Harold Bloom included some 800 books in his list, "The Western Canon," which he felt represented the ebb and flow of western culture. We have recommended the best available editions of many of them as well as some secondary volumes.

According to Nick Gillespie "...Bloom is absolutely correct: Reading the Divine Comedy or War and Peace will not necessarily make us more or less likely to help old ladies across the street..." (from the review in Reason of The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, by Harold Bloom).

The Ancient World

	Harold Bloom's The Western canon
	The Book of the Dead
	The Mahabharata
	The Bhagavad Gita
	Homer's Odyssey
	The Iliad
	Hesiod's Theogony and Works and days
	Sappho
	Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman
	The odes of Pindar
	Aeschylus's The Persians
	Aeschylus: An Oresteia
	Aeschylus: Seven against Thebes
	Aeschylus: Suppliants
	Aeschylus: Prometheus bound
	Sophocles: Oedipus the king, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone
	Sophocles: Electra
	The complete Sophocles
	Euripides
	Euripides: The complete plays
	Aristophanes: The Birds
	Aristophanes: Lysistrata
	Aristophanes: The complete plays
	Herodotus: The Histories
	The Peloponnesian War
	Heraclitus: Fragments
	The dialogues of Plato
	Plato's Republic
	Aristotle: Poetics
	Aristotle: Ethics
	Longinus on the sublime
	Callimachus
	Theocritus: Idylls
	Plutarch: Lives
	Aesop's fables
	Satires of Lucian
	Foreign women in Turkey
	Plautus' Pseudolus
	Plautus' The Braggart Soldier
	Terence - The comedies
	Lucretius' De rerum natura
	Cicero's The nature of the gods
	Horace - The Odes
	Juvenal and Persius - Satires
	Catullus Poems
	Virgil's The Aeneid
	Lucan's Civil war
	The Metamorphoses of Ovid
	Martial 's Epigrams
	Seneca, The tragedies
	Petronius' The Satyricon
	Apuleius' The golden ass
	Epicureanism