Introduction
The Archaic period of ancient Greek literature (8th century- c. 480 BC) begins with Homer, reputed author of the epic narrative poems the Iliad and Odyssey , but there is evidence that parts of the Homeric epics embody an oral literary tradition going much further back into the past. Other heroic legends were handled a little later by the so-called cyclic poets, for example, Arctinus, but these are lost. Towards the end of the 8th century other literary forms began to appear: the didactic, instructional poetry of Hesiod, whose Works and Days deals with morals as they pertain to agricultural life, and the various kinds of lyric which flourished for two centuries, particularly in Ionia and the Aegean islands. Besides choral lyrics (Alcman, Stesichorus), there were elegiac (reflective and mournful) and iambic (pairs of syllables, unstressed followed by stressed) works (Archilochus, Mimnermus, Semonides of Amorgos, Solon, Theognis, Tyrtaeus); epigrams (Simonides of Ceos); table-songs (Terpander); and political lyrics (Alcaeus). This kind of poetry served also as a vehicle of moral ideas for Solon, Theognis, and Tyrtaeus, of invective for Archilochus, of ardent passion for Sappho, or of the merely elegant and affected as in Anacreon. At the very end of the Archaic period stands the first Greek historian, Hecataeus of Miletus, who wrote in prose.
During the classical period ( c. 480-323 BC) lyric poetry reached its perfection with Pindar and Bacchylides. New literary genres appeared, especially in Athens, which for 150 years after the Persian Wars was the intellectual and artistic capital of the Greek world. Drama reached unsurpassed heights: tragedy with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and comedy with Eupolis, Cratinus, and Aristophanes. In the second half of the 5th and most of the 4th centuries BC prose flowered in several forms, including history, philosophy, and speeches (Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates, and Demosthenes).
During the Hellenistic period (323-27 BC), after the death of Alexander the Great, Athens lost its superiority, but its philosophical schools continued to flourish with such teachers as Epicurus, Zeno of Citium, and Theophrastus, as also did comedy (Menander).
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