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