Why Study Ancient Greek Literature

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Why Study Ancient Greek Literature?
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Reasons to Study Ancient Greek Literature

• They laid the foundation of Western
  Civilization
• They established a system of government known
  as the rule of the people or Democracy
• In their literature, they discussed and weighed
  out the issues of war, role of women, and
  humanitys obligations to the divine.
• In a very real sense, they struggled with the
  same concerns we do in the contemporary era.
• Greek language and Greek thought is the root
  metaphor of Western thought.
• Their art and architecture are still the basis
  of High Classical Art in the West.

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What is literature?

• When scholars speak of the literature of a
  subject, what they are referring to is the vast
  bibliography of criticism, interpretation, and
  polemic that has attached itself over the years
  to every field of study.
• Politicians sometimes refer to campaign
  literature, referring to the collection of
  speeches, campaign slogans, etc.  This we might
  find hard to claim has any literary merit.
• When we refer to French or American literature,
  what we are referring to here is a written
  tradition, available to a large literate public,
  presenting a canon of great works that define the
  identity of a civilization, proclaiming its
  ideals but also brood over its problems and
  defects, and set a standard against which later
  writers measure their own achievements.
• It is this last sense of literature that we
  will be using in this course

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Who are these Greeks?

• The Greeks and the Greek language has a
  continuous literary history which covers three
  millennia from the Homeric writings to the
  present day.  There is good reason to believe
  that the ancestors of the Greeks launched the
  first of a series of invasions of the Aegean
  world as early as 2000 BCE.  The earliest record
  of the Greeks comes from Hittite sources, certain
  Hittite letters dated cir. 1335 - 1325 BCE
  mention a people they refer to as the Ahhiyawa or
  the Achaeans of Homer.  The various Greek
  communities referred to themselves as the
  Hellenes (EllhneV) they called their country
  Hellas (h EllaV) and their language the Hellenic
  language (h Ellnvikh glwssa).  We call them
  Greeks from the Latin Graeci, the name given to
  them by the Romans, who applied it to the entire
  people, originally designating a colony in
  southern Italy.  In Homer, the Greeks are
  generally referred to as the Achaeans, or the
  Danai. 

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Periods of Greek History

• Greek history can be divided into several
  periods. 
• The earliest of which is the Mycenaean period
  stemming from about 1500 to 900 BCE.
• The dark ages, roughly 900 to 800 BCE.
• Archaic Greece, roughly 800 to 500 BCE.
• The Classical period, roughly 500 to 350 BCE.
• The Hellenistic period roughly 350 to 90 BCE. 
• After 90 BCE, Greece was conquered by Rome and
  made part of the Empire. 
• The periods of Greek literature we will be
  examining will come from the Archaic and the
  Classical periods.

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Why Study Greek Literature, and not the
literature of other ancient peoples?

• Even though a fragment of the vast output of
  Greek thought exists, what we have is of
  extremely high caliber.
• The literature of other ancient peoples does not
  effect us as greatly as the Greeks. (The only
  exception here is that of Biblical Hebrew).
• The remains of other ancient peoples literature
  isnt of the same quality as that of Ancient
  Greece.
• The written works of other ancient peoples was
  not intended for a literate audience.

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Athena Parthanos
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Views of the Acropolis in Athens
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The Acropolis Today
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Egyptian Hieroglyphs
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A sample of Egyptian Hieroglyphs
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Sumerian Cuneiform Writing
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Map of Greece
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Greek Dialects
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Our Authors
Aeschylus Aristotle Euripides
Homer Plato Sophocles