Great Books Ladder · High school · Grade 7–12

The Greeks

Volumes 3 to 10: Homer, the Athenian playwrights, Herodotus and Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Euclid and Archimedes, from about 750 to 212 BC.

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Unit 1 Epic and Drama

6 topics

Homer's two epics and the playwrights of Athens, who invented tragedy and comedy.

  1. Homer: The Iliad (being written)
  2. Homer: The Odyssey (being written)
  3. Aeschylus: The Oresteia (being written)
  4. Sophocles: Oedipus and Antigone (being written)
  5. Euripides: The Plays (being written)
  6. Aristophanes: The Comedies (being written)

Unit 2 The First Historians

2 topics

Herodotus and Thucydides, who first tried to find out what happened and why.

  1. Herodotus: The Histories (being written)
  2. Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War (being written)

Unit 3 Plato

10 topics

Socrates' questions, written down by his student: justice, knowledge, love and the soul.

  1. Plato: The Trial of Socrates (being written)
  2. Plato: Phaedo (being written)
  3. Plato: Meno (being written)
  4. Plato: Protagoras and Gorgias (being written)
  5. Plato: Symposium and Phaedrus (being written)
  6. Plato: The Republic, Books I–V (being written)
  7. Plato: The Republic, Books VI–X (being written)
  8. Plato: Theaetetus and Sophist (being written)
  9. Plato: Timaeus and Critias (being written)
  10. Plato: Statesman, Laws and the Seventh Letter (being written)

Unit 4 Aristotle

9 topics

Logic, nature, the soul, ethics, politics and poetry from the philosopher who tried to study everything.

  1. Aristotle: Logic (being written)
  2. Aristotle: Physics
  3. Aristotle: On the Heavens
  4. Aristotle: On the Soul (being written)
  5. Aristotle: Metaphysics (being written)
  6. Aristotle: The Animals
  7. Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics (being written)
  8. Aristotle: Politics (being written)
  9. Aristotle: Rhetoric and Poetics (being written)

Unit 5 Medicine and Mathematics

5 topics

Hippocrates' medicine, Euclid's geometry and Archimedes' mechanics.

  1. Hippocrates: On Medicine
  2. Euclid: Elements, Books I–IV
  3. Euclid: Elements, Books V–X
  4. Euclid: Elements, Books XI–XIII
  5. Archimedes: The Works
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