Only passing this on in case of interest to others… something I bumped into while reading articles on JSTOR. This is from a little over a century ago.
Apparently it would take about:
- 8 years (Latin), or
- 16 years (Greek)
to read through all “first-class literature” (as the author defines it) if one reads about three new pages a day, every day.
For what it’s worth, “first-class literature” is defined by the author as:
- (Greek) Homer, Xenophon, Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Lysias, Plato, Demosthenes, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Plutarch’s Lives, Arrian, Pausanias, Strabo.
- (Latin) Cicero, Vergil, Caesar, Horace, Sallust, Ovid, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Catullus, Tibullus.
(The Greek NT, and “perhaps” the Latin Vulgate, get tacked on.)
Of course this is a loose metric (who says what first-class literature is? wouldn’t we add and subtract some authors to form a better canon? what page size is the author assuming? wouldn’t word count be a better metric? etc.) but I thought it was an interesting little metric anyway, and wanted to pass it on.
The author recommends that classics teachers focus on getting this reading under their belt as soon as possible.
(The rest of the article is redundant, explaining what it costed(in pre-WWI prices) to accumulate a library of good editions.)
A Working Library for Students of the Classics: Introductory Note
R. W. Husband, The Classical Weekly, Vol. 7, No. 8 (Dec. 6, 1913), pp. 58-64.
Cheers, Chad