Greek Canonical Authors - Leob Classic Library

This is the Greek author list analysis. For Greek titles, I get 356, this (together with 188 for Latin) is larger than the total ~520 titles in the catalogue - and the reason for this is for some titles with multiple authors, I count each author as an independent title). These titles are from 88 named authors (excluding these 12 titles: Minor Attic Orators, Greek Bucolic Poets, Apostolic Fathers, Greek Elegiac Poetry, Greek Iambic Poetry, Select Papyri, Hellenistic Collection, Greek Anthology, Fragments of Old Comedy, Greek Mathematical Works, Greek Epic Fragments, Homeric Hymns /Apocrypha / Lives). Among these 88 named authors, 3 wrote on Art (Philostratus the Elder and the Younger, Callistratus), Ptolemy wrote on Astronomy, 2 wrote on Geography (Strabo, Pausanias), 3 on Medicine (Galen, Hippocrates, Heracletius), 3 on Military (Aeneas Tacitus, Asclepiodotus, Onasander), Theophrastus wrote on Science. On the remaining 75 authors, 7 were (most likely) Christians (theologians: Basil, Clement of Alexandria, John Damascene; Historians: Eusebius, Procopius - these authors' names are to be important in the Christian tradition. The two other names are Achilles Tatius, Musaeus). Below are my picks out of the remaining 68 authors (compared with 41 Latin authors by this point) for potential inclusion in Western Canonical Text lists:

 

Philosophy (9 authors)

Must include(2): Aristotle, Plato

Likely to include(3): Marcus Aurelius, Philo, Plotinus

May include(2): Epictetus, Sextus Empiricus

Not likely to include(2): Demetrius, Longinus

 

History (16 authors)

Must include(2): Herodotus, Thucydides

Likely to include(5): Arrian, Josephus, Plutarch, Polybius, Xenophon 

May include(5): Appian, Dio Cassius, Diodorus Siculus, Diogenes Laertius (I tend to treat intellectual history as history rather than philosophy - just like how I considered Huang Zongxi's Mingru Xuean as history in the East Asian list), Manethos  

Not likely to include(4): Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Eunapius, Herodian, Philostratus

 

Literature (43 authors)

Must include(1): Homer

Likely to include(6): Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Hesiod, Sappho 

May include(3): Lucian, Menander, Pindar

Not likely to include(33): Aelian, Aeschines, Alcaeus, Alciphron, Anacreon, Apollodorus, Apollonius Rhodius, Aratus, Athenaeus, Babrius, Bacchylides, Callimachus, Corinna, Chariton, Colluthus, Demosthenes, Dio Chrsostom, Ibycus, Isaeus, Isocrates, Julian, Libanius, Longus, Lycophron, Lysias, Nonnos, Oppian, Phaedrus, Quintus Smyrnaeus, Simonides, Stesichorus, Tryphiodorus, Xenophon of Ephesus 

 

Note: One thing that keeps bugging me in classifying these authors are that there are many orators / rhetoricians whose writings I tentatively classify as Literature, even though many write on practical (legal, moral, political) topics that could as easily be classified as Philosophy (say in the Chinese tradition these authors would clearly be classified that way). I guess this is one of the aspects that modern classification of knowledge is at variance with what has happened in the past.

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