The ancient world's library, translated anew from the original languages into one clear modern voice: the first openly AI-translated classics series.
Why these translations? — the measured case → See the proof — the originality & accuracy numbers → Open data — sources, checks, replication notebook →Everything here lives in your browser only: pinned books (📌), where you left off reading and listening, your reading list, and your font-size and page-view choices. Clear your browser data and it resets; nothing is ever sent anywhere.
Same voice, same published checks, free like everything here — each moves to the shelf as it clears the pipeline.
A New Plain-English Prose Translation
Homer's war epic in clear, vivid modern prose: all 24 books, translated directly from the Greek. No archaisms, no verse gymnastics: the story, at full speed.
A New Plain-English Prose Translation
The homecoming of Odysseus in fresh contemporary prose: all 24 books from the Greek. Read it like the page-turner it always was.
71 Essays: The First Complete Plain-English Edition
On Superstition, On Isis and Osiris, On the Decline of Oracles, the Table Talk, and 67 more. Most have never had an affordable modern English translation. 690,000 words from the Greek.
Jewish War · Antiquities · Against Apion · The Life
The indispensable historian of first-century Judea and the Roman war: all four works, 628,000 words, newly translated from Niese's Greek. The only cheap alternative was made in 1737.
37 Treatises: The First New Complete English Philo Since 1855
The great philosopher of first-century Alexandria, where Greek thought and the ancient Near East met. Every surviving Greek treatise appears in clear modern English, keyed to the scholarly section numbers.
A New Plain-English Prose Translation
The first history book ever written. Croesus, Cyrus, Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis: all nine books in clear modern prose, translated directly from the Greek.
All 124 Letters, Newly Translated from the Latin
The most readable stoicism ever written: on time, fear, friendship, wealth, and death. Every surviving letter, translated directly from the Latin into plain contemporary English.
The Republic, the Laws, and Two More Dialogues in Plain English
The Republic complete in ten books, the Laws complete in twelve, the Timaeus, and the Crito: the philosophy that shaped every century after it, translated directly from the Greek.
The Two Poems in Plain-English Prose
The birth of the gods and the oldest farmer's-almanac-and-sermon in Greek. Pandora, Prometheus, the Five Ages of Man, translated directly from the Greek into vivid modern prose.
The Pagan Case Against Christianity & the Great Reply, Newly Translated from the Greek
Around 178 CE the philosopher Celsus wrote the ancient world's most thorough attack on Christianity; seventy years later Origen answered it point by point, quoting his opponent so fully that both books survive in one: eight books of the sharpest debate antiquity produced, translated directly from the Greek.
On John, Matthew, Luke & Jeremiah: Much of It in Free English for the First Time
The founder of biblical scholarship at work: verse-by-verse commentaries on John and Matthew, and his preached homilies on Luke and Jeremiah, translated from the Greek and from Jerome's Latin where the Greek is lost. Large stretches of this material have never had a complete free English translation.
The Strangest Greek Tragedy, in Plain English
Dionysus comes home to Thebes disguised as his own priest, and King Pentheus tries to jail a god. The most unsettling of all Greek tragedies (ecstasy, doubt, and a mother's unspeakable homecoming), translated directly from the Greek.
The Oldest Epic on Earth, Newly Translated from the Akkadian
Four thousand years old: a king who has everything, the wild man who becomes his friend, the quest for the Cedar Forest, the death that breaks him, and the search for eternal life that ends at the Flood. Translated from the Standard Babylonian text in the electronic Babylonian Library's up-to-the-minute scholarly reconstruction (used with gratitude under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), including lines recovered too recently for any printed translation. Lost passages are marked honestly with […]; we never invent what the clay no longer carries.
The Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, Newly Translated from the Greek
Theseus and Romulus, Alexander and Caesar, Demosthenes and Cicero: forty-six biographies, paired Greek with Roman, asking in each what a life of power actually costs. Plutarch's masterpiece complete — every Life and every surviving Comparison — in one clear modern voice.
The Sectarian Writings: Community Rule, War Scroll, Thanksgiving Hymns, Habakkuk Pesher & Damascus Document
The five great sectarian works of the Qumran community, translated line for line with the scrolls themselves: every restored word in brackets, every gap in the leather marked. Hidden in desert caves for two thousand years, and among the oldest religious manuscripts ever found — free forever, never for sale.
The Book of the Way, Newly Translated from the Classical Chinese
Eighty-one short chapters on the Way that cannot be told: water that defeats stone, rulers who force nothing, the usefulness of what is not there. Laozi's classic translated directly from the received Chinese text into plain modern English, with every chapter checked line against line.
The Song of the Lord, Newly Translated from the Sanskrit
Two armies face each other, and a warrior puts down his bow. What follows is one of the world's great philosophical poems: seven hundred verses on duty, action, and the self, translated fresh from the Sanskrit into clear modern English — no archaism, no commentary between you and the text.
A New Plain-English Translation from the 1873 French
Phileas Fogg, an English gentleman of maddening precision, bets his entire fortune that he can circle the globe in eighty days — and sets off that very evening with his new French valet, a bag of banknotes, and a detective convinced he is a bank robber. Verne's 1873 adventure at full speed, translated fresh from the French, because the free English versions in circulation are the abridged and error-strewn Victorian ones. All 37 chapters, complete and unabridged.
The Epicurean Poem of Atoms and Mortality, Newly Translated from the Latin
Everything is atoms falling through void, the gods do not care, and death is simply nothing to you — an argument made in Latin hexameter around 55 BC, and one of the strangest, most modern books to survive antiquity. All six books, 7,428 lines, translated fresh from the Latin as unrhymed verse: the physics, the attack on religion, the great consolation against the fear of death, and the plague at Athens on which the poem breaks off unfinished.
The Ugaritic Epic of the Storm-God, Newly Translated from the Cuneiform Tablets
Three thousand years before it was anyone's Bible story, a scribe named Ilimilku pressed this epic into clay at Ugarit: Baal battles Prince Sea, builds his palace of silver and gold, falls to Death, and rises when the heavens rain oil. Here is Litan, the fleeing serpent of seven heads, a full millennium before Leviathan. Translated line for line from the six tablets, every broken edge honestly marked — free forever, never for sale.
The Complete Trilogy of Christian Alexandria, Newly Translated from the Greek
A Greek convert who knew the classics better than his critics: an exhortation to abandon the old gods, a handbook for Christian daily life, and eight books of miscellanies weaving Homer, Plato, and scripture into the ancient world's most learned defense of faith — the whole trilogy translated directly from the Greek.
The Fiercest Voice of Early Christianity, Newly Translated from the Latin
The Carthaginian lawyer who gave Christianity its Latin voice: the Apology addressed to Rome's magistrates, the five books against Marcion, and the great treatises on the soul, the resurrection, baptism, and spectacles — eighteen works of the sharpest, wittiest prose in ancient Latin, translated fresh.
Five Books Against the Gnostics, Newly Translated from the Ancient Latin Version
Written around 180 CE by the bishop of Lyons: the fullest ancient tour of the Gnostic systems — Aeons, the Pleroma, the Demiurge — and the point-by-point case against them that helped define what Christianity would become. Translated fresh from the ancient Latin version in which the work survives.
The First Christian Philosopher, Newly Translated from the Greek
The 2nd-century case for Christianity, argued to the emperor's face and across a two-day debate with the Jewish teacher Trypho: the earliest surviving Christian-Jewish dialogue, with every scripture quotation rendered from Justin's own Greek.
The public-domain translations are monuments, and they read like it. Hear the same lines side by side:
Independent AI referees re-read the Greek behind random batches hunting for errors; an outside comparative review of six famous passages found our accuracy “never beaten, occasionally sharper” than the classic versions. Every number is published on the proof page.
Read Philo beside Josephus beside Plutarch without time-traveling between translators from 1737, 1854 and 1919. One consistent register means when the authors sound different, that difference is real. That is exactly what comparative readers and researchers need.
A complete modern-English Philo does not exist at any price. Most of Plutarch’s Moralia has never had an affordable modern translation. Complete-works Josephus in current English costs a shelf of Loebs. This library fills gaps, not shelves.
A second, independent, modern rendering is a lens: wherever two honest translations diverge, the Greek is telling you something. That’s why we publish the sample of every volume free.
Every volume on the shelf is narrated: over 350 hours at last count, dialogues performed in distinct voices, every word highlighted as it is spoken. Much of it has simply never existed as an audiobook before: no one had ever recorded the complete Moralia, the complete Philo, or Origen answering Celsus. Stream from any card above, or download any part, any playlist, any book. Free, like everything else here.
Tell me when a book’s audio is readyEvery book above is free to read, listen to, and download: the whole library, no account, no catch. Read online, or take the files anywhere: EPUB is the standard ebook format; it opens in Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play Books, and e-reader apps, and can be sent to a Kindle; TXT is the plain text, which opens on anything.
📦 Download the entire libraryIf you enjoy these books, the way to support the press is simple: read them, and tell someone. The library is free and always will be — but if you’d like to help cover the compute for the next translation, you can ☕ leave a coffee. Never expected, always optional.
Hear about new volumes — email usScriptorium Press · translations made from public-domain Greek texts (Perseus · Niese · Cohn) · the Greek is always the authority · the proof · the colophon · open data & replication · askhistoryai.com · watchshowdown.com · ebikeriderlab.com · panelpicks.com