Good Old Days

I actually taught Martianus Cappela in the hay-day of my teaching. He developed liberal arts education and here, I list some of the topics of such, divided into the Trivium and Quadrivium.

He defined the seven liberal arts, later divided. We owe a tremendous debt to St. Anselm, who stopped the rot of bad seminary training by introducing these subjects into the seminaries.

• the Trivium

1. grammar
2. logic
3. rhetoric

• the Quadrivium

4. arithmetic
5. geometry
6. music
7. astronomy --- from the wiki list but on many sites

Now, when these are no longer taught, a young person is at a great disadvantage. He cannot and does not learn how to think.

That is the purpose of Classical Education-to teach a person how to think.

The following is an example list compiled from How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler (1940), and How to Read a Book, 2nd ed. by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren (1972):

1. Homer – Iliad; Odyssey
2. The Old Testament
3. Aeschylus – Tragedies
4. Sophocles – Tragedies
5. Herodotus – Histories
6. Euripides – Tragedies
7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes – Comedies
10. Plato – Dialogues
11. Aristotle – Works
12. Epicurus – "Letter to Herodotus"; "Letter to Menoecus"
13. Euclid – Elements
14. Archimedes – Works
15. Apollonius – Conics
16. Cicero – Works (esp. Orations; On Friendship; On Old Age; Republic; Laws; Tusculan Disputations; Offices)
17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil – Works (esp. Aeneid)
19. Horace – Works (esp. Odes and Epodes; The Art of Poetry)
20. Livy – History of Rome
21. Ovid – Works (esp. Metamorphoses)
22. Quintilian – Institutes of Oratory
23. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia
24. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola; Germania; Dialogus de oratoribus (Dialogue on Oratory)
25. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic
26. Epictetus – Discourses; Enchiridion
27. Ptolemy – Almagest
28. Lucian – Works (esp. The Way to Write History; The True History; The Sale of Creeds; Alexander the Oracle Monger; Charon; The Sale of Lives; The Fisherman; Dialogue of the Gods; Dialogues of the Sea-Gods; Dialogues of the Dead)
29. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
30. Galen – On the Natural Faculties
31. The New Testament
32. Plotinus – The Enneads
33. St. Augustine – "On the Teacher"; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
34. The Volsungs Saga or Nibelungenlied
35. The Song of Roland
36. The Saga of Burnt Njál
37. Maimonides – The Guide for the Perplexed
38. St. Thomas Aquinas – Of Being and Essence; Summa Contra Gentiles; Of the Governance of Rulers; Summa Theologica
39. Dante Alighieri – The New Life (La Vita Nuova); "On Monarchy"; Divine Comedy
40. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
41. Thomas a Kempis – The Imitation of Christ
42. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks
43. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
44. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly; Colloquies
45. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
46. Thomas More – Utopia
47. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises
48. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel
49. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion
50. Michel de Montaigne – Essays
51. William Gilbert – On the Lodestone and Magnetic Bodies
52. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote
53. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
54. Francis Bacon – Essays; The Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum; New Atlantis
55. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays
56. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Two New Sciences
57. Johannes Kepler – The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Harmonices Mundi
58. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; Generation of Animals
59. Grotius – The Law of War and Peace
60. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan; Elements of Philsophy
61. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy; Principles of Philosophy; The Passions of the Soul
62. Corneille – Tragedies (esp. The Cid, Cinna)
63. John Milton – Works (esp. the minor poems; Areopagitica; Paradise Lost; Samson Agonistes)
64. Molière – Comedies (esp. The Miser; The School for Wives; The Misanthrope; The Doctor in Spite of Himself; Tartuffe; The Tradesman Turned Gentleman; The Imaginary Invalid; The Affected Ladies)
65. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensées; Scientific Treatises
66. Boyle – The Sceptical Chemist
67. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light
68. Benedict de Spinoza – Political Treatises; Ethics
69. John Locke – A Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Some Thoughts Concerning Education
70. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies (esp. Andromache; Phaedra; Athalie (Athaliah))
71. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Opticks
72. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays on Human Understanding; Monadology
73. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe; Moll Flanders
74. Jonathan Swift – The Battle of the Books; A Tale of a Tub; A Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal
75. William Congreve – The Way of the World
76. George Berkeley – A New Theory of Vision; A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
77. Alexander Pope – An Essay on Criticism; The Rape of the Lock; An Essay on Man
78. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; The Spirit of the Laws
79. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
80. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
81. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; Lives of the Poets
82. David Hume – A Treatise of Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; History of England
83. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Discourse on Inequality; On Political Economy; Emile; The Social Contract; Confessions
84. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
85. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations
86. William Blackstone – Commentaries on the Laws of England
87. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
88. Edward Gibbon – The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
89. James Boswell – Journal; The Life of Samuel Johnson
90. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)
91. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers (together with the Articles of Confederation; United States Constitution and United States Declaration of Independence)
92. Jeremy Bentham – Comment on the Commentaries; Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
93. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth
94. Thomas Robert Malthus – An Essay on the Principle of Population
95. John Dalton – A New System of Chemical Philosophy
96. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat
97. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – The Phenomenology of Spirit; Science of Logic; Elements of the Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
98. William Wordsworth – Poems (esp. Lyrical Ballads; Lucy poems; sonnets; The Prelude)
99. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems (esp. Kubla Khan; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ); Biographia Literaria
100. David Ricardo – On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
101. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma
102. Carl von Clausewitz – On War
103. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
104. François Guizot – History of Civilization in France
105. Lord Byron – Don Juan
106. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism
107. Michael Faraday – The Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
108. Nikolai Lobachevsky – Geometrical Researches on the Theory of Parallels
109. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology
110. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy
111. Honoré de Balzac – Works (esp. Le Père Goriot; Le Cousin Pons; Eugénie Grandet; Cousin Bette; César Birotteau)
112. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal
113. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter
114. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America
115. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; Principles of Political Economy; On Liberty; Considerations on Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women;Autobiography
116. Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
117. William Makepeace Thackeray – Works (esp. Vanity Fair; The History of Henry Esmond; The Virginians; Pendennis)
118. Charles Dickens – Works (esp. Pickwick Papers; Our Mutual Friend; David Copperfield; Dombey and Son; Oliver Twist; A Tale of Two Cities; Hard Times)
119. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
120. George Boole – The Laws of Thought
121. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden
122. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – Das Kapital (Capital); The Communist Manifesto
123. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch
124. Herman Melville – Typee; Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
125. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
126. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories
127. Henry Thomas Buckle – A History of Civilization in England
128. Francis Galton – Inquiries into Human Faculties and Its Development
129. Bernhard Riemann – The Hypotheses of Geometry
130. Henrik Ibsen – Plays (esp. Peer Gynt; Brand; Hedda Gabler; Emperor and Galilean; A Doll's House; The Wild Duck; The Master Builder)
131. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; "What Is Art?"; Twenty-Three Tales
132. Richard Dedekind – Theory of Numbers
133. Wilhelm Wundt – Physiological Psychology; Outline of Psychology
134. Mark Twain – The Innocents Abroad; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; The Mysterious Stranger
135. Henry Adams – History of the United States; Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres; The Education of Henry Adams; Degradation of Democratic Dogma
136. Charles Peirce – Chance, Love, and Logic; Collected Papers
137. William Sumner – Folkways
138. Oliver Wendell Holmes – The Common Law; Collected Legal Papers
139. William James – Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; A Pluralistic Universe; Essays in Radical Empiricism
140. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors
141. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; On the Genealogy of Morality; The Will to Power; Twilight of the Idols; The Antichrist
142. Georg Cantor – Transfinite Numbers
143. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method; The Foundations of Science
144. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Three Essays to the Theory of Sex; Introduction to Psychoanalysis; Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; The Ego and the Id; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
145. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces
146. Max Planck – Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
147. Henri Bergson – Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
148. John Dewey – How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; The Quest for Certainty; Logic – The Theory of Inquiry
149. Alfred North Whitehead – A Treatise on Universal Algebra; An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; Process and Reality; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
150. George Santayana – The Life of Reason; Scepticism and Animal Faith; The Realms of Being (which discusses the Realms of Essence, Matter and Truth); Persons and Places
151. Vladimir Lenin – Imperialism; The State and Revolution
152. Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time (formerly translated as Remembrance of Things Past
153. Bertrand Russell – Principles of Mathematics; The Problems of Philosophy; Principia Mathematica; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits
154. Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers
155. Albert Einstein – The Theory of Relativity; Sidelights on Relativity; The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics
156. James Joyce – "The Dead" in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
157. Jacques Maritain – Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; Freedom and the Modern World; A Preface to Metaphysics; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism
158. Franz Kafka – The Trial; The Castle
159. Arnold J. Toynbee – A Study of History; Civilization on Trial
160. Jean-Paul Sartre – Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness
161. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – The First Circle; Cancer Ward

1. thanks to wiki, but found on other sites as well