Letters and speeches

The oldest are speeches: the Apology is what Socrates said to the jury, and the funeral oration in Thucydides is what Pericles said to Athens, and both are on this shelf because rhetoric was the first literary form the Greeks theorised. Demosthenes and Cicero are the orators the Renaissance learned Latin and politics from.

The letter is the other half. Paul’s epistles are theology by post, and Romans and First Corinthians are on the shelf. Cicero’s letters are the inside of the Roman republic as it fell, and Seneca’s are Stoicism as correspondence. Epicurus’s letter to Menoeceus is the whole school in ten pages. Pliny’s letters describe the eruption of Vesuvius. Pascal’s Provincial Letters are the wittiest polemic in French, and Locke’s Letter on Toleration the argument that ended the wars of religion in England.

The American shelf is oratory: Lincoln at Gettysburg and in his second inaugural, Douglass on what the Fourth of July means to a slave, King from the Birmingham jail. Burke’s Reflections and Milton’s Areopagitica are speeches that were never spoken. Read the Apology first; it is where the site’s own tradition begins, and it is the best speech ever written down.