The Canon — Classical Works on War, Strategy, and Statecraft

A working library of the public-domain foundations of strategic thought. Each work is ingested in full — book/part/chapter as individual pages, with concepts wiki-linked, glossaries where dense, and cross-references between authors.

All editions here are public domain (out of copyright). Modern scholarly translations (Howard/Paret, Sawyer/Griffith, Hammond/Lattimore, Mansfield/Bondanella) are preferred for citation but copyrighted and not reproduced.

Works in the Library

Classical Antiquity

Thucydides — History of the Peloponnesian War (Crawley 1874; 8 books, 26 chapters)

Renaissance / Early Modern

Machiavelli — The Prince (Marriott 1908; 26 chapters)

Classical Strategic Theory (19th century)

Clausewitz — On War (Graham 1873; 8 books, 125 chapters, 36-term glossary)
Jomini — The Art of War (Mendell–Craighill 1862; 7 chapters)

Maritime Strategy

Mahan — Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (1890; 14 chapters)
Corbett — Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (1911; 3 parts, 13 chapters)

Ancient Chinese

Sun Tzu — The Art of War (Giles 1910; 13 chapters)

Cross-Reference Matrix — Shared Concepts

Concept	Clausewitz	Sun Tzu	Jomini	Mahan	Corbett	Machiavelli	Thucydides
Deception / stratagem	cool on it	foundational	—	—	—	central	Melos, Sicily
Decisive battle	central (CoG)	avoid when possible	central	central	secondary	—	Syracuse
Limited war	Book VIII	implicit	—	—	central	—	—
Defensive form	stronger form	defensive positions	—	—	fleet-in-being	fortresses	Spartan strategy
Intelligence / spies	moral forces	Ch. XIII	—	—	—	Prince ch. XVIII	throughout
Political object	Book I / VIII	subordinate	Ch. I	national power	subordinate	raison d’état	speeches
Geography / terrain	Book V–VI	Ch. X–XI	Ch. III	central	command of sea	—	—
Morale / will	central	moral law	secondary	national character	—	virtù	speeches
Genius / leadership	Book I Ch. 3	the sovereign general	—	—	—	central	Pericles, Alcibiades

Reading Paths

If you have one week:

Clausewitz Book I (esp. Chapters 1, 3, 7) + Book VIII Chapter 6
Sun Tzu Chapters I, III, VI, XIII
Thucydides Book V (Melian Dialogue)
Mahan Chapter I only

If you have one month:

All of Clausewitz Book I
Clausewitz Book VI (Defence) + Book VII (Attack)
All of Sun Tzu
Corbett Part I (especially Chapter III — Limited and Unlimited War)
Machiavelli Chapters VI, XIV, XVII, XVIII, XXV

If you have one year:

Thucydides cover to cover
Clausewitz cover to cover + the Glossary
Jomini Chapter III (Strategy) — still the clearest statement of the geometric approach
Mahan Chapter I and Chapters VIII, IX, XIV (the analytical chapters)
Corbett cover to cover

Editorial Notes

Clausewitz — The Graham text reads awkwardly compared to Howard/Paret. When a passage seems garbled, it usually is; consult a modern edition for precision.
Sun Tzu — Giles includes the classical Chinese commentators (Ts’ao Kung, Tu Mu, etc.) in his notes. The Samuel Griffith (1963) translation is tighter but copyrighted.
Thucydides — Crawley is Victorian; the Landmark Thucydides (Strassler, 1996) is the reference edition but copyrighted.
Mahan — Chapter I is the theory; Chapters II–XIV are the historical case. Readers looking for doctrine can stop after Chapter I.
Corbett — Explicitly builds on Graham’s Clausewitz (cited in his Introduction). Part I is essential even if you don’t care about navies.
Jomini — Dominated American military thought before Clausewitz. Read Chapter III for the famous decisive point / interior lines argument.
Machiavelli — The Prince is the headline; Discourses on Livy and Art of War (Machiavelli, not Sun Tzu) are deeper works, not yet ingested.

To Be Added

Machiavelli — Discourses on Livy (Thomson 1883)
Machiavelli — Art of War (Farneworth 1762, or Neville 1675)
Xenophon — Anabasis + Cyropaedia (Dakyns)
Polybius — Histories (Shuckburgh)
Caesar — Gallic War + Civil War (McDevitte–Bohn)
Vegetius — De Re Militari (Clarke)
Frederick the Great — Instructions to His Generals (Phillips)
Napoleon’s Maxims (Phillips)
US Joint Publications (public domain as govt works): JP 1 Doctrine for the Armed Forces; JP 3-0 Joint Operations; JP 5-0 Joint Planning
US Army FM 3-0 Operations; USMC FMFM 1 Warfighting (Lind / Gray era)

Methodology

All source texts from Project Gutenberg (verified public domain).
Each chapter preserved with minimal editorial intervention: Gutenberg _italics_ converted to *italics*; paragraph breaks preserved; footnote anchors retained.
First-occurrence-per-chapter wikilinking for core concepts (Clausewitz only at present; Sun Tzu / Corbett / Mahan glossaries pending).
Each chapter file includes YAML frontmatter with work, author, translator, edition, chapter metadata, and tags for Obsidian queries.

_Canon_Index