The last five months, I’ve utilized this first volume reading guide published in 1951, navigating through all or portions of selected readings from: Plato’s “Apology,” Crito,” and “The Republic”; Sophocle’s “Oedipus The King” and “Antigone”; Aristotle’s “Nichomachean Ethics” and “Politics”; Plutarch’s Lives “Lycurgus,” “Numa Pompilius,” “Alexander,” and “Julius Caesar”; The Book of Job; Augustine’s “Confessions”; Montaigne’s “Essays”; Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”; Locke’s “Concerning Civil Government”; Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” America’s Founding Documents, namely, “The Declaration of Independence,” “The Constitution,” and “The Federalist Papers”; concluding with “The Communist Manifesto” by Marx and Engles. All this after my 10 chapters per day Bible reading. I did not read every single day, but I managed to complete the curriculum of Volume 1.
Of all I’ve touched so far, Sophocles and Job capture the human situation best, and spoke to me at the deepest level. From a distance, mankind’s story hints at the fantastical, even comical but up close, unmistakably tragic. Sophocles presents the horror story of a man trapped by consequence, no way out. Job’s tragic story includes redemption, restoration.
The next volume and course of reading will be on politics and government and will revisit selected chapters from a few of the same works as well as others.
