A History of Ancient Greek Literature

A History of Ancient Greek Literature is an exceptional and comprehensive textbook of Europe's oldest civilization. The book covers the ancient Greek literature from the earliest texts until the time of the Byzantine Empire. It begins with the earliest surviving works of ancient Greek literature, the two epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, set in an idealized archaic past today identified as having some relation to the Mycenaean era. Homer's epics as well as the Homeric Hymns and the two poems of Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days, comprised the major foundations of the Greek literary tradition that would continue into the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods. All above mentioned periods are presented in this book with a special emphasise on every particularly literary genre of ancient Greek literature – epic poetry, lyric poetry, drama, historiography and philosophy.

Contents

Homer

Lesser Homeric Poems; Hesiod; Orpheus

The Descendants of Homer, Hesiod, and Orpheus

The Song

The Beginnings of Prose

Herodotus

Philosophic and Political Literature to the Death of Socrates

Thucydides

The Drama

Aeschylus

Sophocles

Euripides

Comedy

Plato

Xenophon

The 'Orators'

Demosthenes and His Contemporaries

The Later Literature, Alexandrian and Roman