Make a list of all the texts in the whole world which are four hundred years old or more and are still widely read today. The first five are easy: the Judeo-Christian Bible, the Qur'an, the Bhagavad Gita, the Pali Canon of Buddhism, and the analects of Confucious. Then, in rapid sucession, nearly everyone agrees to include: Plato's Republic Aristotle's Politics the plays of Shakespeare the plays of Sophocles Dante's Divine Comedy Homer's Illiad and Odyssey Montaigne's Essays Cervantes's Don Quixote Machiavelli's The Prince. After that, consensus becoes more difficult to achieve. . .The point is not whether the list contains twelve or twenty-four or even fifty entries; rather, the point is that the list is extremely short. Think of it: of all the hundreds of thousands of books, essays, poems, letters, plays and histories that were composed four hundred years ago or more, only a dozen or two are still widely read today. . .these supertexts