greek literature report

1. Greek Literature

2. • Greek literature refers to
writings composed in areas
of Greek influence, throughout
the whole period in which
the Greek-speaking people
have existed.

3. • Ancient Greek literature refers
to literature written in Ancient
Greek from the oldest surviving
written works in the Greek
language until approximately the
fifth century AD and the rise of the
Byzantine Empire

4. Preclassical
• Homer - the Iliad and the Odyssey
• Hesiod- Works and Days and Theogony

5. Classical
Lyrical poetry,
odes,
pastorals,
elegies,
epigrams;
Dramatic presentation
of comedy and tragedy; histories, rhetorical treati
ses, philosophical dialectics, and philosophical
treatises

6. • Sappho Pindar
TWO MAJOR LYRICAL POET

7. epinikion or epinicion
Creatures for a day! What is a man?
What is he not?
A dream of a shadowIs our mortal being. But
when there comes to men
A gleam of splendour given of heaven,
Then rests on them a light of glory
And blessed are their days

8. Classical Era
• three authors:
• Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
• Festival:
• Dionysus – God of fertility and wine
• 1st day: great procession
• 2nd day: competition bet. 10 dithyrambic
choruses
• 3rd day: 5 comic poets produced a play

9. Theater of Dionysus

10. Most influential historians
• Herodotus
• Thucydides
• Xenophon

11. The greatest prose achievement
of the 4th century BCE
• Socrates was a classical Greek philosopher credited
as one of the founders of Western philosophy. He is an
enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of
classical writers,
• Plato(platon)
• Aristotle

12. Hellenistic
• later Greek poetry flourished primarily in
the 3rd century BC. The chief poets
were Theocritus, Callimachus,
and Apollonius of Rhodes
• Theocritus, who lived from about 310 to
250 BC, was the creator of pastoral
poetry, a type that the Roman
Virgil mastered in his Eclogues

13. Valuable contribution
• Translation of Old Testament into Greek
finished by the end of 2nd century BC at
Alexandria
The name Septuagint is from Latin
septuaginta "seventy," from the tradition
that there were 72 scholars who did the
work.

14. Roman Age
• Significant historians of the period
were Timaeus, Polybius, Diodorus
Siculus, Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, Appian of
Alexandria, Arrian, and Plutarch.

15. Byzantine
• Byzantine literature refers to literature of
the Byzantine Empire written
in Atticizing, Medieval and early Modern
Greek.

16. Aeschylus (525-456 BC)
• -a musician and a fighter.
• Took part in the Battle of
Salamis which closed Persian
Wars.
• -threw off the shackles of the
old choral dithyramb,added
another actor, reduced the
chorus to 15

17. Aeschylus (525-456 BC)
• Wrote some ninety plays of w/c 7
tragedies remain
• The Persians – only extant Greek tragedy
based on contemporary event.
• He presents suffering and death in such
way that it exalts rather than depresses
us.

18. Aeschylus (525-456 BC)
• Agamemnon trilogy
• Agamemnon- when Agamemnon returns after
the Trojan War with his wife
• The Libation Bearers- Agamemnon’s daughter
Electra & her brother Orestes slay their mother
Clytemnestra & her lover.
• The Eumenides Orestes- delivered from the
avenging Furies and reconciled to his homeland
through the mercy goddess Athena

19. Aeschylus (525-456 BC
• He tosses the gods to one side and
gropes towards monotheism

20. Sophocles ( c 496-406 BC)
(Sopok-les)
• Wrote 123 plays, 7
remain
• -Ajax
• -Antigone
• -the woman of Trachis
• -Oedipus the King
• -Electra
• Philoctetes
• Oedipus at Colonus

21. Sophocles
• Sophocles was the most-fêted playwright
in the dramatic competitions of the city-
state of Athens that took place during the
religious festivals of the Lenaea and
the Dionysia. He competed in 30
competitions, won 18, and was never
judged lower than second place.
Aeschylus won 14 competitions, and was
sometimes defeated by Sophocles, while
Euripides won 5 competitions

22. Aristotle
• His writings cover many subjects –
including physics, biology, zoology,
metaphysics, logic,
ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theater,
music, rhetoric, linguistics, politics
and government – and constitute the
first comprehensive system
of Western philosophy.

23. Aristotle
• this period in Athens, between 335 and
323 BC, is when Aristotle is believed to
have composed many of his works.
• He wrote many dialogues of which only
fragments have survived. Those works
that have survived are in treatise form and
were not, for the most part, intended for
widespread publication;

24. Aristotle
• they are generally thought to be lecture
aids for his students. His most important
treatises include
Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean
Ethics, Politics, De Anima (On the Soul)
and Poetics

25. Aristotle
• -tragedy is an imitation of an action
• -it should be dramatic not narrative
• With incidents arousing pity and fear
• It should be long enough to show a character
passing gradually from happiness to misery
• -it should represent one complete action with the
incidents so closely integrated that nothing can
be deleted w/o destroying the unity of the whole.

26. Aristotle
• A good plot involves:
Peripety(reversal) w/c is a change from one
state of affairs to its opposite
Discovery – a change from ignorance to
knowledge
Pity- aroused by undiscovered suffering

27. Three unities
• Time
• Place
• Action