The History Of Ancient Greek Literature

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.

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

Excerpt from A History of Ancient Greek Literature To read and re-read the scanty remains now left to us of the Literature of Ancient Greece, is a pleasant and not a laborious task; nor is that task greatly increased by the inclusion of the 'Scholia' or ancient commentaries. But modern scholarship has been prolific in the making of books; and as regards this department of my subject, I must frankly accept the verdict passed by a German critic upon a historian of vastly wider erudition than mine, and confess that I 'stand helpless before the mass of my material.' To be more precise, I believe that in the domain of Epic, Lyric, and Tragic Poetry, I am fairly familiar with the researches of recent years; and I have endeavoured to read the more celebrated books on Prose and Comic control; but I hope that comparatively few articles of importance in the last twenty volumes of the Hermes, the Rheinisches Museum, the Philologus, and the English Classical Journals, have escaped my consideration. More than this I have but rarely attempted. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Publisher description

This is the second volume of a new narratological history of Ancient Greek lietrature, which deals with aspects of time: the order in which events are narrated, the amount of time devoted to the naration, and the number of times they are presented.