I’ve revised my list, using a fairly tight cut which has reduced it to 75. Especially, I compressed the Ring Cycle into a single book and removed some of Caesar’s memoirs.
I’ve realised that it’s impossible to be quite happy with one definitive collection… one always wants to add some works in or take some out. I’m still wondering what the best choices are for the remaining quarter.
| # | First published | Title | Author |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 722-481 BCE | Spring and Autumn Annals | Various |
| 2 | ~700 BCE | Iliad | Homer (?) |
| 3 | ~700 BCE | Odyssey | Homer (?) |
| 4 | ~700 BCE | Works and Days | Hesiod |
| 5 | 430 BCE | The Histories | Herodotus |
| 6 | ~430 BCE | History of the Peloponnesian War | Thucydides |
| 7 | ~370 BCE | Anabasis | Xenophon |
| 8 | 200-300 BCE | Argonautica | Apollonius Rhodius |
| 9 | ~160 BCE | De Agri Cultura | Cato the Elder |
| 10 | after 146 BCE | Histories | Polybius |
| 11 | 58-49 BCE | Gallic Wars | Julius Caesar |
| 12 | 44-40 BCE | The Conspiracy of Catiline | Sallust |
| 13 | ~40 BCE | The Civil War | Julius Caesar |
| 14 | ~30 | Rerum Rusticarum | Varro |
| 15 | ~30 | De Lingua Latina | Varro |
| 16 | ~30-15 BCE | De Architectura | Vitruvius |
| 17 | ~25 BCE | Aeneid | Virgil |
| 18 | 49 | De Brevitate Vitae | Seneca |
| 19 | ~50 | Histories of Alexander the Great | Quintus Curtius Rufus |
| 20 | ~50 | The Aesop Romance | ? |
| 21 | ~60 | De Re Rustica | Columella |
| 22 | ~75 | Satyricon | Gaius Petronius |
| 23 | ~75 | Epigrams | Martial |
| 24 | ~80 | Natural History | Pliny the Elder |
| 25 | ~98 | Germania | Tacitus |
| 26 | 0-100 | Apicius | ? |
| 27 | ~100 | Parallel Lives | Plutarch |
| 28 | 100-200 | Milinda Pahna | ? |
| 29 | ~105 | Histories | Tacitus |
| 30 | similar time | Annals | Tacitus |
| 31 | 121 | The Twelve Caesars | Suetonius |
| 32 | written 161-80 | Meditations | Marcus Aurelius |
| 33 | ~175 | Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass) | Apuleius |
| 34 | ~250 | Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers | Diogenes Laertius |
| 35 | <338 | The Alexander Romance | ? |
| 36 | ~400? | Historia Augusta | ? |
| 37 | > 750 | Manyoshu | Various |
| 38 | 900-1000 | Suda | ? |
| 39 | 900-1000 | Taketori Monogatari | ? |
| 40 | < 975 | Beowulf | ? |
| 41 | ~1100 | Winchester Chronicle | various |
| 42 | ~1136 | Historia Regum Britanniae | Geoffrey of Monmouth |
| 43 | 1148/9 | Ysengrimus | Nivardus? |
| 44 | 1174 | Roman de Renart | Pierre de St. Cloud |
| 45 | ~1200 | Prose Edda | ? |
| 46 | 1212 | Hojoki | Kama no Chomei |
| 47 | ~1250 | Van den vos Reynaerde | ? |
| 48 | ~1300 | The Travels of Marco Polo | Marco Polo |
| 49 | ~1400 | The Canterbury Tales | Geoffrey Chaucer |
| 50 | ~1595 | Richard II | Shakespeare |
| 51 | 1687 | Principia | Isaac Newton |
| 52 | 1793 | System Naturae (13th Edt.) | Carl Linnaeus / Johann F. Gmelin |
| 53 | 1815-23 | A Dictionary of the Chinese Language | Robert Morrison |
| 54 | 1849 | Kalevala | Elias Lonnrot (compiler) |
| 55 | 1859 | On the Origin of Species | Charles Darwin |
| 56 | 1872 | Around the World in Eighty Days | Jules Verne |
| 57 | 1876 | The Ring Cycle | Richard Wagner |
| 58 | 1913 | Principia Mathematica | Alfred Whitehead & Bertrand Russell |
| 59 | 1922 | The Worm Ouroboros | E. R. Eddison |
| 60 | 1926 | The Castle | Franz Kafka |
| 61 | 1931 | The Shadow over Innsmouth | H. P. Lovecraft |
| 62 | 1927 | The Hobbit | J. R. R. Tolkien |
| 63 | 1951 | Foundation | Isaac Asimov |
| 64 | 1951 | The Sentinel | Arthur C. Clarke |
| 65 | 1951 | The Day of the Triffids | John Wyndham |
| 66 | 1954-5 | The Lord of the Rings | J. R. R. Tolkien |
| 67 | 1954 | Lord of the Flies | William Golding |
| 68 | 1968 | 2001: A Space Odyssey | Arthur C. Clarke |
| 69 | 1977 | The Silmarillion | J. R. R. Tolkien |
| 70 | 1978 | Vox Latina | William Sidney Allen |
| 71 | 1979 | The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy | Douglas Adams |
| 72 | 1971/92 | The Carpet People | Terry Pratchett |
| 73 | 1993 | Against a Dark Background | Iain M. Banks |
| 74 | 1996 | A Game of Thrones | George R. R. Martin |
| 75 | 2003 | Monstrous Regiment | Terry Pratchett |