Ancient and Medieval Classics: Free EPUB

This is the oldest shelf on the site: fifteen books composed before 1500, from the Iliad and the Art of War to Dante’s Comedy and Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. All but Malory’s belong to manuscript culture, which means every text here is a translation or a modern edition of a manuscript tradition.

What holds them together is not genre but the conditions of survival. An epic, a military manual, a dialogue and a poem reach us through copies of copies, and the English versions on this site are nineteenth-century reconstructions or later translations. The word counts are therefore the counts of the translations, not of the originals.

Every ancient and medieval title on this shelf

Fifteen titles, oldest first, from c. 750 BC to 1485.

Year	Title	Author	Form	Words	Reading time
c. 750 BC	The Iliad	Homer	Epic poem	155,801	9 h
c. 500 BC	The Art of War	Sun Tzu	Treatise	54,841	3 h
c. 429 BC	Oedipus Rex	Sophocles	Play	12,000	1 h
c. 399 BC	Apology	Plato	Dialogue	19,000	1 h
c. 385 BC	Symposium	Plato	Dialogue	35,600	2 h
c. 375 BC	The Republic	Plato	Treatise	212,446	12 h
c. 370 BC	Phaedrus	Plato	Dialogue	41,200	2 h
c. 340 BC	The Nicomachean Ethics	Aristotle	Treatise	116,452	6 h
8	Metamorphoses	Ovid	Epic poem	131,300	7 h
125	The Enchiridion	Epictetus	Treatise	14,119	1 h
397	The Confessions of St. Augustine	Augustine of Hippo	Spiritual autobiography	111,892	6 h
1000	Beowulf	Anonymous	Epic poem	24,921	1 h
1320	The Divine Comedy	Dante Alighieri	Epic poem	111,673	6 h
1387	The Canterbury Tales	Geoffrey Chaucer	Verse	151,000	8 h
1485	Le Morte d’Arthur	Thomas Malory	Novel	350,000	19 h

How this list was made

Titles are included when the book page records a publication year before 1400. Approximate dates are marked with c. in the Year column; where scholarship disagrees, the page uses the conventional figure.

The English texts are public-domain translations. A different translator would change the counts by as much as a fifth, so treat them as the length of these editions.

Questions readers ask

Which is the easiest way in?

The Art of War, at about 7,000 words: thirteen short chapters, read in an hour. The Iliad is the opposite experience and needs a week.

Why are the dates marked approximate?

Because composition dates for oral and manuscript works are reconstructions. The pages say which century and which basis, and the list keeps them in the order the site uses.

Are these translations in verse or prose?

Mixed. The Iliad and the Odyssey are verse translations, the dialogues are prose, and the Art of War is a nineteenth-century prose version from the Chinese.

Part of all themed reading lists. Nearby shelves: Russian Classics · French Classics · American Classics · authors A–Z · word counts and reading times.