Author: Larry Kooper

Original language: Latin. Livy was Rome’s foremost historian. His work Ab Urbe Condita (From the Founding of the City) covers Rome from its beginning to Livy’s lifetime. I fell in love with Livy’s writing so much that I spent two wonderful months reading all his surviving work, which amounts to about 25% of what he…

Original language: Latin. I read the Odes, the Epodes, and Ars Poetica. For the Odes and Epodes I read the Joseph P. Clancy translation published 1960 by U. of Chicago Press. I found Horace’s lyric poetry beautiful. The Clancy translations are excellent. They flow, they are idiomatic English, they feel and look poetic. I love…

Original language: Latin. The Aeneid I read the Rolfe Humphries translation, published 1951 by Scribners. It’s the story of Aeneas, a Trojan who fought in the Trojan war, had some more adventures, then went to Italy and became the ancestor of Rome’s founders. Along the way he won and broke the heart of Queen Dido…

The dates of his birth and death are uncertain; first half of 1st century BC. Original language: Latin. De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) I read the Rolfe Humphries translation published 1968 by Indiana University Press. What a restless mind, ever thinking, ranging over physics and biology. And proving propositions with logic.  …

Original language: Latin. [First entry here in Latin.] I read On Friendship, On Old Age, and The Orations Against Catiline. Many people call On Old Age a work of philosophy. But to me it is more like an op-ed, or a magazine piece. I’m not taking anything away from its merits, but no one today…

Original language: Greek. On Conic Sections It’s a book of geometry. I don’t have much to say about it.

Original language: Greek. I read The Sand-Reckoner and skimmed On the Equilibrium of Planes and On Floating Bodies. The Sand-Reckoner Archimedes set out to find an upper bound for the number of grains of sand that would fit into the “universe” (which, to the ancients, was a finite area bounded by the stars seen from…

Original language: Pali. A Buddhist scripture. A collection of the sayings of the Buddha in verse form. The edition I read was translated and edited by Valerie J. Roebuck, published 2010 by Penguin. In some ways The Dhammapada is like an early self-help book. I liked the emphasis on meditation, self-control, and control of anger.…

Original language: Greek. I skimmed Elements. It’s amazing that the geometry I studied in high school, and is still studied today, is basically this book by Euclid. Though slightly different terminology is used today. A general thought It’s really interesting, now that I have gone from 1400 BC to 300 BC, how I’ve gone from…

Original language: Greek. I read “Letter to Herodotus” (not a letter to the historian Herodotus) and “Letter to Menoeceus,” both online. Letter to Herodotus The main surprising thing is that Epicurus thought (correctly) that matter is made of atoms. He got a few things wrong, and he believed in the existence of the soul, but…