Old Western Culture is a great books curriculum with a distinctly Christian “great books” reading list. It includes all the famous favorites you’ll recognize from series like the Britannica Great Books of the Western World, but also includes books that are often left out of modern editions for various reasons, most often because they are from the “Age of Faith.” We include more works from the early Church Fathers, Medieval period, and the Reformation. These are deeply influential and formative books on Western civilization, and worthy of inclusion in great books series. These books are part of our Christian and cultural inheritance, and Old Western Culture exists to help you and your children receive that inheritance!

The Old Western Culture Reader Series is a sixteen-volume set. Below are the works included in the series that students using the Old Western Culture curriculum read over four years in high school. In some cases, students do not read the full work, especially for works of philosophy. But even in those cases, it is larger swaths of the original text, not small excerpts.

We also have an Essentials List for Old Western Culture for parents or students who want a different pace through the curriculum.

Year One: The Greeks

Unit One: The Epics:

• The Iliad by Homer
• The Odyssey by Homer

Unit Two: Drama and Lyric

• The Agamemnon by Aeschylus
• The Libation Bearers by Aeschylus
• The Eumenides by Aeschylus
• Oedipus the King by Sophocles
• Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles
• Antigone by Sophocles
• The Trojan Women by Euripides
• The Medea by Euripides
• The Frogs by-Aristophanes
• Sappho’s Poems by Sappho
• Odes of Pindar by Pindar
• Idylls of Theocritus by Theocritus
• Works and Days by Hesiod
• The Fall of Troy by Quintus of Smyrna.

Unit Three: The Histories

• The Histories, by Herodotus
• The History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides
• Anabasis (The Persian Expedition), by Xenophon

Unit Four: The Philosophers

• The Apology by Plato
• The Crito by Plato
• The Phaedo by Plato
• The Phaedrus by Plato
• The Republic (Book I, II, VII, VIII, IX, X) by Plato
• The Metaphysics (Book I, XII) by Aristotle
• Nicomachean Ethics (Book I, VIII) by Aristotle
• The Poetics by Aristotle