# Which is the second most important work of literature for the Western World? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [August 23, 2010, 10:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-is-the-second-most-important-work-of-literature-for-the-western-world/551143 "2010-08-23T10:19:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2010, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-is-the-second-most-important-work-of-literature-for-the-western-world/551143/41 "2010-08-23T17:46:29Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > But how about the Declaration of Independence… Scooped me, dangit! I have a hard time choosing between that world-changing piece of paper and the _Iliad_. Although one could question whether the _Iliad_ counts as “written,” I suppose. It’s informed our views on warfare, obligation, family, literature, poetry, revenge, honor, treachery, fate…heck, wasn’t there someone who said “Without Homer, nothing?” [QUOTE=Cummings study guide] The Iliad ranks as one of the most important and most influential works in world literature in that it established literary standards and conventions that writers have imitated over the centuries, down to the present day. It also created archetypes that hundreds of great writers—including Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Stephen Crane, and James Joyce—alluded to when in need of an apt metaphor or simile. In addition, the Iliad provided a mother lode of information about Greek customs and ideals and about Greek mythology. The Iliad was a truly remarkable accomplishment. Even though its author had no similar literary model on which to base his work, he wrote a masterpiece that ranks with the greatest works of all time. No student of literature can ignore Homer. No writer’s education is complete unless he has read Homer. [/QUOTE] [source](http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/TheIliad.html#importance) ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2010, 6:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-is-the-second-most-important-work-of-literature-for-the-western-world/551143/42 "2010-08-23T18:46:37Z")
If “The Bible” counts as one work, given its multiple authors, provenances, formats, etc, then even more so does [_The First Folio_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Folio). So that, closely followed by _On the Origin of Species_. ---
**Author:** ![Ogre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/ecb155/32.png) [@Ogre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ogre)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2010, 6:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-is-the-second-most-important-work-of-literature-for-the-western-world/551143/43 "2010-08-23T18:49:37Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > If “The Bible” counts as one work, given its multiple authors, provenances, formats, etc, then even more so does [_The First Folio_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Folio). So that, closely followed by _On the Origin of Species_. Upon first viewing, I thought you said _The Fiend Folio_. I mean, yeah, I found it influential, but sheesh. :smack: ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2010, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-is-the-second-most-important-work-of-literature-for-the-western-world/551143/44 "2010-08-23T19:35:39Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > > [@Mahaloth](#): > > > > I still don’t get this. > > Which is more ubiquitous in fiction? > > 1. The Four Horsemen \<-\> Multiplying Food > 2. The Apocalypse/Armageddon \<-\> Flipping over pots of gold in the temple > 3. 666 \<-\> The parable of the good samaritan > > For the Four Horsemen, I can think of Good Omens and Incarnations of Immortality off the top of my head, and Wikipedia names [30 different things named after them](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_horsemen). As to multiplying food? Er…it was in the Bible. If you’re talking about the Bible, it’s certainly a story that comes up, but I don’t think I’ve seen it taken and adapted by others even once. If anything, you’re more likely to see a reference to a cornucopia than a wise man handing out loafs of bread. > > [Armageddon?](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armageddon_(disambiguation)), it’s been used a couple times in fiction. Jesus and the money changers? Nope, I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen Bruce Willis go and rob a bank so that he could toss all the money into a river and rant about how evil they are. > > 666? Yeah, I think you’ll find that if you ask about there are far more people who could tell you that 666 means something about the devil or the anti-Christ than could tell you what a Samaritan is. Surely you can see the flaw in this argument. All that you did was take three of the best-known symbols from the Book of Revelation and compare them to three of the lesser-known events from the Gospels. To legitimately test your hypothesis, we’d obviously have to compare the best-known things in Revelation to the best-known things in the rest of the Bible, such as the Garden of Eden, David killing Goliath, and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Are you truly willing to argue that if we did that, we’d still find that “nearly all references come from Revelations [sic]”? On the whole, perhaps you should put some more effort into posting things that are true. That way you wouldn’t have to spend so much time on these flimsy defenses of false statements. Alternately, you could accomplish the same thing by admitting an error when you make it. ---
**Author:** ![Mahaloth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mahaloth/32/1079_2.png) [@Mahaloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mahaloth)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2010, 8:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-is-the-second-most-important-work-of-literature-for-the-western-world/551143/45 "2010-08-23T20:31:29Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > If “The Bible” counts as one work, given its multiple authors, provenances, formats, etc, then even more so does [_The First Folio_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Folio). So that, closely followed by _On the Origin of Species_. That was my point. If we are counting collections(let alone The Bible, which has many authors), then we should include collected works, like Shakespeare’s plays. Heck, even his sonnets are more influential than many books of the Bible. I’d bet even Christopher Marlowe’s plays are more influential than…Malachi, for example. ---
**Author:** ![NinjaChick](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/71c47a/32.png) [@NinjaChick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NinjaChick)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2010, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-is-the-second-most-important-work-of-literature-for-the-western-world/551143/46 "2010-08-23T20:39:18Z")
Well, I don’t agree that the bible was the most influential, because I have a hard time to begin with with the idea that one book has definitively had more influence than another, but I’ll toss out a couple ideas: \*Both The Iliad and The Odyssey. Homer basically popularized large-scale storytelling, not to mention provided us with the archetypical hero/hero’s journey. \*Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, without which we would have no modern philosophy. \*Euclid’s Elements (enjoy math? You owe him), which allowed Ptolemy to write the Almagest, which paved the way for Copernicus’s On The Revolutions of the Celestial Sphere. We also owe a considerable debt to Descartes’s Geometry (which technically was part of Discourse on the Method). Newton’s Principia arguably aimed to tie all that preceded him together. \*Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry, Darwin’s On The Origin of Species. \*Herodotus’s Histories and Thucydides Peloponnesian War (I have literally seen two academics get red in the face with anger over who was more significant). \*Das Kapital, The Wealth of Nations, the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence (not books, but important enough to count), Tocqueville’ Democracy in America, \the collected writings of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau\ \*Summa Theologica, Goethe’s Faust, Dante’s Divine Comedy. \*Don Quixote, just for inventing the novel. > [@Mr.Excellent](#): > > > [@Jonathan\_Chance](#): > > > > I suppose I’d go with Romeo and Juliet. The tale of star-crossed lovers resonates with people on most levels and I’d bet most of the west would understand pretty quickly if you described two people as being such. > > Slight hijack, but this always bugs me: Romeo and Juliet were _not_ star-crossed lovers, they were damned idiots. Asimov made an excellent argument that the whole Montague/Capulet feud was on its last legs by the time the play started - for example, when Tybalt complains to Lord Capulet that Romeo is crashing their party, Lord Capulet’s response boils down to “What of it? He’s a good kid.” > > Tybalt cares about the feud, and maybe a few street toughs who just enjoy a fight. But none of the adults place much stock in it - if Romeo and Juliet had just gone to their parents, they’d probably have been delighted with the opportunity to “officially” end the feud through a marriage. But these stupid kids are are besotted with the idea of a “forbidden” romance that they ruin their own chance at whatever happiness such a marriage would provide (and I think it’d fall apart), and then they can’t even handle _that_ disappointment like sane people. My 9th grade English teacher gave the best summary of it, IMO: they were two kids who were both in love with the idea of being in love, and also very very stupid. They would’ve been miserably unhappy had their families said, “eh, well, sure, go for it,” because they didn’t care about each other, they cared about the risk they thought they created. ---
**Author:** ![YogSothoth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/8edcca/32.png) [@YogSothoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/YogSothoth)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2010, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-is-the-second-most-important-work-of-literature-for-the-western-world/551143/47 "2010-08-23T20:43:22Z")
The Origin of Species by Darwin? ---
**Author:** ![panache45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/panache45/32/64_2.png) [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2010, 9:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-is-the-second-most-important-work-of-literature-for-the-western-world/551143/48 "2010-08-23T21:19:13Z")
I’m still sticking with Aristotle. If he hadn’t existed, and nobody else wrote what he wrote . . . I can’t imagine what our world would be like. In fact I believe Aristotle and Plato, combined, beat the Bible. ---
**Author:** ![Princhester](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3e96dc/32.png) [@Princhester](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Princhester)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2010, 11:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-is-the-second-most-important-work-of-literature-for-the-western-world/551143/49 "2010-08-23T23:38:35Z")
> [@EinsteinsHund](#): > > The points you mentioned are valid, but I would also add the cultural, philosophical and political impact. The cultural, philosophical and political impact of many of the esteemed works being cited here is highly dubious: many are the type of work that people in ivory towers have read but almost no one else has, and which contain ideas that are dated, wrong or obvious, but which are esteemed because they happen to be written down in old books. > [@Galileo](#): > > _On the Origin of Species_, by Darwin. If we are allowed non fiction I think this is the winner. > [@Chronos](#): > > > [@](#): > > > > What does “important” mean? Neither of the texts you mention have been read by probably 99% of the English speaking population at any given time. > > Then again, the same is true of the Bible, if you mean reading the whole thing. Agreed. I think the bible is much over-rated in this context. Mostly it is just an old book that describes aspects of life and rules by which people may get along. Those things would occur today whether the bible was written or not, and have always occurred even in cultures which have never heard of the bible. Not so of Origin of Species, for example. ---
**Author:** ![Mahaloth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mahaloth/32/1079_2.png) [@Mahaloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mahaloth)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2010, 2:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-is-the-second-most-important-work-of-literature-for-the-western-world/551143/50 "2010-08-24T02:59:15Z")
> [@Princhester](#): > > Mostly it is just an old book that describes aspects of life and rules by which people may get along. That’s what you think the Bible is? Wow. Anyway, Origin of the Species definitely deserves a mention in the non-fiction category. But if we get into non-fiction and scientific works, we open a whopper of a category. In terms of “literature”, I stick with Shakespeare’s first folio. ---
**Author:** ![Princhester](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3e96dc/32.png) [@Princhester](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Princhester)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2010, 3:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-is-the-second-most-important-work-of-literature-for-the-western-world/551143/51 "2010-08-24T03:44:33Z")
> [@Mahaloth](#): > > > [@Princhester](#): > > > > Mostly it is just an old book that describes aspects of life and rules by which people may get along. > > That’s what you think the Bible is? Wow. Well that plus a whole load of shit people made up. What else? ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2010, 3:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-is-the-second-most-important-work-of-literature-for-the-western-world/551143/52 "2010-08-24T03:47:16Z")
> [@Ogre](#): > > There have been many thousands of times more weddings than horror movies, and a significant percentage of them have used 1 Corinthians 13 in the ceremony. That alone blows Revelation out of the water. That’s just one example. I don’t think I would consider that to be an example of “influence” since it is the Bible itself. 1 Corinthians 13 didn’t inspire someone to write 1 Corinthians 13. Even if you consider the overall Christian wedding ceremony to be a derivative work – rather than an excuse to quote the Bible – it only influenced whoever came up with the ceremony. And that guy was probably a preacher under the pay of the Church – so it’s not like he was influenced so much as he was commissioned. ---
**Author:** ![jackdavinci](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackdavinci/32/3259_2.png) [@jackdavinci](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jackdavinci)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2010, 7:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-is-the-second-most-important-work-of-literature-for-the-western-world/551143/53 "2010-08-24T07:54:27Z")
Well “The Complete Works of” Shakespeare is worth a mention - since the old and new testament of the bible are legitimately considerable as having multiple authors… ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2010, 8:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-is-the-second-most-important-work-of-literature-for-the-western-world/551143/54 "2010-08-24T08:09:41Z")
> [@Princhester](#): > > > [@Mahaloth](#): > > > > That’s what you think the Bible is? Wow. > > Well that plus a whole load of shit people made up. What else? And _Harry Potter_, _Lord of the Rings_, and _A Tale of Two Cities_ (the three works you suggested yourself in post 5) aren’t “shit people made up?” ---
**Author:** ![Princhester](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3e96dc/32.png) [@Princhester](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Princhester)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2010, 9:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-is-the-second-most-important-work-of-literature-for-the-western-world/551143/55 "2010-08-24T09:10:07Z")
Of course they are. Are they important shit? As I said at the outset, until you define “important” for the purpose of the question it’s hard to give an answer. If you are going by what influences people, which was what I was considering at my post 5 then I think the fiction I named has a shot. So does the Bible, and I didn’t say otherwise at post 5. I left the OP’s assumption that it was No. 1 unchallenged. If on the other hand one is thinking about “important” in the sense of describing an empirical and seriously heavyweight realisation about the nature of the world, then Origin of Species I see as a real contender, and the Bible not so much because a lot of it is just descriptive, or alternatively supernatural shit that someone made up. Sorry if that wasn’t clear but let’s face it many of the posters in this thread are very ready to say what they think to be “important” works of literature but are pretty damn thin when it comes to saying what “important” even means to them for the purposes of this question. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Second\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@The\_Second\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Second_Stone)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2010, 9:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-is-the-second-most-important-work-of-literature-for-the-western-world/551143/56 "2010-08-24T09:26:52Z")
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson Damn bats. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2010, 12:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-is-the-second-most-important-work-of-literature-for-the-western-world/551143/57 "2010-08-24T12:26:47Z")
If we break it down to literary traditions, after the Bible I’d say Classical literature is number two. For one thing, it’s the only tradition shared by the entire Western world; we may all know Shakespeare and Don Quixote, but non-Spanish speakers don’t usually know much about Spanish art and culture of the period the way they’re familiar with Greece and Rome. I think only modern mass-media (esp. film and tv) comes close, and it has nowhere near the time depth to penetrate into philosophy and culture. Of Greco-Roman lit., I think Homer’s _Iliad_ is a good choice. I think **NinjaChick** is overstating the case when she says it “provided us with the archetypical hero / hero’s journey” – those already existed in oral tradition. He (assuming you believe Homer was a distinct historical person) did provide a literary model for epic literature, though, and the epic hero. Dante and Milton are directly inspired by Homer. The heroic tradition continues into medieval Romance, and even Don Quixote is a send-up of it. The scouring powder, Ajax, comes from the Iliad; how many other works of literature are naming household cleaning products two thousand years later? ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2010, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-is-the-second-most-important-work-of-literature-for-the-western-world/551143/58 "2010-08-24T13:35:38Z")
I assumed most influential would mean the most influential in literature. I don’t have a problem lumping films in with that, but not weddings and prayers or whatever. I do know that we take Biblical allusions for granted. I knew a Hindu girl at school who was originally from India, and she was always horribly confused in her literature classes. We always had to explain the Biblical allusions to her. I wish I could be more specific, but it’s too close to bed time. ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2010, 1:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-is-the-second-most-important-work-of-literature-for-the-western-world/551143/59 "2010-08-24T13:38:19Z")
> [@Dr.Drake](#): > > The scouring powder, Ajax, comes from the Iliad; how many other works of literature are naming household cleaning products two thousand years later? Makes me want to start a line of _Gilgamesh™ Pot Scrubber_ cleaning brushes. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Ogre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/ecb155/32.png) [@Ogre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ogre)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2010, 3:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-is-the-second-most-important-work-of-literature-for-the-western-world/551143/60 "2010-08-24T15:08:44Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > > [@Ogre](#): > > > > There have been many thousands of times more weddings than horror movies, and a significant percentage of them have used 1 Corinthians 13 in the ceremony. That alone blows Revelation out of the water. That’s just one example. > > I don’t think I would consider that to be an example of “influence” since it is the Bible itself. 1 Corinthians 13 didn’t inspire someone to write 1 Corinthians 13. Even if you consider the overall Christian wedding ceremony to be a derivative work – rather than an excuse to quote the Bible – it only influenced whoever came up with the ceremony. And that guy was probably a preacher under the pay of the Church – so it’s not like he was influenced so much as he was commissioned. I’m not sure what the latter has to do with anything, since a great deal of what we consider the world’s best, most inspired art was done on commission from the church. But anyway, I’ll bet if you took every biblically-influenced horror movie ever made, plus every piece of biblically-influenced horror fiction (which, by the way, in my experience relies as much on the Old Testament - think _The Exorcist_, etc. - for inspiration as anything in Revelation) and compared it to the amount of “inspirational literature” published in this country alone in the past 20 years, it would amount to a fraction of the total of the inspirational literature. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-is-the-second-most-important-work-of-literature-for-the-western-world/551143.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-is-the-second-most-important-work-of-literature-for-the-western-world/551143.md?page=4)