Here is a sample of some Really Old Classics that were written pre-Shakespeare (i.e., pre-1600s). This list is, of course, not exclusive. You can purchase books through my Amazon Store.

• Gilgamesh
• Egyptian Book of the Dead
• Holy Bible
• The Apocrypha
• Bhagavad-Gita
• Homer Iliad, Odyssey
• Aeschylus Oresteia, Seven Against Thebes, Prometheus Bound,
• Sophocles Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone
• Euripides Orestes
• Aristophanes
• Herodotus The Histories
• Thucydides  The Peloponnesian Wars
• Plato Dialogues
• Aristotle  Poetics, Ethics
• Plutarch Lives; Moralia
• “Aesop” Fables
• Cicero On the Gods
• Horace Odes
• Virgil Aeneid
• Ovid Metamorphoses
• Juvenal Satires
• Martial Epigrams
• Seneca Tragedies
• Apuleius The Golden Ass
• Saint Augustine City of God; Confessions
• The Koran (Al-Qur’an)
• The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night
• The Nibelungen Lied
• Beowulf
• The Poem of the Cid
• Dante The Divine Comedy
• Petrarch Lyric Poems; Selections
• Giovanni Boccaccio The Decameron
• Michelangelo Buonarroti Sonnets and Madrigals
• Niccolò Machiavelli The Prince
• Leonardo da Vinci Notebooks
• Benvenuto Cellini Autobiography
• Giordano Bruno The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast
• Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales; Troilus and Criseyde
• Sir Thomas Malory Le Morte D’Arthur
• Sir Thomas More Utopia
• Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene
• Christopher Marlowe Poems and Plays
• The Song of Roland
• Michel de Montaigne Essays
• François Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel
• Erasmus In Praise of Folly
• Christine de Pisan The Book of the City of Ladies
• Romances of the Three Kingdoms
• Sun Tzu’s Art of War
• Confucius’s The Analects