became the friend of Scipio Aemilianus and stood beside him at Carthage, and he writes as a soldier and a politician, insistent on causes and on firsthand knowledge. His sixth book finds the secret of Rome’s success in its mixed constitution, with consuls, Senate, and people each checking the others, and that argument passed through Cicero and Montesquieu to the framers of the American Constitution. Only the first five of his forty books survive whole, but he is the hinge between the Greek shelf and this one: a Greek historian whose subject was Rome.

The Oath of the Horatii (1784), by the French painter Jacques-Louis David, born in Paris, now in the Louvre. Three brothers swear to their father to fight for Rome against three champions of Alba Longa, while the women of the house, bound by marriage and betrothal to both sides, collapse in grief. The story is Livy’s; the oath is David’s invention. He painted it for Louis XVI, and within a decade the Revolution had taken it as an emblem of republican virtue, which is what Livy said history was for.

History of Rome, Livy

Livy wrote the history of Rome from its founding in 142 books, of which 35 survive: the first ten, from the arrival of Aeneas in Italy to 293 BC, and twenty-five more from the war with Hannibal to the conquest of Macedon. His preface says the use of history is to set before the reader examples to follow and to shun, and his early books are where Europe learned Romulus, Lucretia, Horatius at the bridge, and Cincinnatus at his plow. He wrote under Augustus and said plainly that the oldest stories were closer to poetry than to record, and he told them anyway, because they showed what Rome believed itself to be. The books on Hannibal are history in the full sense, and the fullest narrative of the Second Punic War that survives.

How the Republic Was Lost

Catiline’s Conspiracy and The Jugurthine War, Sallust

Two short books by a partisan of Caesar who governed Africa, grew rich there, and retired to write about the moral decay of the Republic. Catiline’s Conspiracy covers the plot of 63 BC to seize the state, broken by the consul Cicero, and closes on the Senate debate in which Caesar and Cato argued over the fate of the conspirators. The Jugurthine War tells how a Numidian king bought senators and generals for years, and how the war against him raised Marius, the first of the generals whose soldiers looked to him rather than to Rome. Sallust’s diagnosis, that conquest brought wealth and wealth brought ambition and avarice, became the standard Roman account of the Republic’s fall, and the man who made it was a fair example of it.

The Landmark Julius Caesar, Kurt A. Raaflaub, ed.

Caesar’s own account of the conquest of Gaul and of the civil war that made him master of Rome, together with the shorter accounts of his Alexandrian, African, and Spanish wars, written by his officers and continuators. He writes of himself in the third person, in plain and rapid Latin, and the plainness is the art: no war memoir has made its author’s judgment look so inevitable. Of all the ancient histories, this is the one that most needs the Landmark’s maps, since Caesar’s narrative is a march from river to river and siege to siege across country a modern reader cannot picture, and the specialist appendices supply much of what Caesar chose to leave out. Read beside Sallust and Syme, it shows the end of the Republic from the inside, written by the man who ended it.

The Roman Revolution, Ronald Syme

Syme, a New Zealander at Oxford, published this in 1939, and the shadow of the dictatorships of his own day falls across it. His subject is the passage from Republic to monarchy between 60 BC and AD 14, and his method is to trace the families, factions, and personal followings behind the constitutional language, which he treated as a screen. His Augustus is a party leader who took power by violence and kept it by restoring the forms of the Republic while emptying them. Written in a hard, compressed style learned from Tacitus, it is the modern book on Rome that has mattered most, and the corrective to the account Augustus gave of himself.

What the Emperors Made

Agricola, Tacitus

Tacitus’s short life of his father-in-law, a governor of Britain who served Rome well under Domitian, was recalled, and died in quiet. It is the best way into Tacitus, because his great theme is already here: how a good man keeps his virtue and his dignity under a tyrant. It also holds the speech Tacitus gives to Calgacus, a Caledonian chief before battle, the sharpest indictment of Roman empire ever written, put by a Roman into an enemy’s mouth: they make a desert and call it peace. Britain is the setting; Rome is the subject.

Ancient Rome; Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus (exhibited 1839), by the English painter J. M. W. Turner, born in London, now in the Tate. Agrippina brings home the ashes of her husband, the general Rome loved and Tiberius was suspected of having poisoned; Tacitus tells the story in the Annals. Turner moves the landing from Brundisium to the Tiber and sets the grief beneath a city blazing with gold. That is Tacitus’s own point: the splendor and the murder belong to the same regime.

The Annals, Tacitus

The history of Rome from the death of Augustus in AD 14 to the reign of Nero, the last and greatest work of the greatest Roman historian. What survives covers Tiberius, part of Claudius, and most of Nero; Caligula is lost, and the text breaks off in AD 66. Tacitus promised to write without anger or partiality, and then wrote the most damning portrait of absolute power the ancient world left: the servile Senate, the informers, the treason trials, and the slow corruption of men who knew better. It also holds one of the earliest Roman references to Christ, in its account of the Christians Nero burned after the great fire of Rome.

The Histories, Tacitus

Written before the Annals, it took up the story from AD 69, the year of the four emperors, and carried it through the reign of Domitian. Only the first four books and part of the fifth survive, covering little more than a year and a half, but no stretch of Roman history is told at such pace: emperors raised and murdered by their armies, Rome fought over in its own streets, the Capitol burned, and a revolt on the Rhine. Tacitus draws the lesson in his first book: the secret of empire was out, and an emperor could be made somewhere other than Rome.

The Twelve Caesars, Suetonius

Lives of Julius Caesar and the first eleven emperors, through Domitian, by a court official who served as Hadrian’s secretary and wrote with the imperial archives at hand. Suetonius arranges each life by topic rather than by year (family, career, public acts, habits, appearance, death), and he keeps the gossip, the omens, and the vices that Tacitus disdained. That makes him the weaker historian and the more vivid portraitist, and much of what everyone thinks they know about Caligula and Nero comes from him. Read him after Tacitus, as the view from the palace corridor.

How a Roman Should Live

On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, Cicero

Cicero’s answer to Plato’s Republic and Laws, written in the 50s BC while the Republic he describes was coming apart. On the Commonwealth is a dialogue set among Scipio Aemilianus and his friends, and it defends the Roman mixed constitution as the best form of government, defining a commonwealth as a people bound together by agreement on justice and a common interest; it survives only in pieces, but its closing Dream of Scipio, in which the dead Africanus shows his grandson the smallness of earthly glory, was read throughout the Middle Ages. On the Laws sets out the doctrine of a natural law, right reason common to gods and men, from which every just law of a city derives. Augustine argued with Cicero’s definition of a commonwealth in The City of God, and the Christian doctrine of natural law grew from the second book’s root.

On Duties, Cicero

One of Cicero’s last books, written in 44 BC as a letter to his son, then a student at Athens, in the months after Caesar’s murder and the year before Cicero’s own. It asks what a man owes to his country, his family, and his fellow men, and argues that what is right and what is useful can never truly conflict. For centuries it was among the most widely read books of moral philosophy in the West: Ambrose rewrote it for the clergy of Milan, and it was among the first classical texts to be printed. It is the best single statement of what the Romans meant by duty, and of what a gentleman was expected to be.

On the Nature of Things, Lucretius

A long philosophical poem from the last years of the Republic, setting out the teaching of Epicurus in Latin verse: the world is atoms and void, the soul dies with the body, and the gods, if they exist, take no interest in men. Lucretius wrote it to free his readers from the fear of death and of the gods, and he argues with a passion and a power of description no other Roman philosopher matched. It stands on this shelf as the dissent, the strongest ancient case against everything Cicero and the Stoics believed about providence and duty. It nearly vanished, surviving the Middle Ages in a handful of manuscripts until one was found in a monastery in 1417, and every later argument for a universe without purpose descends from it.

Discourses, Epictetus

Epictetus was born a slave in Asia Minor, owned by a freedman of Nero, and once freed taught Stoic philosophy in Rome until Domitian expelled the philosophers; he spent the rest of his life teaching in Greece. He wrote nothing. The Discourses are his lectures as taken down by his student Arrian, the same Arrian whose history of Alexander stood on the last shelf. Their teaching is hard and simple: distinguish what is in your power from what is not, care only for the first, and bear the rest as the will of God.

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

The private notebook of a Roman emperor, written in Greek and meant for no one else, much of it in camp on the Danube during the long wars against the Germanic tribes. Marcus reminds himself, again and again, to do his duty, to bear what comes, to remember that he and all he rules will soon be dust, and not to be turned into a Caesar, dyed in the purple. It is the Stoicism of Epictetus put to work by the most powerful man in the world, and its sincerity is the reason it is still read. He was the last emperor of the age Gibbon called the happiest in the history of mankind, and he left the empire to his son.

The Inheritance

What Rome handed on was the means of keeping an inheritance. The Greeks made the forms; the Romans carried them, wrote them into law, and spread them along roads and frontiers from Britain to the Euphrates, and Latin remained the language of the Western church, of law, and of learning for more than a thousand years after the last emperor in the West. Rome handed on its own example as well: a republic that conquered the world and lost itself in the conquering, and an empire that kept the peace by emptying the republic’s forms. Its moralists left a standard of duty that the Church would baptize rather than discard, and the faith that outlasted the empire traveled the empire’s roads, carried by a Roman citizen named Paul. But Rome in the West could not keep itself. The next shelf turns to the fall of Rome, and to what survived it.

October 3, 2026
The Unwithering Fame of the Greeks

Greek epic, tragedy, history, and philosophy

Plutarch tells us that Alexander carried a copy of the Iliad on campaign, a text his tutor Aristotle had corrected, and that he kept it under his pillow beside his dagger. He called it provision for the art of war. The king who took Greek arms to the Indus took Homer with him.

The last shelf of this library held no primary sources at all. Its subject was a people who left no writing, and everything known of them had to be recovered from word roots, pottery, and bone. This shelf begins where the writing does. When Achilles weighs a long life against a short one, he names the glory that awaits him if he dies at Troy kleos aphthiton, unwithering fame, and the same phrase stands in the Vedic hymns of India. It was old before Homer sang it. In Greece the inheritance traced on the previous shelf was written down, then staged, argued over, and turned into history and philosophy, and Europe has been reading it ever since.

This is the second shelf of the library described in Why Build a Library. Nearly every book on it was written by the Greeks themselves. The groups follow the order in which the Greeks came to write: the poets first, then the stage, the historians, and the philosophers, with a single modern guide to open the way.

Who the Greeks Were

The Greeks, H. D. F. Kitto

Kitto wrote this short book in 1951 for readers with no Greek, and it has not been bettered for that purpose. He explains the land and the sea that shaped the Greeks, the polis as a community rather than a state, and the passage from the Homeric age to the classical, and he writes with an affection for his subject that makes the rest of this shelf easier to enter. If a reader buys one book about the Greeks before reading the Greeks themselves, it should be this one.

What the Poets Remembered

Achilles and Ajax at dice, on an amphora signed by the Athenian potter and painter Exekias, about 540 to 530 BC (Vatican Museums). The scene appears in no surviving poem. More than a century and a half after Homer, an Athenian craftsman could invent a quiet hour for these heroes, spears still in their hands, because the Greeks no longer only heard the poems. They lived inside them. Photo: Daderot, public domain.

The Iliad, Homer

A few weeks in the tenth year of the siege of Troy, from the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon to the ransoming of Hector’s body. It stands with the Odyssey at the head of European literature, a poem about honor, wrath, and the cost of both, in which the Trojans are given as much dignity as the Greeks. Every later account of the warrior in this library measures itself against it, knowingly or not.

The Odyssey, Homer

The long homecoming of Odysseus, and the patience of the household that waited for him. Where the Iliad is about the man who would rather die gloriously than live long, the Odyssey is about the man who wants above all to get home, and it sets hearth, marriage, and the obligations of host and guest at the center of the Greek world. Read together, the two poems give nearly the whole range of the Greek idea of a good man.

Theogony and Works and Days, Hesiod

Two short poems from about 700 BC, by the first Greek poet to speak in his own name. The Theogony tells how the gods came to be and how Zeus came to rule them; Works and Days is a farmer’s counsel to his idle brother on labor, justice, and the turning of the seasons. Hesiod gives the order of the gods that the tragedians and philosophers inherited, and a sober picture of the ordinary life that Homer’s heroes stood above.

What the Stage Asked

The Oresteia, Aeschylus

The only trilogy of Greek tragedy to survive whole. Agamemnon comes home from Troy and is murdered by his wife, his son Orestes kills her in turn, and the Furies pursue him until Athena sets up a court at Athens to judge the case. Aeschylus stages the passage from blood vengeance to law, and makes it the founding act of a city.

The Theban Plays, Sophocles

Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone: not a trilogy, but three plays written over more than three decades about one cursed house. Oedipus, who solves every riddle but his own, and Antigone, who buries her brother against the king’s decree, have given Europe two of its permanent questions: whether a man can know himself, and what is owed when the law of the city and the law of the gods divide.

The Bacchae, Euripides

One of Euripides’ last plays, first staged after his death. Dionysus comes to Thebes in disguise, and the king who refuses to honor him is torn apart by the women of the city, his own mother among them. It is the most unsettling play the Greeks left, a study of what befalls a city whose rulers deny the divine, and of what the divine does when it is loosed without measure.

What the Historians Saw

The Landmark Herodotus, Robert B. Strassler, ed.

The first history in the Western tradition; our word history comes from the word Herodotus used for his work, historiē, inquiry. His subject is the war between the Greeks and the Persian Empire, but to explain how it came about he ranges over Egypt, Scythia, and the whole known world, and he preserves customs and stories found nowhere else. The Landmark edition, like the three that follow, sets maps beside nearly every page and adds essays by specialists, and for a reader coming to the ancient historians for the first time that apparatus makes the difference.

The Landmark Thucydides, Robert B. Strassler, ed.

The war between Athens and Sparta, written by an Athenian general who fought in it and was exiled for failing at it. Thucydides meant his book to be a possession for all time, and it is: his accounts of the plague at Athens, the Melian Dialogue, and the disaster in Sicily remain among the most clear-eyed writing on power, fear, and the breakdown of a political community in any language. The Landmark uses Richard Crawley’s Victorian translation, revised, which is heavier going than modern versions and worth the effort.

The Landmark Xenophon’s Hellenika, Robert B. Strassler, ed.

Xenophon takes up the story where Thucydides breaks off, in 411 BC, and carries it through the fall of Athens, the brief supremacy of Sparta, and the rise of Thebes, to the battle of Mantinea in 362. He was an Athenian who admired Sparta and served beside its king, and his history shows it. Where Thucydides analyzes, Xenophon tells, and his is the only full account of these years by a man who lived through them.

Alexander at the battle of Issus, detail of the Alexander Mosaic from the House of the Faun, Pompeii, about 100 BC (National Archaeological Museum, Naples). The mosaicist is unknown, and the work is thought to copy a painting by a Greek artist made within a generation of Alexander’s death. A Roman family laid it in the floor of their house more than two centuries after the battle: Greece made the image, and Rome kept it. Photo: Berthold Werner, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Landmark Arrian, James Romm, ed.

The fullest surviving account of Alexander’s campaigns, written in the second century AD by a Greek who had governed a Roman province and commanded Roman troops. Arrian built it chiefly on the lost memoirs of Ptolemy and Aristobulus, two men who marched with Alexander, and he writes as a soldier about a soldier: clear on tactics, generous to his subject, sparing with gossip. The Landmark’s maps make the march from Macedonia to the Indus possible to follow.

The History of Alexander, Quintus Curtius Rufus

The other full-length ancient narrative of Alexander, written in Latin, probably in the first century AD. Curtius drew on a tradition far less friendly to the king than Arrian’s, and his Alexander is a brilliant commander undone by success, sliding toward Persian luxury, suspicion, and cruelty. Read beside Arrian, he teaches the first lesson of ancient history: the sources are themselves an argument.

How a City Should Be Ordered

Plato and Aristotle, detail of The School of Athens, 1509 to 1511, by the Italian painter Raphael, born in Urbino (Vatican). Plato carries his Timaeus and points to the heavens; Aristotle carries his Ethics and holds his hand level over the earth. Raphael painted the argument of this shelf’s last section in two gestures, on the walls of the room meant to hold a pope’s library.

Lives, Plutarch

Paired biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen, written by a Greek priest of Delphi under the Roman peace. Plutarch was a moralist more than a historian, concerned with character rather than chronology, and that is his use: his lives of Lycurgus and Solon are the principal accounts of how Sparta and Athens were given their laws, and his Pericles, Alexander, and the rest show what the Greeks believed a great man ought to be.

The Republic, Plato

Plato’s great dialogue on justice, which answers its question by building a city in speech, ruled by philosophers and guarded by a class trained from childhood to serve it. It holds the allegory of the cave, the myth of the metals, and the argument that soul and city are ordered alike, so that a disordered soul makes a tyrant. Few books have been argued with so continuously for so long, and none of the arguments makes sense without it.

The Laws, Plato

Plato’s last and longest work, in which an old Athenian, a Cretan, and a Spartan walk to a shrine of Zeus and design the laws of a new colony. Where the Republic imagines rule by the wise, the Laws settles for rule by law, and it gives close attention to religion, education, marriage, and the household as the things a lawgiver must get right. It is less read than the Republic, and in some ways the more practical book.

Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle

Aristotle’s account of the good life, which he finds in virtue exercised over a whole lifetime: courage, temperance, justice, friendship, and above all practical wisdom, acquired by habit rather than argument. It is the foundation of the tradition of the virtues that Aquinas would carry into Christian thought. Aristotle closes it by turning to the Politics, since virtue is formed by habit and habit by law.

Politics, Aristotle

Aristotle’s study of the city, grounded in the observation that man is by nature a political animal, and that the household and the village come before the polis as its parts. He compares the constitutions of his day, which his school collected by the score, and weighs monarchy, aristocracy, and constitutional government against their corruptions into tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. It is the most empirical political book the Greeks left, and the source of the vocabulary Europe has used for government ever since.

The Inheritance

What Greece handed on was not a single doctrine but a set of forms: epic and tragedy, history and the dialogue, and the habit of asking what a good man is and what a good city ought to be. The books on this shelf argue with one another as often as they agree, but they fixed the terms, and every later shelf of this library uses them. The New Testament itself was written in their language. The Greeks could not keep what they made: their cities wore one another out in war, Alexander’s heirs divided his conquests, and the inheritance passed into the keeping of a people who had begun as a single city on the Tiber. The next shelf turns to Rome.

September 23, 2026