Illustrated Ancient Classics User Guide

By: Tony McKinley

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Ancient Classics User Guide is a comprehensive overview of the great works that have come down to us from antiquity. I have gathered the best sources and provided clear descriptions to allow readers to comfortably navigate these timeless cultural treasures.
My approach to the Ancient Classics is to treat them as proven resources to enhance our understanding of Western history, philosophy and the arts.
This book is designed to allow you to choose the books that match your interests, to follow the path of your own curiosity. The chapters are arranged in the order of the authors’ lives, because later writers developed the work of their predecessors. There is a natural progression to this arrangement should you choose to read from beginning to end. But the chapters are written independently, so you can dive in and investigate authors and periods of history as you like.
Each chapter is organized as User Guide, beginning with a description of each author’s body of work. Next, we explain the special benefits of the recommended sources, both print and online. Finally, to give you a full sense of each author, the chapters devote most of their pages to sampling the content of the original works.
Each chapter includes three components:
- Biography of the author – when they lived, with a brief description of the times and society they lived in, and the works they created.
- Recommended books to read – details on the authors who created the translation, and contributors who provided introductions, notes, maps, images, and similar educational aides, with publisher info to simplify accessing the books from publishers such as Penguin Classics, Oxford World’s Classics and Landmark Editions, see Print Resources. Links to online sources of the original works are included, such as those hosted by the Online Books at Penn Library, the Perseus Project at Tufts, and the Penelope site at U. Chicago, see Web Resources.
- Narrative on the content and generous excerpts for your consideration – these are not synopses or abridged versions of the works, these are a book lover's guides to the originals. The samples are intended as aids to understanding the original author’s style, point of view, and intellectual approach. The sample quotes give you a sense of the final result created by the translator.
Ancient Classics embody timeless insights on not only history, but whether we are aware of it or not, the philosophy that guides our society and the arts that enrich our culture. Our modern lives are immeasurably enhanced by the intellectual riches in the Classics.
The Classics are an absolute joy to experience. When we read the Classic writers, we realize that one of the ancients’ selection criteria for preservation must have been the quality of the writing. As Longinus stated in his unforgettable survey of literary criticism in On the Sublime:
We too, then, when we are working at some passage that demands sublimity of thought and expression, should do well to form in our hearts the question, “How might Homer have said this same thing, how would Plato or Demosthenes or (in history) Thucydides have made it sublime?”