Best ancient & medieval literature according to redditors

>Your Upper casts could kill starve and maim lower castes with impunity


LOL! Utter and complete ahistorical crap. Sudras were free people under the law and owned property that was protected by the law. Further, they were paid workers that worked when they felt like.

Ref: The Arthashastra.

Arthashastra by Kautilya.

This is a really old book, and a lot of the technical terms, such as the denotation of currency, demand some meandering of imagination, but it does make an interesting read. What I found most fascinating about this (some 2000 year old text) is how sophisticated their tactics of surveillance, secrecy and deception were - and the parallels that exist in society today. It helps unearth the principles and techniques from the gizmos.

EDIT: Formatting.

I'd recommend reading a book on the history of philosophy. That way, you'll have a working understanding of all the major philosophers, and you will probably find someone's philosophy interesting enough to pursue them further. A classic is Samuel Enoch Stumpf's Socrates to Sarte. A friend of mine also recommended a more contemporary book that he said is becoming more standard today. A New History of Western Philosophy by Anthony Kenny.

Other standards works many students start with include Rene Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy. Also, Plato is a good starting point. The Five Dialogues are some of his earlier works. These include the Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, and Phaedo. I personally started with Plato's Republic, which a former professor informed me that you must read in order to consider yourself educated in today's world (Interestingly enough, he's only ever said that about books he's read).

I'm a huge fan of Cicero and I had to use these books when I was doing him:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cicero-Pro-Archia-Poeta-Oratio/dp/0865166420/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1396123234&sr=8-2&keywords=pro+archia+poeta+oratio

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cicero-Oratio%2522-Syntactic-Companion-Commentary/dp/0865164398/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1396123234&sr=8-1&keywords=pro+archia+poeta+oratio

the second one isn't needed but can certainly help, the first one is solid, lots of vocab (each word is given on the left page, each time it's used an asterisk goes to it, 5 asterisks and he stops presenting the word).
The speech itself isn't actually that great in English but for me the Latin was great fun and it's short so you can do it all in no time at all.

For an English translation of this ballad you can see here. Most of the monsters in the ballads in this collection are trolls of various kinds. One of the ballads does feature a troll cat ...

Found this on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Vergili-Maronis-Fredericus-Arturus-Hirtzel/dp/B000SEE7AW/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373053729&sr=1-1

Another great book on this topic: http://www.amazon.com/Climbing-Parnassus-Apologia-Greek-Latin/dp/1933859504

This may be closer to what I'm looking for than anything else I've seen previously. I'll give it a shot. Thank you!

Edit: Actually, your suggestion led me to two additional books that might also fulfill what I'm looking for: Ramon Llull's Book of Knighthood and Chivarly and Christine de Pizan's Book of Deeds of Arms and Chivalry.

I hadn't heard of Christine de Pizan in my (obviously too shallow) research and, though I've heard of Ramon Llull, I didn't know he had penned a book on the subject. So, very useful indeed! Thank you!

I just finished reading this translation of Republic. I haven't touched any other, so I can't speak for them, but I felt the author did an admirable job at unifying the text with endnotes referencing relevant passages throughout the book.

As a hipster political scientist, whenever I see someone on Machiavelli's proverbial dick, I have to offer that an old Indian known as Kautilya put's him to shame and proceeded Nick by a thousand years. He wrote something called the Arthashastra and if you enjoyed the PG13 Prince, you're gonna love this guy's work

Which Arthashastra? There are many. Penguin one is good http://www.amazon.in/Arthashastra-Kautilya/dp/0140446036

Have read it in parts though. Found it better than other one I had in Hindi years back at my grandpa's place which was highly rated but I didnt like it much. Also it was not printed anymore so...Anyways you will need someone knowledgeable to ask Qs to otherwise book is useless.

Its not easy to transpose his teachings to modern era. But once you start dissecting problem to its root cause, human nature & how vedanta breaks it down, then the correlation of his principles to situations becomes slightly easier.

And even then you do feel confused sometimes. As its common say in our culture, a guru is a must. Only realized it after trying to understand Kautilya and Ayurved.