'I have cast up my reading account, and brought it to the end of the year 1835. [?] During the last thirteen months I have read Aeschylus twice; Sophocles twice; Euripides once; Pindar twice; Callimachus; Apollonius Rhodius; Quintus Calaber; Theocritus twice; Herodotus; Thucydides; almost all Xenophon?s works; almost all Plato; Aristotle?s Politics, and a good deal of his Organon, besides dipping elsewhere in him; the whole of Plutarch?s Lives; about half of Lucian; two or three books of Athenaeus; Plautus twice; Terence twice; Lucretius twice; Catullus; Tibullus; Propertius; Lucan; Statius; Silius Italicus; Livy; Velleius Paterculus; Sallust; Caesar; and, lastly, Cicero. I have, indeed, still a little of Cicero left; but I shall finish him in a few days. I am now deep in Aristophanes and Lucian.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Babington Macaulay Print: Book
'This day I finished Thucydides, after reading him with inexpressible interest and admiration. He is the greatest historian that ever lived. Feb 27, 1835'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Lord Macaulay Print: Book
'the young Burney's paranoia about being detected in classical learning. When in 1769 she read Thucydides, she emphasised even in her private diary that she did not read "the original Greek... I think the precaution necessary!". '
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Frances Burney Print: Book
'Have read, since I have been here, about 30 pages in the Bipont edition of "Thucydides", the part, the latter part of the second book, containing the funeral oration by Pericles [comments on text].'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Windham Print: Unknown
'Read papers, and last number but one of Cob. A little in the Milton. licence for universal printing: and in Thucydides'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Windham Print: Unknown
'Read a little in Thucydides.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Windham Print: Book
'Went up for a short time into library, and read in "Oration of Lysias". [quotes Greek text]'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Windham Print: Book
[Percy Shelley's Reading List for 1815, compiled by Mary Shelley. Only texts not referred to in journal entries are given separate database entries here]
'Pastor Fido
Orlando Furioso
Livy's History
Seneca's Works
Tasso's Girusalame Liberata
Tassos Aminta
2 vols of Plutarch in Italian
Some of the plays of Euripedes
Seneca's Tragedies
Reveries of Rousseau
Hesiod
Novum Organum
Alfieri's Tragedies
Theocritus
Ossian
Herodotus
Thucydides
Homer
Locke on the Human Understanding
Conspiration de Rienzi
History of arianism
Ochley's History of the Saracens
Mad. de Stael sur la literature'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
'Spender [J.A. Spender, editor of the Westminster Gazette] has recently introduced me to Thucydides & I think he is the greatest of all historians. Indeed I need say no more than that if I wrote history this is the way I should write it.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett Print: Book
'He begged of General Paoli to repeat one of the introductory stanzas of the first book of Tasso's "Jerusalem", which he did, and then Johnson found fault with the simile of sweetening the edges of a cup for a child, being transferred from Lucretius into an epick poem. The General said he did not imagine Homer's poetry was so ancient as is supposed, because he ascribes to a Greek colony circumstances of refinement not found in Greece itself at a later period, when Thucydides wrote. JOHNSON. "I recollect but one passage quoted by Thucydides from Homer, which is not to be found in our copies of Homer's works; I am for the antiquity of Homer, and think that a Grecian colony, by being nearer Persia, might be more refined than the mother country.".'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Filippo Antonio Pasquale di Paoli Print: Book
'He begged of General Paoli to repeat one of the introductory stanzas of the first book of Tasso's "Jerusalem", which he did, and then Johnson found fault with the simile of sweetening the edges of a cup for a child, being transferred from Lucretius into an epick poem. The General said he did not imagine Homer's poetry was so ancient as is supposed, because he ascribes to a Greek colony circumstances of refinement not found in Greece itself at a later period, when Thucydides wrote. JOHNSON. "I recollect but one passage quoted by Thucydides from Homer, which is not to be found in our copies of Homer's works; I am for the antiquity of Homer, and think that a Grecian colony, by being nearer Persia, might be more refined than the mother country.".'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Johnson Print: Book
'It was in 1886 [...] that Mrs Ward began seriously to read Greek, usually with her ten-year-old son; she bought a Thucydides in Godalming one day and was delighted to find it easier than she expected'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Ward Print: Book
'The book ["Robert Elsmere"] had moved him [Gladstone] profoundly and he felt impelled to combat the all too dangerous conclusions to which it pointed. "Mamma and I", he wrote to his daughter in March, "are each of us still separately engaged in a death grapple with "Robert Elsmere". I complained of some of the novels you gave me to read as too stiff, but they are nothing to this. It is wholly out of the common order. At present I regard with doubt and dread the idea of doing anything on it, but cannot yet be sure whether your observations will be verified or not. In any case it is a tremendous book". And to Lord Acton he wrote: "It is not far from twice the length of an ordinary novel; and the labour and effort of reading it all, I should say, sixfold; while one could no more stop in it than in reading Thucydides".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: William Gladstone Print: Book
'Cloudy but very pleasant. Sighted Gozzo [Gozo] about 10. Read Thucydides and packed. Very amusing watching Gozo with its high perched little towns and terraced fields running down to the sea.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Gertrude Bell Print: Book
'After breakfast & a short walk we start work on Thucydides — a desperately dull and tedious
Greek historian.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Clive Staples Lewis Print: Book
‘As to the Thucydides, I cannot think it exactly the book for me - considering how little access
I have at present to classical books, and how little I know of those critical niceties, on which
the merits of an edition of Thucydides must hang. I think a book might have been selected
more in my way. But if I had Arnold’s Thucydides, which I have not, nor Mr.Wordsworth
either, I would set about it. I delicately hinted the thing to Dr. Arnold himself when he was
here - but he said he had no copy. ...’
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Hartley Coleridge Print: Book
