Here you’ll find selections from the Great Books and classical authors. A classical library for the cultivation of knowledge, wisdom, and virtue for the lifelong learner.

The canon is not about personal taste or political ideology It’s a list of books that are foundational to a culture. It’s a simple test. Does this book still matter across generations? It’s that simple

Or we could just read the great books. They’ve been exploring alienation and belonging for a few thousand years.

Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book saw this coming in 1972. “Teaching how to read a book is not teaching literacy. It is teaching how to think.” We still have to teach it because we almost never learn how to read.

Civil war had torn Thebes apart. Two brothers killed each other for the throne. Creon, now king, declared one buried with honor and the other left to rot as a traitor. Antigone defied him. She buried her brother anyway. “I was born to join in love, not hate - that is my nature.”

In Sophocles, tragedy was not fate as much as it was irreconcilable principles colliding. Antigone insisted the gods’ laws were higher, but Creon insisted the state must be obeyed. Both had legitimate claims. This was Sophoclean tragedy: not good against evil, but good against

Nope, these will.

"The Agamemnon is a play about the murder of a king, but it is also about justice, about the nature of evil, about the chain of bloodshed that binds generation to generation" -Richmond Lattimore

Agamemnon had killed his child ten years earlier. Clytemnestra waited and planned for her revenge. The moment he stepped on the carpet, it was already over. In Aeschylus, one murder called for another, and fate felt more like the result of choice than destiny.

You could waste weeks reading these self-help books or you could learn psychology from George Eliot, social relations from Jane Austen, morality from Dostoevsky, redemption from Dumas, the nature of good and evil from folklore & myth.

Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon because he had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia for favorable winds to Troy. Murder for murder. Justice or vengeance? There was no clean answer. Once blood was spilled, the cycle did not end.

“It is better to read a little and thoroughly than to cram a crude undigested mass into my head, though it be great in quantity.” -Thomas Huxley

Agamemnon returned from Troy in victory. Clytemnestra rolled out crimson tapestries for him to walk on, the kind of honor reserved for gods. He hesitated. He knew to step on them was hubris. Pride won. He walked the blood-red carpet into his palace, where she killed him in his

The Chorus sensed doom before it arrived. They spoke of old crimes and vengeance that was coming: “The bloody past never dies. It breeds the future.” But they could not act. It was knowledge without power.

In Aeschylus, tragedy was not chance or accident. It was cause and effect. One murder led to another until the house was ruined. Agamemnon opened with the Watchman waiting for the signal fire that would announce Troy’s fall. When it came, he said, “I have no joy in speaking… the

“In Homer’s Iliad, the tragic dimension arises not from evil but from the brevity of life, from the waste of the young, from the ineluctable mortality of all men, heroes and cowards alike.” - George Steiner

Priam came alone to Achilles’ tent to beg for his son’s body. Two enemies, broken by war, wept together and shared a meal. “Remember your own father,” Priam said. The Iliad's answer to mortality is not with glory or honor but with grief. We are all mortal. We all lose what we

When Achilles closed in, Hector ran. Three times around Troy’s walls before he turned to fight. Even the greatest hero was terrified. He fell asking only for burial, but Achilles dragged his body through the dirt. When honor outweighs life, death spares no one, not the brave and

Hector knew his fate: to face Achilles and die or retreat behind Troy’s walls and live. He chose to fight. “I feel shame before the Trojans if I should shrink from the fighting.” This is tragic heroism: death before dishonor, even when dishonor would save his life.

Achilles knew the choice: return home for a long life in obscurity, or stay at Troy and die young with eternal glory. He chose glory. But when Patroclus falls, Achilles realizes what that choice has cost him: “My dearest friend of all I cherished most—Patroclus… I’ve lost him.

“Sing, goddess, the rage of Achilles.” The Iliad begins not with glory but with rage. When honor outweighs life, death becomes the measure of men and grief shadows every glory.