History Of The Literature Of Ancient Greece

This book offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date history of ancient Greek literature from Homer to Late Antiquity. Its clear structure and detailed presentation of Greek authors and their works as well as literary genres and phenomena makes it an indispensable reference work for all those interested in Greek Antiquity, particularly well-suited for use in the classroom.

The 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