Alexandria

Platonism & Neoplatonism

Porphyry: Life of Plotinus

by Porphyry

Ancient (before 500 CE)AdvancedSelf-Knowledge & Transformation

Porphyry: Letter to Marcella

by Porphyry

Ancient (before 500 CE)IntermediateEthics & the Good Life

+8 more...

Epicureanism & Atomism

Principal Doctrines

by Epicurus

Ancient (before 500 CE)IntermediateEthics & the Good Life

Letter to Menoeceus

by Epicurus

Ancient (before 500 CE)IntermediateEthics & the Good Life

+1 more...

Pre-Socratic Philosophy

Fragments of Heraclitus

by Heraclitus

Ancient (before 500 CE)AdvancedSelf-Knowledge & Transformation

Fragments of Parmenides

by Parmenides

Ancient (before 500 CE)AdvancedCosmos & Creation

+1 more...

Aristotelian Philosophy

Politics

by Aristotle

Ancient (before 500 CE)AdvancedEthics & the Good Life

Metaphysics (Selections)

by Aristotle

Ancient (before 500 CE)AdvancedSelf-Knowledge & Transformation

+2 more...

Cynicism & Skepticism

This alcove awaits its first volumes...

Roman Philosophy

Plutarch's Morals

by Plutarch

Ancient (before 500 CE)IntermediateEthics & the Good Life

Tusculan Disputations

by Cicero

Ancient (before 500 CE)AdvancedEthics & the Good Life

+1 more...

All Books in Classical Philosophy

Pre-Socratic PhilosophyExplore

Fragments of Heraclitus gathers the surviving sparks of a thinker who saw the world as living fire and ever flowing river. In compressed sentences like oracles he points to the Logos, a common reason that orders change even as most sleep through it. Opposites wrestle and harmonize, strife becomes justice, beginnings coil into endings. The book invites you to read slowly, to let riddles clear like mist and reveal the hidden pattern under flux. This is not a system but a flint for thought, striking clarity from tension and training the mind to wake into what is continually becoming.

Parmenides arrives in a chariot to a veiled goddess who teaches two paths. The austere path of Truth where Being is ungenerated, deathless, whole, unmoved, and the path of mortal Opinion with deceptive senses and naming of fire and night. Parmenides crafts a radical argument that what is cannot not be, abolishing becoming and plurality. The fragments demand thinking that outstrips perception and become a cornerstone of metaphysics and logic. Exploring them is like entering bright noon where shadows fail. For newcomers, the poem's mythic frame softens the rigor while the arguments invite patient rereading and decisive wonder.

Pre-Socratic PhilosophyExplore

Empedocles sings a universe where four roots earth, water, air, fire mingle and part as Love binds and Strife divides. In these luminous fragments survive a cosmic cycle, a wandering soul seeking purification, and early bold guesses about nature from sense perception to the growth of living things. Poetry carries philosophy here, with images of whirling vortices and quiet kinship with all creatures inviting an ethic of reverence and restraint. Leonard’s translation preserves the choral music and the grit of thought. Enter if you want myth and reason braided together, a Presocratic voice that still feels strangely fresh.

Pre-Socratic PhilosophyExplore

Principal Doctrines is Epicurus’s pocket constellation of teachings, small bright truths arranged to calm the night mind. In crisp aphorisms he frees readers from fear of gods and death, presenting divinity as serene and distant and death as a dreamless sleep. Pleasure is the soft equilibrium where pain is absent and desire is pared to what is natural and necessary. Pain proves brief or bearable when viewed with prudence. A good life is a braid of pleasure, wisdom, justice, and friendship, each strengthening the other. Underneath hums atomistic clarity, a world of swerving particles without cosmic anger. The result is a guide to tranquil joy, like bread and water shared in a sunlit garden.

Epicureanism & AtomismExplore

Epicurus writes a friendly compass for the soul, inviting young and old to philosophy as the art of happiness. He teaches that pleasure means calm delight, the quiet of a body without pain and a mind without fear. Learn to sift desires into natural and empty, cherish friendship, practice prudence as the highest guide, and choose simple satisfactions that leave no bitter aftertaste. Gods dwell in serene blessedness and do not trouble us. Death is nothing to us, a door we never meet while we live. In a world of atoms and void, this brief letter offers clear steps toward steady joy and unshaken freedom.

Epicureanism & AtomismExplore

Lucretius sings to Venus then ushers you into a bright, fearless cosmos where all things are woven from indivisible seeds drifting through the void like dust in a sunbeam. On the Nature of Things is Epicurean wisdom in sweeping verse, teaching that nothing comes from nothing, the soul is mortal, and the gods neither punish nor demand fear. By tracing lightning, love, and thought to natural causes, he loosens the knots of superstition and death anxiety, aiming for a life of clear pleasure and quiet mind. Expect a lyrical tour of atomism, including the slight swerve that makes choice possible, and a tender argument for human tranquility.

Epicureanism & AtomismExplore

Aristotle’s Metaphysics opens with a simple confession of love for knowing, then climbs toward the highest questions. What is it for something to be. What are the first causes that make the world intelligible. Moving from the delight of the senses to the calm reach of wisdom, Aristotle maps the ladder from memory and experience to art, science, and the search for first principles. He weighs matter and form, potentiality and actuality, substance and cause, and arrives at a prime actuality that stirs the heavens without itself moving. These selections offer a lantern for readers who want reality in its deepest keys rather than its passing notes.

Aristotle’s Poetics is a compact map of how stories work, treating poetry as imitation of human action through rhythm, language, and song. He prizes plot above all, asking for unity of beginning, middle, and end, for turns of fate and recognition that arise with necessity or strong likelihood, and for the cleansing of pity and fear we call catharsis. Characters, thought, diction, melody, and spectacle support the action like pillars under a stage. Epic and tragedy share aims yet differ in scale and means. Part handbook for makers, part lens for readers, it reveals why certain tales strike like lightning and endure.

Plutarch's Morals is a generous cabinet of essays and letters where a priest of Apollo turns everyday conduct into a field of noble action. He ponders how to raise children, love spouses, choose friends, tame anger, quiet envy and measure our growth in virtue, mixing Greek lore with Roman experience and steady common sense. Rather than abstract systems he offers portraits, parables and crisp counsel that feel like a lantern in the hand. The book invites patient self scrutiny, teaching how to befriend adversity and learn even from enemies. Enter for humane wisdom, stay for its calm, clarifying light.

Roman PhilosophyExplore

Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus is a luminous doorway into Neoplatonism, giving the philosopher as a living presence rather than a remote system. In Rome we meet a man who hid his origins, refused portraits, and sought the One beyond all images, asking if we must leave an image of an image. Porphyry records the school’s rhythms, acts of quiet charity, moments of mystical union, and the failed dream of Platonopolis. He arranges the Enneads and explains their birth, pages that pulse with the heat of thought. This is a humane, intimate narrative that lets metaphysics breathe through daily gestures and invites the reader toward inward ascent.

Porphyry’s Letter to Marcella is a tender manual of philosophy addressed to his wife, turning household life into a school of the soul. He invites the reader to build an inner temple, to tend a quiet flame of attention, and to rise from shifting passions toward the simple Good. Prayer becomes clear thought, sacrifice becomes self mastery, and virtue becomes the ladder by which the soul remembers its source. Plain counsel mingles with luminous images on grief, riches, purity, and friendship, offering Neoplatonic wisdom in a human voice. For seekers it reads like a small lamp in a windy room, steadying and clear.

Cover of The Golden Sayings of Epictetus

Epictetus speaks in clear sparks, guiding you to the quiet strength you already carry. The Golden Sayings gathers brisk conversations and incisive maxims that teach the art of inner freedom. What is ours to govern are thoughts, choices, and the stories we tell ourselves. What is not ours we greet with acceptance. The book invites you to tune your will to nature as a musician tunes a lyre, to honor Providence while tending the small garden of the mind. Expect plain counsel, vivid images, and a humane severity that steadies you like a lamp in storm and a compass on open water.

Cover of Musonius Rufus: Lectures and Fragments

Musonius Rufus speaks like a clear spring in a crowded market, offering practical Stoicism you can drink today. These brief lectures and fragments show philosophy as training for life where virtue is the only good and practice matters more than talk. He favors few strong proofs over many weak ones like a physician who heals with one medicine and counsels simple food honest work endurance and restraint. He defends educating women, treats marriage as a partnership, and sees hardship as useful medicine. The voice is plain, steady, and humane inviting you to clear your habits like a garden and live according to nature.

Written in retreat after the loss of his daughter, Cicero gathers friends at his Tusculum villa to test the soul in dialogue. The five discussions ask what death is, how to meet pain, how to calm grief, how to master the swell of emotion, and whether virtue alone secures happiness. Greek wisdom wears a Roman toga, and rhetoric becomes medicine. Examples from myth and history are sifted with careful logic, until fear loosens its grip and character stands straighter. If you want philosophy as consolation and training, not abstraction, these conversations offer a clear cup of courage and clarity.

Roman PhilosophyExplore

The Enchiridion is a pocket guide to inner freedom, drawn from Epictetus's teaching. In clear maxims it asks you to sort the world into what is yours and what is not yours. Your judgments, choices, desires, and refusals are yours. Body, wealth, praise, and position are not. Hold only to what is truly yours and you move like a steady ship through weather, calm within fortune's storm. The book coaches attention to first impressions, discipline of desire and action, and consent to nature's course. The prize is a resilient joy, a quiet dignity, and a courage that does not depend on circumstance.

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is a calm compass for a stormy life, asking what good we truly aim at and answering with eudaimonia, a flourishing happiness found in excellent activity. He treats virtue as a craft of the soul, learned through practice until choice becomes graceful. The golden mean steadies us between excess and deficiency, while practical wisdom guides judgment in real situations. Friendship appears as the warm fire where virtue ripens, pleasure as a companion not a captain, and politics as the larger household that nurtures character. At the summit waits contemplation, a clear sky of thought, though the path is walked in deeds.

Cover of Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides

Proclus turns Plato’s most enigmatic dialogue into a luminous map of reality, where the One stands like a silent star and all levels of being unfold from its radiance. Moving through the Parmenides’ austere hypotheses, he shows how rigorous dialectic becomes spiritual practice, guiding the mind from names and forms toward apophatic stillness. This commentary offers both a precise architecture of Neoplatonic metaphysics and a path of ascent for contemplative readers. The translation by Morrow and Dillon is clear and learned, opening a demanding yet rewarding text. Enter here if you want logic to awaken wonder and argument to become prayer.

Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic reads like a series of quiet conversations by lamplight, practical and humane counsel to his friend Lucilius. He teaches how to save our most precious wealth, time, to choose friends wisely, to read with depth rather than drift, and to look at death until fear loosens its grip. Philosophy becomes a daily medicine and a compass at sea, training the mind to build an inner citadel amid fortune’s storms. Through simple exercises and clear images poverty rehearsed, anger examined, desire tamed these letters invite steady courage, cheerful restraint, and a freedom rooted in character.

In On the Gods Cicero invites us into a Roman garden where thoughtful voices test what the divine might be. An Epicurean praises tranquil gods, a Stoic finds providence written in the stars, and an Academic skeptic tugs at each claim with gentle rigor. With urbane wit and steady grace, the dialogue becomes a tour of ancient schools and a lesson in how to think rather than what to believe. It weighs piety, fate, design, and the touch of evil, yet never forces certainty. If luminous debate under a colonnade calls to you, this is Rome’s most humane doorway to theology.

Roman PhilosophyExplore

Plotinus invites you to turn inward and taste the source from which all reality flows. In these selections from the Enneads, he unfolds a luminous map of the One, Intellect, and Soul, showing how the world streams from unity and how the soul can ascend by purification, love of beauty, and silent contemplation. He probes where emotions and thought truly live, the relation between sense and intellection, and why evil is lack rather than a power. The prose moves like a calm river becoming a bright sea, part philosophy, part prayer. For seekers of clarity and depth, this is a guide to the intimate sky within.

Plato’s Symposium is a glittering night of talk where philosophers, poets, and a tipsy Alcibiades pass the cup and praise Eros. Each speech shapes love like a different lamp, from witty comedy to noble seriousness, until Socrates recalls the teaching of Diotima, who leads the soul up a living ladder from desire for a single body to contemplation of Beauty itself. In this mingling of myth, argument, and theater, love appears as guide, goad, and god, binding mortal longing to immortal vision. The dialogue’s warmth and irony invite you to sit at the table and listen for what your own heart seeks.

Critias is Plato’s tantalizing fragment where philosophy walks into legend. Continuing from Timaeus, the elder Critias recalls Solon’s Egyptian tale of prehistoric Athens and the island empire of Atlantis, a glittering power framed by concentric seas and laws under Poseidon. Athens appears as an ideal city tested by vast ambition, while Atlantis slowly decays as its divine alloy gives way to human excess. The narrative breaks off mid sentence just as judgment gathers like a storm, leaving a deliberate hush. Half history and half mirror, Critias uses myth to probe political virtue, cultural memory, and the rise and ruin of civilizations.

Plato’s Timaeus is a luminous origin story told as philosophical myth. In a calm voice a sage describes how a benevolent craftsman shapes a formless receptacle into a living cosmos, imbuing it with a world soul and setting time as the moving image of eternity. Geometry becomes scripture as fire air water and earth are woven from triangles, while the human body and soul are traced to cosmic patterns, health and virtue as harmony. Framed by Socrates and the hint of Atlantis, it blends science theology and poetry, a gateway text for Platonism and later mystical cosmology. Enter if you enjoy grand design stitched with myth and mathematics.

Cicero’s On Duties is a lantern for life in public and private, written as a father’s counsel to his son while the Roman Republic dimmed. Drawing on Stoic wisdom and Roman civic sense, Cicero asks what we owe to ourselves, to others, and to the commonwealth. He weighs the honorable against the useful and insists that the truly useful is what is honorable. Justice, prudence, courage, and moderation become living measures for choice, from business deals to statecraft. Grounded in natural law as right reason in accord with nature, this book offers steadiness of soul amid ambition, fear, and the press of events.

Seneca’s brief letter to Paulinus argues that life is not truly short; we simply hand it away to busyness, vanity, and borrowed obligations. Time is our only true possession, yet we scatter it like coins before a crowd, then mourn when the purse is empty. Seneca urges a radical custody of hours, turning from restless errands toward the steady practice of philosophy, which gathers the mind, reconciles with mortality, and stretches life by giving it depth. The wise person lives fully in the present, learning from the past and welcoming what comes, while the unguarded drift like passengers asleep at sea. A classic for anyone ready to reclaim their days. Stoic counsel delivered with the calm urgency of a friend.

Epictetus’ Discourses is a conversational training ground where a former slave teaches freedom of the mind. In lively talks and vivid examples, he shows how peace comes from tending the one thing that is ours to govern, the choosing mind, while greeting fortune, praise, illness, or loss as passing weather. Reason is the helmsman, steering through rough seas of impulse and fear toward a life in accord with nature and duty. The tone is firm yet humane, more coach than lecturer, inviting daily practice, clear seeing, and a resilient joy within a small inner citadel no storm can breach.

Cover of On the Mysteries of the Egyptians

Iamblichus invites you into a lamplit temple where philosophy breathes through ritual. Written as a reply to Porphyry, On the Mysteries argues that reason alone cannot touch the gods, and that theurgy, sacred action with symbols, names, and prayer, draws the soul into living contact with a hierarchy of divine powers. Egyptian and Chaldean rites become a precise metaphysics in motion, where numbers, hymns, and offerings tune the cosmos like a lyre. The book maps gods, angels, daemons, fate, and providence, and shows how true piety purifies, protects, and finally unites. Expect lucid defenses, strange beauty, and a vision of the world as a consecrated whole.

Seneca speaks to a busy friend and to us, arguing that life is not short but squandered. He urges us to guard time as a treasure, to step back from the bustle that feels like purpose yet steals our days, and to claim leisure as a school for virtue. Philosophy becomes a compass and a hearth, teaching us to live now rather than forever preparing to begin. He shows how good actions bank the past safely and free the mind to meet the present. This lucid Stoic dialogue offers a stern kindness and a clear mirror, inviting you to simplify, to choose what is yours, and to cultivate a well tended life.

The Phaedrus begins on a sunlit riverbank, where Socrates and Phaedrus wander among plane trees and cicadas and talk of desire, persuasion, and the soul. Through playful speeches the dialogue turns to the vision of the soul as a charioteer struggling to lift its horses toward beauty remembered from a higher realm. Love appears as divine madness that can heal and guide. True rhetoric becomes the art of leading souls, grounded in knowledge of their forms and needs. In a final turn, Plato contrasts lifeless writing with living dialogue. The result is a shimmering bridge between eros and philosophy, intimate, probing, and alive.

Plato’s Republic is a dramatic conversation that asks what justice is in a soul and a city, then builds a city in speech to test the answer. Socrates guides companions through education, music and myth, to the rule of philosopher rulers who glimpse the Form of the Good. The famous cave opens like a doorway from shadow to sun, turning politics into a path of conversion. Along the way we meet the tripartite soul, a critique of poetry, a cycle of decaying regimes, and the tale of Er. Part blueprint, part mirror, it remains a lucid provocation about how to live and how to govern.

Meditations is a private journal of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, a Stoic workbook written to steady the mind amid power, illness, and war. In short notes he reminds himself to live by reason and virtue, to meet insult with patience, to do the task before him, and to accept the larger order of nature. The voice is calm as a lamp in a field tent at dawn, asking you to rule yourself rather than events, to narrow attention to what you can control, and to remember that life is brief. Read it for austere kindness and durable guidance.