Monday, February 13, 2023
Presidential Reading
Theodore Roosevelt, letter to Nicholas Murray Butler (November 4, 1903):
Newer› ‹Older
You remember speaking to me about reading and especially about the kind of books one ought to read. On my way back from Oyster Bay on Election day I tried to jot down the books I have been reading for the past two years, and they run as follows.The list goes on and on. Of course Sophocles didn't write Seven Against Thebes (Aeschylus did), but nevertheless the list is impressive.
[....]
Parts of Herodotus; the first and seventh books of Thucydides; all of Polybius; a little of Plutarch; Aeschylus' Orestean Trilogy; Sophocles' Seven against Thebes; Euripides' Hippolytus and Bacchae; and Aristophanes' Frogs. Parts of the Politics of Aristotle; (all of these were in translation); Ridgeway's Early Age of Greece; Wheeler's Life of Alexander; some six volumes of Mahaffy's Studies of the Greek World — of which I only read chapters here and there...
