Classics Published Before 1800: Free EPUB

Everything published before 1800 is on this shelf: fifty-four titles from the Iliad to Rousseau’s Social Contract, which is the point. The eighteenth century did not think of ‘classics’ as a separate category, and neither does this list; it simply stops at the year the novel became the dominant form.

What the list shows is how much of the site’s oldest material is not fiction: philosophy, history, political theory, military manuals, spiritual autobiography. The epics are here too, and so are the first Gothic novel and the first detective story’s ancestors.

One consequence of the rule is that the Year column changes character as it descends: approximate centuries for the Greeks, firm years for the eighteenth century, and translations dated in between. The publication year on each book page is the one that decides placement.

Every pre-1800 title on this shelf

Fifty-four titles, oldest first, from c. 750 BC to the 1790s.

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
1532	The Prince	Niccolò Machiavelli	Political theory	31,000	2 h
1580	The Essays of Michel de Montaigne	Michel de Montaigne	Essays	517,000	29 h
1590	The Faerie Queene	Edmund Spenser	Epic poem	280,000	16 h
1592	Doctor Faustus	Christopher Marlowe	Play	6,000	1 h
1600	A Midsummer Night’s Dream	William Shakespeare	Play	18,000	1 h
1600	Hamlet	William Shakespeare	Play	35,005	2 h
1605	Don Quixote	Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra	Novel	423,624	24 h
1623	Macbeth	William Shakespeare	Play	18,000	1 h
1637	Discourse on the Method	René Descartes	Treatise	26,100	1 h
1651	Leviathan	Thomas Hobbes	Political theory	201,968	11 h
1667	Paradise Lost	John Milton	Epic poem	82,000	5 h
1670	Pascal’s Pensées	Blaise Pascal	Aphorisms	113,900	6 h
1677	Ethics	Benedictus de Spinoza	Treatise	91,000	5 h
1678	The Pilgrim’s Progress	John Bunyan	Novel	109,000	6 h
1719	Robinson Crusoe	Daniel Defoe	Novel	121,000	7 h
1722	Moll Flanders	Daniel Defoe	Novel	136,000	8 h
1726	Gulliver’s Travels	Jonathan Swift	Novel	104,000	6 h
1729	A Modest Proposal	Jonathan Swift	Pamphlet	3,467	1 h
1739	A Treatise of Human Nature	David Hume	Treatise	225,200	13 h
1748	An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding	David Hume	Treatise	48,000	3 h
1748	The Adventures of Roderick Random	Tobias Smollett	Novel	193,646	11 h
1749	The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling	Henry Fielding	Novel	338,946	19 h
1753	The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom	Tobias Smollett	Novel	157,000	9 h
1759	Candide	Voltaire	Novel	38,738	2 h
1759	The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman	Laurence Sterne	Novel	188,000	10 h
1764	The Castle of Otranto	Horace Walpole	Novel	39,627	2 h
1771	The Expedition of Humphry Clinker	Tobias Smollett	Novel	145,000	8 h
1774	The Sorrows of Young Werther	Johann Wolfgang von Goethe	Novel	42,000	2 h
1776	Common Sense	Thomas Paine	Pamphlet	22,127	1 h
1776	The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire	Edward Gibbon	History	1,603,000	89 h
1776	The Wealth of Nations	Adam Smith	Political economy	389,724	22 h
1781	The Critique of Pure Reason	Immanuel Kant	Treatise	212,000	12 h
1788	The Federalist Papers	Alexander Hamilton	Essays	190,000	11 h
1789	The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano	Olaudah Equiano	Slave narrative	85,638	5 h
1791	The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin	Benjamin Franklin	Autobiography	65,000	4 h
1792	A Vindication of the Rights of Woman	Mary Wollstonecraft	Political writing	83,000	5 h
1794	Songs of Innocence and of Experience	William Blake	Verse	5,600	1 h
1794	The Mysteries of Udolpho	Ann Radcliffe	Novel	290,000	16 h
1796	The Monk	M. G. Lewis	Novel	136,866	8 h

How this list was made

Inclusion is by the publication year recorded on the book page. Dates before 1500 are approximate and marked as such in the Year column; the translation year is used only when the page says so.

Word counts are for these English texts. A Greek epic in translation is shorter than in Greek, and a Victorian translation of Plato is longer than a modern one.

Questions readers ask

Why do the oldest books show approximate dates?

Because composition dates for ancient and medieval works are arguments, not records. The pages use the conventional figure and mark it with c. where scholarship is divided.

Where should I start?

The Apology, at 19,000 words, is the shortest great pre-1800 book here. The Prince is next and takes an evening.

Is the Bible on this list?

No. The site does not publish scripture as a book page, so it cannot appear in a data-driven shelf.

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