A Daunting Endeavor The oldest stories ever told are written in the stars. The Greeks, Romans, and other ancient civilizations decoded those stories as a means of defining our place in the cosmos. We are not born into an empty universe. We simply must learn its stories. The ancients sorted our stories in the stars, unraveling the mysteries of life and nature through myth, stories that explain the whys and wherefores of our existence. Some of us are introduced to these stories as children, or encounter them later on the path to adulthood, or perhaps at an even older age. When we finally open our first volume of literature, we discover stories that help us to understand who we are and how we are to behave as members of a civilized society. They help us to know ourselves, to live the life that Socrates declared the only one worth living: the examined life. Why Read the Great Works? Among the questions we can ask when launching on a study of the Great Works are: ¿Why is classical literature so important, or is it important at all? ¿What is better: a survey that covers many books or a deeper study of only a few books?