Rebecca Reads

Children 2,000 years ago read and memorized Virgil and Homer, and Aesop’s Fables were common knowledge. Even 200 years ago these classics were widely read. Now, there are thousands of new books published each year. But what about those really old ones? Have we read those yet? Any of them?
That’s why I’ve decided to host [...]

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 [...]

In his introduction to a 1912 translation by V.S. Vernon Jones of Aesop’s Fables (available online here via Project Gutenberg), G.K. Chesterton claimed that Aesop’s fame “was all the more deserved because he never deserved it.” Chesterton continued:
“The firm foundations of common sense, the shrewd shots at uncommon sense, that characterise all the Fables, belong [...]