Greek literature

Archaic period, to the end of the 6th century bc

The Greeks created poetry before they made use of writing for literary purposes, and from the beginning their poetry was intended to be sung or recited. (The art of writing was little known before the 7th century bc. The script used in Crete and Mycenae during the 2nd millennium bc [Linear B] is not known to have been employed for other than administrative purposes, and after the destruction of the Mycenaean cities it was forgotten.)

Its subject was myth—part legend, based sometimes on the dim memory of historical events; part folktale; and part religious speculation. But since the myths were not associated with any religious dogma, even though they often treated of gods and heroic mortals, they were not authoritative and could be varied by a poet to express new concepts.

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Poetry: First Lines

Thus, at an early stage Greek thought was advanced as poets refashioned their materials; and to this stage of Archaic poetry belonged the epics ascribed to Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, retelling intermingled history and myth of the Mycenaean Age. These two great poems, standing at the beginning of Greek literature, established most of the literary conventions of the epic poem. The didactic poetry of Hesiod (c. 700 bc) was probably later in composition than Homer’s epics and, though different in theme and treatment, continued the epic tradition.

The several types of Greek lyric poetry originated in the Archaic period among the poets of the Aegean Islands and of Ionia on the coast of Asia Minor. Archilochus of Paros, of the 7th century bc, was the earliest Greek poet to employ the forms of elegy (in which the epic verse line alternated with a shorter line) and of personal lyric poetry. His work was very highly rated by the ancient Greeks but survives only in fragments; its forms and metrical patterns—the elegiac couplet and a variety of lyric metres—were taken up by a succession of Ionian poets. At the beginning of the 6th century Alcaeus and Sappho, composing in the Aeolic dialect of Lesbos, produced lyric poetry mostly in the metres named after them (the alcaic and the sapphic), which Horace was later to adapt to Latin poetry. No other poets of ancient Greece entered into so close a personal relationship with the reader as Alcaeus, Sappho, and Archilochus do. They were succeeded by Anacreon of Teos, in Ionia, who, like Archilochus, composed his lyrics in the Ionic dialect. Choral lyric, with musical accompaniment, belonged to the Dorian tradition and its dialect, and its representative poets in the period were Alcman in Sparta and Stesichorus in Sicily.

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Both tragedy and comedy had their origins in Greece. “Tragic” choruses are said to have existed in Dorian Greece around 600 bc, and in a rudimentary dramatic form tragedy became part of the most famous of the Dionysian festivals, the Great, or City, Dionysia at Athens, about 534. Comedy, too, originated partly in Dorian Greece and developed in Attica, where it was officially recognized rather later than tragedy. Both were connected with the worship of Dionysus, god of fruitfulness and of wine and ecstasy.

Written codes of law were the earliest form of prose and were appearing by the end of the 7th century, when knowledge of reading and writing was becoming more widespread. No prose writer is known earlier than Pherecydes of Syros (c. 550 bc), who wrote about the beginnings of the world; but the earliest considerable author was Hecataeus of Miletus, who wrote about both the mythical past and the geography of the Mediterranean and surrounding lands. To Aesop, a semi-historical, semi-mythological character of the mid-6th century, have been attributed the moralizing beast fables inherited by later writers.