Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. The Iliad is one of the oldest works of Western literature, dating back to classical antiquity. Homer’s epic poem belongs in a collection called the Epic Cycle, which includes the Odyssey. It was originally written in ancient Greek and utilized a dactylic hexameter rhyme scheme. Although this rhyme scheme sounds beautiful in its native language, in modern English it can sound awkward and, as Eric McMillan humorously describes it,...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Virgil’s epic poem begins with Aeneas fleeing the ruins of Troy with his father Anchises and his young son Ascanius, with a plan to make a home in Italy. Because of a prophecy foretelling that the descendants of Aeneas will one day destroy Carthage, Juno’s favorite city, Juno orders the god of the winds to unleash a terrible storm. The ships are thrown off course and arrive at an African port. As Aeneas makes his way towards his ...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Cicero composed these discourses while in his villa in Tusculum as he was mourning the death of his daughter, in order to convey his philosophy of how to live wisely and well. They take the form of fictional dialogues between Cicero and his friends, with each one focusing on a particular Stoic theme. The first, “On the Contempt of Death,” reminds us that mortality is nothing to be upset about. The second, “On Bearing Pain,” reass...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Seneca the Younger was a statesman and philosopher who lived in Rome around the dawn of the Common Era. Though he wrote a large amount of tragedies and other works, today he’s perhaps best known for his writing on Stoic philosophy and principles. Seneca didn’t write books about Stoicism; rather, he composed essays and sent letters over the course of his lifetime that addressed that philosophy. Since these essays and letters are a...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Raised a slave in Nero’s court, Epictetus would become one of the most influential philosophers in the Stoic tradition. While exiled in Greece by an emperor who considered philosophers a threat, Epictetus founded a school of philosophy at Nicopolis. His student Arrian of Nicomedia took careful notes of his sometimes cantankerous lectures, the surviving examples of which are now known as the Discourses of Epictetus. In these disco...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Suetonius was a Roman historian born in about 69 AD, shortly after the death of the emperor Nero. This book, detailing the lives of the twelve Roman emperors who were known as “Caesar”—some by a family connection to Julius Caesar, some just as a title—is considered to be Suetonius’ most important work. The Lives of the Caesars is a detailed account of the often dramatic lives of these emperors, whose abilities and morals varied e...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. The Tao Te Ching is a classic Chinese text written around the 6th century BC by Laozi, a Zhoudynasty courtier. While its authorship is debated, the text remains a fundamental building block of Taoism and one of the most influential works of its time. Today it’s one of the mosttranslated works in the world. The work itself is a series of 81 short poetic sections, each one written in a fluid, ambiguous style, leaving them open to w...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. The Sun Also Rises was Ernest Hemingway’s first published novel, and the novel that introduced the term “Lost Generation” to describe the generation that came to adulthood during World War I. The novel follows Jake Barnes, an American expat living in the Parisian café society of the roaring 20s. A wound sustained during the war has left him unable to have sex, and that drives a wedge between him and the woman he loves: Brett Ashl...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. “When I die and am in Heaven,” Christine Daaé’s father said, “I will send the Angel of Music to you.” It is with these words still in her ears years later that Christine accepts the disembodied voice that speaks to her to claim that divine title, and to give her singing lessons within her dressing room at the Paris Opera, as the fulfillment of her beloved father’s promise. And when those lessons lead her to a performance that ast...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Paradise Lost is an epic poem written by the Puritan English poet John Milton between 1658 and 1663, and published in 1667. This is a period of English history which encompasses the end of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Perhaps reflecting some of his country’s turmoil during Milton’s life, Paradise Lost deals with revolution in Heaven by Satan and his followers against God, their defea...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Commentaries on the Gallic War describes the conflicts between Rome and the region of Gaul in western Europe, as well as the Germanic peoples who lived to the east of the river Rhine, and Britain to the north, in the later years of the Roman republic. Despite being written in the 3rd person, the commentaries are the memoirs of Julius Caesar himself, and offer a unique insight into these events. Before the Gallic war began, the Ro...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Hercule Poirot has retired to the English village of King’s Abbot, determined to use his little grey cells in the growing of vegetable marrows. But when Roger Ackroyd, a local businessman and former acquaintance of Poirot’s, is murdered, the man’s niece begs Poirot to investigate in order to clear her fiancé. With Hastings having married and moved to Argentina, Poirot enlists the local doctor to be his assistant and scribe, and t...