Historical Works

A vault of the major works of classical antiquity — the Greek and Roman historians, epic poets, tragedians, orators, and philosophers, together with Josephus — in complete public-domain English translations. These are the ancient texts most often set beside the New Testament in discussions of manuscript transmission and textual criticism.

Texts are drawn from Project Gutenberg (and, for Tacitus’s Annals, from Wikisource), converted to Markdown for personal study. Each file names its translator and source edition in its frontmatter.

Greek Epic

• Homer — The Iliad
• Homer — The Odyssey

Greek History

• Herodotus — The Histories
• Thucydides — History of the Peloponnesian War

Greek Tragedy

• Euripides — Tragedies
• Sophocles — The Seven Plays

Greek Oratory

• Demosthenes — Public Orations

Greek Philosophy

• Plato — Dialogues

Roman History

• Caesar — The Commentaries (Gallic War)
• Livy — History of Rome
• Tacitus — The Annals

Roman Natural History & Letters

• Pliny the Elder — Natural History
• Pliny the Younger — Letters

Jewish History

• Josephus — Works

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Note on scope: These are complete works, with one unavoidable exception — Tacitus’s Annals is missing Books 7–10, which were lost in antiquity and survive in no manuscript. Everything else is whole: all nine extant books of Herodotus, all forty-five surviving books of Livy, the full Natural History of Pliny in six volumes, and all nineteen surviving plays of Euripides (assembled from Buckley, Murray, Way, and Coleridge, since no single public-domain edition contains them all). Each work’s own page names its translator, source edition, and any detail of coverage.