Ancient Greece

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Literature and Dramas

Greek literature began in the Mycenaean Period as stories told aloud. Mycenaeans used their pictorial script (Linear B) only for accounting. Fighting from 1200 to 1000 bc destroyed Greek knowledge of writing, until they adopted an alphabet from Phoenicia in the 8th century bc to record the exciting poetry of Homer. His epics The Iliad and The Odyssey became Greece's most famous literature. The epics told about the Trojan War and the suffering it caused its heroes and its victims. People loved the stories for their fabulous descriptions of action and for their lessons about the effects of anger and mercy. Hesiod, a poet of the 8th century bc, also became a lasting favorite with his long stories of how the world began and how justice was the proper guide for life in business and farming. Somewhat later, lyric poets spun short tales of passion and emotion that people loved to sing.

Great literary innovations in drama were produced in Athens in the 5th century bc. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were the most famous authors of tragedies. They based their plays on myths that presented moral issues, especially the danger of hubris (arrogant overconfidence). Their plots often involved fierce conflicts in families or dangerous interactions between gods and humans. The story of Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother, was one of the most famous tragedies. See also Greek Literature.

Plays were performed outdoors at festivals honoring the god Dionysus in a competition sponsored by the city-state. Thousands of people packed the theater. Each author presented three tragedies, followed by a semicomic play featuring satyrs (mythical half-man, half-animal beings). Actors wore colorful costumes and masks; a chorus danced and sang as part of each play.

Comedies also were performed in these competitions. These plays displayed remarkable freedom of speech in criticizing public policy and making fun of politicians. Their plots could be fantastic, for example having a character fly up on a dung beetle to ask the gods for peace. Their language featured jokes, puns, and obscenities. The most famous comic playwright was Aristophanes, who wrote some comedies with powerful women as main characters. Greek comedy in the 4th century bc changed from political commentary to social satire. Authors such as Menander produced comedies that provided insights into human weaknesses and the complications of everyday life.

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Greeks began writing about history in the 5th century bc. Herodotus and Thucydides wrote long works that stressed eyewitness evidence, the multiple causes of events, and judgments about people's motives. Thucydides, followed by Aristotle, developed political science by analyzing how states operated. Hellenistic Greek writers made history more personal and began composing biographies.

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The Legacy of Ancient Greece

The enduring legacy of ancient Greece lies in the brilliance of its ideas and the depth of its literature and art. The greatest ancient evidence of their value is that the Romans, who conquered the Greeks in war, were themselves overcome by admiration for Greek cultural achievements. The first Roman literature, for example, was Homer's Odyssey translated into Latin. Greek art, architecture, philosophy, and religion also inspired Roman artists and thinkers, who used them as starting points for developing their own style of work. All educated Romans learned to read and speak Greek and studied Greek models in rhetoric. Stoicism became the most popular Roman philosophy of life.

Arab philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists who became the leading thinkers of medieval times studied the works of Aristotle and other Greek sources intensely. During the European Renaissance from the 14th to the 16th centuries, people from many walks of life read Greek literature and history. Writing in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, English playwright William Shakespeare based dramas on ancient Greek biographies. Modern playwrights still find inspiration for new works in Athenian drama. Many modern public buildings, such as the United States Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., imitate Greek temple architecture. Although the founders of the United States rejected Athenian democracy as too direct and radical, they enshrined democratic equality as a basic principle. It was ancient Greeks who proved that democracy could be the foundation of a stable government. Pride in the cultural accomplishments of ancient Greece contributed to a feeling of ethnic unity when the modern nation of Greece was carved out of the Ottoman Empire. That pride still characterizes modern Greece and makes it a fierce defender of the Hellenic heritage.

Reliance on logic, allegiance to democratic principles, unceasing curiosity about what lies beneath the surface of things, a healthy respect for the dangers of arrogant overconfidence, and a love of beauty in stories and art remain incredibly important components of Western civilization. Ancient Greece contributed all of these things.

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