I would like to read something that's ancient. I don't mind what it is as long as it was created before the year 500 AD. I also don't mind what culture it's from.
I’d add the Odyssey or the Aeneid, there are some excellent new translations available recently.
I’d also recommend some Euripides or Sophocles – obviously Oedipus Rex but also recommend Antigone, Orestes, the Bacchae or my absolute favourite – Medea!
Letters_to_Dionysus on
oedipus! also theogony
Jetamors on
I really liked the Anabasis by Xenophon, ancient memoir by a Greek soldier whose group got stranded in Mesopotamia and got back to Greece over the course of about two years. It’s still a wild story.
pecanorchard on
The Bhagavad Gita is a good one for ancient South Asia. It is a part of a longer epic, the Mahabharata, but works as a standalone piece.
The Tain for ancient Ireland, with the asterisk that it was not actually written down until the 12th century and has the fingerprints of medieval Christian morality on it, even though it originated in first century pre-Christian Ireland.
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The Iliad. The Epic of Gilgamesh. Any Greek myth.
I’d add the Odyssey or the Aeneid, there are some excellent new translations available recently.
I’d also recommend some Euripides or Sophocles – obviously Oedipus Rex but also recommend Antigone, Orestes, the Bacchae or my absolute favourite – Medea!
oedipus! also theogony
I really liked the Anabasis by Xenophon, ancient memoir by a Greek soldier whose group got stranded in Mesopotamia and got back to Greece over the course of about two years. It’s still a wild story.
The Bhagavad Gita is a good one for ancient South Asia. It is a part of a longer epic, the Mahabharata, but works as a standalone piece.
The Tain for ancient Ireland, with the asterisk that it was not actually written down until the 12th century and has the fingerprints of medieval Christian morality on it, even though it originated in first century pre-Christian Ireland.
Bhagavad Gita.