Essays

Classic essays

Classic essays and a poem on the works in our list, from Aristotle to Virginia Woolf.

Rembrandt, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer: the philosopher rests his hand on a marble bust of Homer.

Sophocles · Oedipus the King

Poetics: On Tragedy

Aristotle · translated by S. H. Butcher

Aristotle's account of tragedy, with Sophocles' Oedipus the King as his model: pity and fear, reversal, recognition and the tragic error.

Ingres, Oedipus and the Sphinx: Oedipus, nude, questions the Sphinx at the mouth of a cave.

Sophocles · Oedipus the King

The Legend of King Oedipus

Sigmund Freud · translated by A. A. Brill (1913)

The passage in The Interpretation of Dreams where Freud reads Sophocles' Oedipus the King as a childhood wish fulfilled, the idea later named the Oedipus complex.

Moreau, Oedipus and the Sphinx: the winged Sphinx clings to Oedipus's chest on a rocky pass.

Sophocles · Homer

On Not Knowing Greek

Virginia Woolf · The Common Reader (1925)

Virginia Woolf on what an English reader can and cannot grasp of the Greeks, from Sophocles' Electra to the Odyssey.

Homer · The Odyssey

Ulysses

Alfred Tennyson · Poems (1842)

Tennyson's poem of the aged Ulysses, home in Ithaca, resolving to sail once more.

Marcus Aurelius · Meditations

Marcus Aurelius

Matthew Arnold · Essays in Criticism (1865)

Matthew Arnold's essay on Marcus Aurelius as a moralist, prompted by George Long's translation of the Meditations.