Core Curriculum texts

This page links to free, online versions of the major texts discussed in the two main Core Curriculum classes, Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization.

The student group Free Culture at Columbia has compiled the core texts and distributed the package on USB keys. The package can be found here.

Literature Humanities

First semester

• The Iliad by Homer
• Hymn to Demeter by Homer
• The Odyssey by Homer
• The History by Herodotus
• The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
• Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
• Medea by Euripides
• Lysistrata by Aristophanes
• The Oresteia Trilogy by Aeschylus:

• Agamemnon
• The Libation Bearers
• Eumenidies

• The Symposium by Plato
• The Bible:

• Book of Genesis
• Book of Job

Second semester

• The Aeneid by Virgil
• The Confessions by Saint Augustine
• The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
• The Essays by Michel de Montaigne
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Contemporary Civilization

First semester

• The Republic by Plato
• Politics by Aristotle
• Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
• Book of Exodus in the Bible
• City of God by Saint Augustine
• The Holy Qu'ran
• The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
• The Discourses by Niccolo Machiavelli
• The Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
• Second Treatise of Government by John Locke

Second semester

• An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals by David Hume
• Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant
• Discourse on the Origins of Inequality by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
• The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
• On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche