Harvard Classics

Compiled by Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot and first published by P. F. Collier & Son in 1909–1910, the Harvard Classics — popularly known as "Dr. Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf" — is a fixed 51-volume anthology of classic literature, philosophy, science, and history, from ancient Greece through the nineteenth century, assembled on the premise that fifteen minutes of daily reading from it could give a reader the essence of a liberal education. Volume 2, "Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius," collects Plato's Apology, Crito and Phaedo, Epictetus's Golden Sayings, and Marcus Aurelius's Meditations.