Greek literature

Greek literature refers to writings composed in areas of Greek influence, throughout the whole period in which the Greek-speaking people have existed. Ancient Greek literature (before AD 350) 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. The Greek language arose from the proto-IndoEuropean language, though roughly one-third of its words cannot be derived from various reconstructions of the tongue. A number of alphabets and syllabaries had been used to render Greek, but surviving Greek literature was written in a Phoenician-derived alphabet that arose primarily in Greek Ionia and was fully adopted by Athens by the fifth century BC. Preclassical At the beginning of Greek literature stand the two monumental works of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Though dates of composition vary, these works were fixed around 800 BC or after. The other great poet of the preclassical period was Hesiod. His two surviving works are Works and Days and Theogony. Some ancients thought Homer and Hesiod roughly contemporaneous, even rivals in contests, but modern scholarship raises doubts on these issues. Classical In the classical period many of the genres of western literature became more prominent. Lyrical poetry, odes, pastorals, elegies, epigrams; dramatic presentations ofcomedy and tragedy; histories, rhetorical treatises, philosophical dialectics, and philosophical treatises all arose in this period. As the genres evolved, various expectations arose, such that a particular poetic genre came to require the Doric or Lesbos dialect. The two major lyrical poets were Sappho and Pindar. The Classical era also saw the dawn of drama. Of the hundreds of tragedies written and performed during theclassical age, only a limited number of plays by three authors have survived: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Like tragedy, the comedy arose from a ritual in honor of Dionysus, but in this case the plays were full of frank obscenity, abuse, and insult. The surviving plays byAristophanes are a treasure trove of comic presentation. Menander is considered the best of the writers of the New Comedy. Two of the most influential historians who had yet lived flourished during Greece's classical age: Herodotus and Thucydides. A third historian, Xenophon, began his "Hellenica" where Thucydides ended his work about 411 BC and carried his history to 362 BC.

The greatest prose achievement of the 4th century was in philosophy. Among the tide of Greek philosophy, three names tower above the rest: Socrates even though he did not write anything himself, Plato, and Aristotle. Hellenistic By 338 BC many of the key Greek cities had been conquered by Philip II of Macedon. Philip II's son Alexander extended his father's conquests greatly. The Greek colony of Alexandria in northern Egypt became, from the 3rd century BC, the outstanding center of Greek culture. 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. One of the most valuable contributions of the Hellenistic period was the translation of the Old Testament into Greek. The work was done at Alexandria and completed by the end of the 2nd century BC. The name Septuagint is from Latin septuaginta "seventy," from the tradition that there were 72 scholars who did the work. Roman Age The significant historians in the period after Alexander were Timaeus, Polybius, Diodorus Siculus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Appian of Alexandria, Arrian, and Plutarch. The period of time they cover extended from late in the 4th century BC to the 2nd century AD. Eratosthenes of Alexandria, who died about 194 BC, wrote on astronomy and geography, but his work is known mainly from later summaries. The physician Galen, in the history of ancient science, is the most significant person in medicine after Hippocrates, who laid the foundation of medicine in the 5th century BC. The New Testament, written by various authors in varying qualities of Koine Greek hails from this period (1st to early 2nd century AD), the most important works being theGospels and the Epistles of Saint Paul. Patristic literature was written in the Hellenistic Greek of this period. Syria and Alexandria, especially, flourished. Byzantine (AD 290-1453) If Byzantine literature is the expression of the intellectual life of the Byzantine Greeks during the Christian Middle Ages, then it is a multiform organism, combining Greek and Christian civilization on the common foundation of the Roman political system, set in the intellectual and ethnographic atmosphere of the Near East. Byzantine literature partakes of four different cultural elements: the Greek, the Christian, the Roman, and the Oriental, the character of which commingling with the rest. To Hellenistic intellectual culture and Roman governmental organization are added the

emotional life of Christianity and the world of Oriental imagination, the last enveloping all the other three.[1] Aside from personal correspondence, literature of this period was primarily written in the Atticizing style. Some early literature of this period was written in Latin; some of the works from the Latin Empire were written in French. Chronicles, distinct from historic, arose in this period. Encyclopedias also flourished in this period. Modern Greek (post 1453) Modern Greek literature refers to literature written in common Modern Greek, emerging from late Byzantine times in the 11th century AD. During this period, spoken Greek became more prevalent in the written tradition, as demotic Greek came to be used more and more over the Attic idiom and the katharevousa reforms. The Cretan Renaissance poem Erotokritos is undoubtedly the masterpiece of this early period of modern Greek literature, and represents one of its supreme achievements. It is a verse romance written around 1600 by Vitsentzos Kornaros (15531613). The migration of Byzantine scholars and other migrs from southern Italy and Byzantium during the decline of the Byzantine Empire (12031453) and mainly after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 until the 16th century, is considered by some scholars as key to the revival of Greek and Roman studies and subsequently in the development of the Renaissance humanism[2] and science. These emigres were grammarians, humanists, poets, writers, printers, lecturers, musicians, astronomers, architects, academics, artists, scribes, philosophers, scientists, politicians and theologians.[3] They brought to Western Europe the far greater preserved and accumulated knowledge of their own civilization. Much later, Diafotismos was an ideological, philological, linguistic and philosophical movement among 18th century Greeks that translate the ideas and values of European Enlightenment into the Greek world.Adamantios Korais and Rigas Feraios are two of the most notable figures. The Korakistika (1819), a lampoon written by Jakovakis Rizos Neroulos and directed against the Greek intellectual Adamantios Korais, is a major example of the Modern Greek Enlightenment and emerging nationalism before the Greek War of Independence. Contemporary Greek literature Contemporary Greek literature is usually (but not exclusively) written in polytonic orthography, though the monotonic orthography was made official in 1981 by Andreas Papandreou. Contemporary Greek literature is represented by many writers, poets and novelists: Dionysios Solomos, Andreas Kalvos, Angelos Sikelianos, Emmanuel Rhoides, Kostis Palamas, Penelope Delta, Yannis Ritsos, Alexandros Papadiamantis, Nikos Kazantzakis, Kosmas Politis, Antonis Samarakis, Andreas Embeirikos, Kostas Karyotakis, Gregorios Xenopoulos, Constantine P. Cavafy, Demetrius Vikelas, while George Seferis andOdysseas Elytis have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Homer In the Western classical tradition, Homer (/homr/; Greek: [hmros], Hmros) is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest of ancient Greek epic poets. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature. When he lived is unknown. Herodotus estimates that Homer lived 400 years before his own time, which would place him at around 850 BC,[1] while other ancient sources claim that he lived much nearer to the supposed time of the Trojan War, in the early 12th century BC.[2] Most modern researchers place Homer in the 7th or 8th centuries BC. The formative influence of the Homeric epics in shaping Greek culture was widely recognized, and Homer was described as the teacher of Greece.[3] Homer's works, which are about fifty percent speeches, provided models in persuasive speaking and writing that were emulated throughout the ancient and medieval Greek worlds. Fragments of Homer account for nearly half of all identifiable Greek literary papyrusfinds.[4] Period For modern scholars "the date of Homer" refers not to an individual, but to the period when the epics were created. The consensus is that "the Iliad and the Odyssey date from around the 8th century BC, theIliad being composed before the Odyssey, perhaps by some decades,"[5] i.e. earlier than Hesiod,[6] the Iliad being the oldest work of Western literature. Over the past few decades, some scholars have argued for a 7thcentury BC date. Oliver Taplin believes that the conclusion of modern researchers is that Homer dates to between 750 to 650 BC.[7] Some of those who argue that the Homeric poems developed gradually over a long period of time give an even later date for the composition of the poems; according to Gregory Nagy for example, they only became fixed texts in the 6th century BC.[8] The question of the historicity of Homer the individual is known as the "Homeric question"; there is no reliable biographical information handed down from classical antiquity.[9] The poems are generally seen as the culmination of many generations of oral story-telling, in a tradition with a welldeveloped formulaic system of poetic composition. Some scholars, such as Martin West, claim that "Homer" is "not the name of a historical poet, but a fictitious or constructed name."[10] Life and legends "Homer" is a Greek name, attested in Aeolic-speaking areas,[11] and although nothing definite is known about him, traditions arose purporting to give details of his birthplace and background. The satiristLucian, in his True History, describes him as a Babylonian called Tigranes, who assumed the name Homer when taken "hostage" (homeros) by the Greeks.[12] When the Emperor Hadrian asked the Oracleat Delphi about Homer, the Pythia proclaimed that he was Ithacan, the son of Epikaste and Telemachus, from the Odyssey.[13] These stories were incorporated into

the various[14] Lives of Homer compiled from the Alexandrian period onwards.[15] Homer is most frequently said to be born in the Ionian region of Asia Minor, at Smyrna, or on the island of Chios, dying on the Cycladic island of Ios.[15][16] A connection with Smyrna seems to be alluded to in a legend that his original name was Melesigenes ("born of Meles", a river which flowed by that city), and his mother the nymph Kretheis. Internal evidence from the poems gives evidence of familiarity with the topography and placenames of this area of Asia Minor; for example, Homer refers to meadow birds at the mouth of the Caystros,[17] a storm in theIcarian sea,[18] and mentions that women in Maeonia and Caria stain ivory with scarlet.[19][20] The association with Chios dates back to at least Semonides of Amorgos, who cited a famous line in the Iliad (6.146) as by "the man of Chios".[21] An eponymous bardic guild, known as the Homeridae (sons of Homer), or Homeristae ('Homerizers')[22] appears to have existed there, tracing descent from an ancestor of that name,[23] or upholding their function as rhapsodes or "lay-stitchers" specialising in the recitation of Homeric poetry. Wilhelm Drpfeld[24] suggests that Homer had visited many of the places and regions which he describes in his epics, such as Mycenae, Troy, the palace of Odysseus at Ithacaand more. According to Diodorus Siculus, Homer had even visited Egypt.[25] The poet's name is homophonous with (hmros), "hostage" (or "surety"), which is interpreted as meaning "he who accompanies; he who is forced to follow", or, in some dialects, "blind".[26] This led to many tales that he was a hostage or a blind man. Traditions which assert that he was blind may have arisen from the meaning of the word in both Ionic, where the verbal form (homre) has the specialized meaning of "guide the blind",[27] and the Aeolian dialect of Cyme, where (hmros) is synonymous with the standard Greek (tuphls), meaning 'blind'.[28] The characterization of Homer as a blind bard goes back to some verses in the Delian Hymn to Apollo, the third of the Homeric Hymns,[29] verses later cited to support this notion by Thucydides.[30] The Cymean historian Ephorusheld the same view, and the idea gained support in antiquity on the strength of a false etymology which derived his name from ho m horn ( : "he who does not see"). Critics have long taken as self referential[31] a passage in the Odyssey describing a blind bard, Demodocus, in the court of the Phaeacian king, who recounts stories of Troy to the shipwrecked Odysseus.[32] Many scholars take the name of the poet to be indicative of a generic function. Gregory Nagy takes it to mean "he who fits (the Song) together".[33] (homr), another related verb, besides signifying "meet", can mean "(sing) in accord/tune".[34] Some argue that "Homer" may have meant "he who puts the voice in tune" with dancing.[35][36] Marcello Durante links "Homeros" to an epithet of Zeus as "god of the assemblies" and argues that behind the name lies the echo of an archaic word for "reunion", similar to the later Panegyris, denoting a formal assembly of competing minstrels.[37][38] Some Ancient Lives depict Homer as a wandering minstrel, like Thamyris[39] or Hesiod, who walked as far as Chalkis to sing at the funeral games of Amphidamas.[40] We are given the image of a "blind, begging singer who hangs around with little people: shoemakers, fisherman, potters, sailors, elderly men in the gathering places of harbour towns".[41] The poems, on the other hand, give us evidence of singers at the courts of

the nobility. There is a strong aristocratic bias in the poems demonstrated by the lack of any major protagonists of non-aristocratic stock, and by episodes such as the beating down of the commoner Thersites by the king Odysseus for daring to criticize his superiors. That Odysseus is described as beating Thersites, not with any object of his own, but rather with Agamemnon's sceptre, could be seen as leaving the implications of the event open to the listener's imagination or point of view. In any event, scholars are divided as to which category, if any, the court singer or the wandering minstrel, the historic "Homer" belonged.[42] Works attributed to Homer The Greeks of the sixth and early fifth centuries BC understood by "Homer", generally, "the whole body of heroic tradition as embodied in hexameter verse".[43] Thus, in addition to the Iliad and the Odyssey,there are "exceptional" epics which organize their respective themes on a "massive scale".[44] Many other works were credited to Homer in antiquity, including the entire Epic Cycle. The genre included further poems on the Trojan War, such as the Little Iliad, the Nostoi, the Cypria, and the Epigoni, as well as the Theban poems about Oedipus and his sons. Other works, such as the corpus of Homeric Hymns, the comic mini-epic Batrachomyomachia ("The Frog-Mouse War"), and the Margites were also attributed to him, but this is now believed to be unlikely. Two other poems, the Capture of Oechalia and thePhocais were also assigned Homeric authorship, but the question of the identities of the authors of these various texts is even more problematic than that of the authorship of the two major epics. Identity and authorship[edit source | editbeta] . The idea that Homer was responsible for just the two outstanding epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, did not win consensus until 350 BC.[45] While many find it unlikely that both epics were composed by the same person, others argue that the stylistic similarities are too consistent to support the theory of multiple authorship. One view which attempts to bridge the differences holds that the Iliad was composed by "Homer" in his maturity, while the Odyssey was a work of his old age. The Batrachomyomachia, Homeric Hymns and cyclic epics are generally agreed to be later than the Iliad and the Odyssey. Most scholars agree that the Iliad and Odyssey underwent a process of standardisation and refinement out of older material beginning in the 8th century BC. An important role in this standardisation appears to have been played by the Athenian tyrant Hipparchus, who reformed the recitation of Homeric poetry at the Panathenaic festival. Many classicists hold that this reform must have involved the production of acanonical written text. Other scholars still support the idea that Homer was a real person. Since nothing is known about the life of this Homer, the common jokealso recycled with regard to Shakespearehas it that the poems "were not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name."[46][47] Samuel Butler argues, based on literary observations, that a young Sicilian woman wrote the Odyssey (but not the Iliad),[48] an idea further pursued

by Robert Graves in his novel Homer's Daughter and Andrew Dalby in Rediscovering Homer.[49] Independent of the question of single authorship is the near-universal agreement, after the work of Milman Parry,[50] that the Homeric poems are dependent on an oral tradition, a generations-old technique that was the collective inheritance of many singer-poets (aoidoi). An analysis of the structure and vocabulary of the Iliad and Odyssey shows that the poems contain many formulaic phrases typical of extempore epic traditions; even entire verses are at times repeated. Parry and his student Albert Lord pointed out that such elaborate oral tradition, foreign to today's literate cultures, is typical of epic poetry in a predominantly oral cultural milieu, the key words being "oral" and "traditional". Parry started with "traditional": the repetitive chunks of language, he said, were inherited by the singer-poet from his predecessors, and were useful to him in composition. Parry called these repetitive chunks "formulas". Exactly when these poems would have taken on a fixed written form is subject to debate. The traditional solution is the "transcription hypothesis", wherein a non-literate "Homer" dictates his poem to a literate scribe between the 8th and 6th centuries BC. The Greek alphabet was introduced in the early 8th century BC, so it is possible that Homer himself was of the first generation of authors who were also literate. The classicist Barry B. Powell suggests that the Greek alphabet was invented ca. 800 BC by one man, whom he calls the "adapter," in order to write down oral epic poetry.[51] More radical Homerists likeGregory Nagy contend that a canonical text of the Homeric poems as "scripture" did not exist until the Hellenistic period (3rd to 1st century BC). New methods try also to elucidate the question. Combining information technologies and statistics stylometry analyzes various linguistic units: words, parts of speech, and sounds. Based on the frequencies of Greek letters, a first study of Dietmar Najock[52] particularly shows the internal cohesion of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Taking into account the repartition of the letters, a recent study of Stephan Vonfelt[53]highlights the unity of the works of Homer compared to Hesiod. The thesis of modern analysts being questioned, the debate remains open. Homeric studies[edit source | editbeta] Main article: Homeric scholarship The study of Homer is one of the oldest topics in scholarship, dating back to antiquity. The aims and achievements of Homeric studies have changed over the course of the millennia. In the last few centuries, they have revolved around the process by which the Homeric poems came into existence and were transmitted over time to us, first orally and later in writing. Some of the main trends in modern Homeric scholarship have been, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Analysis and Unitarianism (see Homeric Question), schools of thought which emphasized on the one hand the inconsistencies in, and on the other the artistic unity of, Homer; and in the 20th century and later Oral Theory, the study of the mechanisms and effects of oral transmission, and Neoanalysis, the study of the relationship between Homer and other early epic material.

Homeric dialect[edit source | editbeta] Main article: Homeric Greek The language used by Homer is an archaic version of Ionic Greek, with admixtures from certain other dialects, such as Aeolic Greek. It later served as the basis of Epic Greek, the language of epic poetry, typically in dactylic hexameter. Transmission and publication Though evincing many features characteristic of oral poetry, the Iliad and Odyssey were at some point committed to writing. The Greek script, adapted from a Phoenician syllabary around 800 BC, made possible the notation of the complex rhythms and vowel clusters that make up hexameter verse. Homer's poems appear to have been recorded shortly after the alphabet's invention: an inscription from Ischia in the Bay of Naples, ca. 740 BC, appears to refer to a text of the Iliad; likewise, illustrations seemingly inspired by the Polyphemus episode in the Odyssey are found on Samos, Mykonos and in Italy, dating from the first quarter of the seventh century BC. We have little information about the early condition of the Homeric poems, but in the second century BC, Alexandrian editors stabilized this text from which all modern texts descend. In late antiquity, knowledge of Greek declined in Latin-speaking western Europe and, along with it, knowledge of Homer's poems. It was not until the fifteenth century AD that Homer's work began to be read once more in Italy. By contrast it was continually read and taught in the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire where the majority of the classics also survived. The first printed edition appeared in 1488 (edited by Demetrios Chalkokondyles and published by Bernardus Nerlius, Nerius Nerlius, and Demetrius Damilas in Florence, Italy). One often finds books of the Iliad and Odyssey cited by the corresponding letter of the Greek alphabet, with upper-case letters referring to a book number of the Iliad and lower-case letters referring to theOdyssey. Thus 200 would be shorthand for Iliad book 14, line 200, while 200 would be Odyssey 14.200. The following table presents this system of numeration: Iliad

book no. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 Odyssey