501 Great Writers - 1-25

Via an online acquaintance, I came across this recently-released book on the all-time great writers. It's in the same series as 501 Films To See Before You Die, which was a useful resource for me (with contributions from Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of my favourite film critics), even if it seems a bit lightweight now. So, I wasn't sure exactly what to expect. In any case, the aforementioned acquaintance is providing me with the list, bit by bit. The authors are listed in chronological order, wisely side-stepping any number of impossible problems presented by ranking by order of quality - Ovid or Nabokov? Shakespeare or Homer? Etc.

Without further ado, here are the first 25 names:

Homer
Sappho
Aeschylus
Pindar
Sophocles
Euripides
Aristophanes
Plato
Gaius Valerius Catullus
Virgil
Horace
Ovid
Apuleius
St. Augustine
Chrétien de Troyes
Dante Aligheri
Francesco Petrarch
Hafiz
Giovanni Boccaccio
Geoffrey Chaucer
Francois Villon
Niccolo Machiavelli
Erasmus
Ludovico Ariosto
Francois Rabelais

I must stress I don't have the book itself, so I can't comment on the rationale provided by the editor, one Julian Patrick, a Canadian literary theorist and lecturer in Comparative Literature. Nevertheless, at this early stage, it's looking like a project that cannot be defended or salvaged. It is almost unfeasibly bad, even taking into account the facts that one, classical educations are rare these days, and two, Westerners tend to be very insular about the canon.

Let me be clear: this is dreadful work from any supposed scholar. The compiler of this list is asserting two indefensible falsehoods: that there were only 25 great writers until 1494 (when Rabelais was probably born) and that only 13 of these were classicists (in the Roman/Greek sense). In reality, it is generally accepted that the classical period was the high point of literature. Trying to come up with a list of the names of unquestionably great writers the author has omitted was exhausting, and at this point pretty much all I can do.

The first thing that leapt out at me was the inclusion of names like Plato and Machiavelli, which obviously means that the list is not limited to poetry and fiction but open to philosophers and essayists. Plato's inclusion is a given, of course - no list of this sort could possibly do without him. However, leaving out Aristotle is borderline criminal. Whilst it's true we only have perhaps a third of Aristotle's works, and that consists mainly of lecture notes by his pupils, this problem has not prevented the author from including Sappho, of whose work we have but fragments, and it hardly needs saying that Aristotle's are ideas that fundamentally (re)shaped physics, biology, ethics, logic, rhetoric, politics and, most importantly here, poetry and theatre. It wouldn't be a stretch to call him the most important thinker and writer who ever lived.

The greatest of the pre-Socratic philosophers, Heraclitus, is also left out. Hesiod, Archilocus, Alcman, Plutarch (!), Petronius, Plautus, Suetonius, Seneca, Livy, Cicero (!), Juvenal, Apollonios of Rhodes, Lucretius, Theocritus, Ennius (no less a figure than the father of Latinate poetry!), Callimachus, Lucan, Sextus Propertius and Tibullus are all conspicuous. The great historians are royally shafted - I understand that Herodotus is not everyone's cup of tea, but excluding Thucydides is staggeringly ignorant and baffling.

Moving outside of a Western context, and the foolishness of choosing only Plato, St Augustine and Machiavelli is laid bare. There is absolutely zero representation of Eastern thought or writing. No Ibn al-Nafis, arguably the founder of science fiction. No Averroes (Spanish, of course, but a huge contributor to Islamic philosophy), the founder of modern secular thought and great translator of Aristotle. No Avicenna. No Algazel. No Ibn Tufail. Omar Khayyám, hugely famous and popular even in the West, has not been included, so there's no hope for Rudaki, who is to Modern Persian what Shakespeare is to Modern English; Ferdowsi, the writer of Shahnameh, the great Persian epic; Nezāmi, the innovator of romanticism, realism and populism in the style of the Persian epic; his probable countryman Nesimi, similarly revered in Azerbaijan; Ali-Shir Nava'i, the national poet of the Uzbeks; Amir Khusrow; or Saadi. Kālidāsa, almost unanimously regarded as the greatest writer in Sanskrit, the author of not one but two great epics and at least one play that could be counted among the greatest of all time, is similarly without trace. Amazingly Hafiz does make it in, scant consolation for anyone who has dared to read outside of their own culture.

Travelling further East (obviously a mistake at this stage), Confucious, of all people, is missing! Laozi, apparently the second best selling poet of all time and the founder of a major religion, isn't there, nor is Zhuangzi. Luo Guanzhong, a writer of roughly equal standing as Kālidāsa, has not been mentioned.

I'm sure you more than get the picture. I know being given the task of Professor Patrick is unenviable (although honestly, I would gladly have put together twice as good a list for half the fee), but even with the numerical limitations, this is not even a representative sample of world literature over this period. I wish I could, as I did with the film equivalent, excuse it as a valuable resource for beginners. But all this book does is encourage the illiteracy and intellectual mediocrity that has blighted post-War generations, not to mention being a sad indictment on the unwillingness of departments of supposed higher education to engage with anything outside of their comfort zone.

Perhaps the list will improve as we move forward. But it's the classical period that is the foundation stone of an education in literature. Getting it wrong is the equivalent of not being able to do arithmetic in mathematics - not an impassable obstacle, but one that makes success very unlikely indeed.