Hellenistic and Roman Republic

After Alexander, the Greek world became the whole Mediterranean, and philosophy became a way to live in it. The city-state was gone, and with it the assumption that a person’s good was the city’s good. The new schools answered the question of how to live alone in a large world. Epicurus said pleasure, carefully defined, and a garden of friends. The Stoics said virtue and nothing else, and to bear what fortune sends. Both are here through the books that survived: Epicurus’s letters, and Lucretius’s poem, which put the atoms and the ethics of Epicurus into Latin hexameter and is on seven of the nine lists.

The other half of the shelf is mathematics, and it is why this era is on the lists at all. Euclid’s Elements is the book St. John’s and Thomas Aquinas College begin their mathematics tutorials with, worked at the board proposition by proposition, and it was the model of certainty for two thousand years. Archimedes and Apollonius are the summit of Greek mathematics, and the hardest reading on the site.

Cicero, though a Roman, belongs here by philosophy: his On Duties is the Stoic manual the Renaissance read most, and it is short. Ecclesiastes, written in the same centuries, is the Bible’s Hellenistic book, and it sounds it.