One of the most celebrated couples of all time: he was a French philosopher, a forerunner to empiricism, she was one of the earliest contributors to modern feminist thought. Their story of passion and tragedy is intensely felt in these poems.
Pliny wrote about everything. His Naturalis Historia is the very model of the modern encyclopedia. It is not surprising that he would devote an entire book to this obscure subject: it was a critical skill in his time, and he was, after all, a Roman…
The Book of Jasher, also called The Book of the Upright or The Book of the Just Man, is a lost book mentioned in the Hebrew Bible at Joshua 10:13 and 2 Samuel 1:18. The title is a translation of the Hebrew ספר הישר (Sefer ha Yashar). The book is an…
The Five Classis were basic Confucian texts. They were in use from before 1000 BCE along with a sixth book, now lost, the Classic of Music. This work was lost at the time of the first emperor, Qin-Shi-Huang-Ti, who ordered books to be burned and…
While he was sniffing around Alexandria, Cleopatra showed Caesar her library. He was impressed: on returning to Rome, he told his friends that Rome should have a library, too, a Roman library. He enlisted Marcus Varro, who wrote the De bibliothecis…