Ph.D. Reading List

Quantities are measured according to standard editions (Oxfords, Teubner, etc.). Exact works and editions read are subject to the approval of the graduate advisor. Faculty may make some substitutions in this list when teaching survey courses; students will be able to take this into account when drawing up their own reading lists for their Ph.D. exams.

Greek:

  • Homer: 8 books of each epic
  • Hesiod: one complete work (Theogony or Works and Days) and the first 212 verses of the other
  • Homeric Hymns: 250 verses
  • Lyric: all in Budelmann and Allan, plus 50 more verses of Theognis, 50 more verses of Alcaeus, Alcman 3 PMG, Bacchylides 3, 5, 17, 18. [i.e.: Budelmann’s Greek Lyric and Allan’s Greek Elegy and Iambus, both in the Cambridge Green and Yellow series.]
  • Pindar: 300 verses
  • Herodotus: 80 pages, including book 1.1-5
  • Aeschylus: 2 plays (including Agamemnon)
  • Sophocles: (2 plays)
  • Euripides: (2 plays)
  • Aristophanes (2 plays)
  • Satyr drama: 200 lines
  • Thucydides: 80 pages, including book 1.20-22 and book 2.34-46
  • Gorgias: 40 lines
  • Lysias: Lysias 12, or speeches totalling 20 pages or more
  • Xenophon: one book from the major works
  • Isocrates: one work
  • Demosthenes: one speech or speeches totalling 20 pages or more
  • Parmenides: fragments 1 and 8
  • Plato: one long dialogue (e.g. Phaedo, Symposium, or Gorgias, or three books of Republic); and one more dialogue (may be short)
  • Aristotle: Poetics; and one other book chosen from Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, Metaphysics (but not little alpha), Physics, De Generatione Animalium, Historia Animalium
  • Menander: 500 verses
  • Callimachus: 200 verses
  • Theocritus: 200 verses
  • Apollonius: 200 verses
  • Hellenistic poetry: 500 more verses
  • Lucian: 20 pages
  • Longinus: 10 pages
  • Plutarch: 20 pages
  • Chariton, Longus, Heliodorus: 15 pages each
  • Polybius: 20 pages
  • Imperial prose: 30 more pages

Latin:

  • Archaic Latin
  • Caesar: one book of either BG or BC
  • Catullus: all
  • Cicero: one long oration (e.g. Pro Caelio or Catilinarians 1-3); one major philosophical book; one major rhetorical book; letters in the Shackleton Bailey selection
  • Lucretius: I, III, V
  • Plautus: 2 plays
  • Terence: 2 plays
  • Sallust: one monograph
  • Horace: 10 Satires, 3 books of Odes, the Epodes, the Ars Poetica, 10 letters from Epist. I-II (including one from Epist. II)
  • Livy: Preface, Book 1, and one other
  • Propertius: Book I or III
  • Tibullus: Book I
  • Sulpicia: all
  • Ovid: 1 book of elegiacs, 2 books of Metamorphoses, Ars Amat. 1
  • Virgil: 10 books of Aeneid; Eclogues (all); Georgics IV
  • Juvenal: 1, 3, 6, 10
  • Persius: 1
  • Martial: 1 book
  • Seneca: 1 play and 1 dialogue (De tranquillitate animi or De brevitate vitae) or equivalent amount in the Epistulae morales
  • Pliny: 15 pages of letters (including 6.16, 6.20, 10.96, 10.97)
  • Suetonius: one book of De vita Caesarum
  • Lucan: 1 book (but not Book X)
  • Petronius: Cena Trimalchionis
  • Tacitus: 3 complete books of Annals or Histories and one minor work
  • Quintilian: Book X, Chapter 1
  • Apuleius: Metamorphoses28-6.30 or another continuous selection of equal length from the Metamorphoses
  • 800 more lines imperial epic other than Lucan (e.g. Statius or Valerius Flaccus)
  • Post-classical Latin: 15 pages

Last Revised Nov. 2021