Classics

Classics, originally, and often still, the standard authors in the literature of Greece or Rome, now authors in any literature that represent it at its best, when, as Goethe has it, it is “vigorous, fresh, joyous, and healthy,” as in the “Nibelungen,” no less than in the “Iliad.”

Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)