• What object has keys that open no locks, space but no room, and you

can enter but not go in?

Keyboard

• What word starts with the letter E ends with the letter E but only has one
letter in it?

Envelope

• First, think of the color of clouds.

• Next think of the color of snow.
• Last, think of the color of the moon.
• Now, what do cows drink?

Water
• Re-arrange the letters, O O U S W T D N E J R, to
spell just one word. What is it?

• Just one word

• What's at least 6 inches long, goes in your mouth,

and is more fun if it vibrates?

• A toothbrush. Come on
• Once in a Blue
Moon

• Lost in Space
FAMOUS WRITERS AND
DRAMATISTS FROM
GREECE
 INTRODUCTION

-The Greeks are recognized as an exceptional people.

They are known in history as the “Noble Greeks”.
Because of their attainments in literature, sculpture,
architecture, and philosophy, the term the glory that was
Greece is particularly applicable to them.
 -Out of the darkness of barbarism that prevailed in ancient times
when absolute despots governed their people capriciously,
cruelly, and ruthlessly, when the governed were wretched and
miserable, when superstition and ignorance were rampant, the
cities of Greece progressed. These cities became centers of white-
hot intellectual energy, and their inhabitants pursued beauty in all
it’s forms and developed a passion for democracy in it’s true
sense.
 GREEK ART
-The Greeks produced a civilization which in many ways has
never been surpassed in the world. Of what they accomplished
in art little remains, and we are not even sure that what we have
is the best. But what remains has aroused the admiration and
astonishment of the world. There is no sculpture comparable to
theirs; there are no bulidings more beautiful and more
admirable than those they built; there are no literary pieces
superior to theirs. In fact, in literature they are all supreme. The
world has produced no epic poet to compare with Homer, no
lyric poet to equal Pindar.
• The Greeks cultivated prose rather
late, but history has no greater
practitioner than Herodotus and
Thucydides; and there is no prose,
aside perhaps from the Bible, more
poetic than that of Plato.
EVEN THOUGH MANY PIECES OF ART IS LOST TO US,
WE MUST TRY TO RECAPTURE THE EXPERIENCES TO
ASK WHAT THESE DID FOR THEM.

An obstacle of understanding these marvelous artistic

pieces as well as literature is that we read Greek works
only through translations. Translations are indispensable
because ancient Greek is now a dead language; nobody
speaks it any longer. But a translation can only indicate; it
cannot replace the original. This is especially lamentable
in relation to Greek literature because the greater portion
of their literary works were written in poetry.
• We must remember that a poem,
especially a typical lyric poem, is two-
thirds melody and only one-third thought.
This is what particularly distinguishes
poetry from prose Translation cannot
duplicate the rhythm, the tone, the
combination of vowel sounds and
consonant values which give poetry it’s
enduring quality.
 GREEK LITERATURE
The history of Greek literature is divided into three periods:

1. The first period covers the Pre-Homeric and Homeric. It

includes the earliest poetry of Greece and the works of
Homer.

2. The second period coincides with the Athenian Period to

the Golden Age of Pericles.

3. The third period, the Period of Decline, extends from the

death of Alexander the Great.
 5 QUALITIES OF GREEK LITERATURE
1. Permanence and Universality
-It is as alive today as it was when it was written more than 3000
years ago. It has a universality that is truly remarkable; it is read
and admired by all nations of the world regardless of race,
religion, or culture.

2. Essentially Full of Artistry

- It is a product of a people who purposely and conscientiously
developed their physical and intellectual powers. Greek art is the
highest form of classic art. The Greek mind became the
foundation of the literature of the Western world.
3. Originality
-The quality of literary originality does not mean that all literary types
originated from Greece. The drama had been produced by the Egyptians and
narrative poetry had been cultivated in India, but the Greek mind had the
supreme power of modifying and improving all that it had touched.

4. Diversity of Talent
- The Greek mind never rested complacently on any one subject; it was ever
searching, ever seeking. It was fond of diversity of application. That was why
the Greeks cultivated all literary types to perfection.

5. Intellectual Quality
- This means that the Greek mind challenges one to think for some purpose:
To bring about some inner transformation.
 THE EPICS OF HOMER
-Many centuries must have elapsed before the literary temper of the
Greeks could produce the poems of Homer, but of this ante-Homeric
literature very little remains. The dominant figure of this early age was
Homer. Seven cities contended for the honor of being the birthplace of
Homer. He was probably born about 1000 B.C.

-He was called the blind poet of Greece. Very little is known about him,
but his transcendent genius is vividly impressed upon his works. His two
epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were learned by heart, and wherever a
Greek settled, he carried with him a love for Homer.
• -The Iliad and the Odyssey depict the complete life of
man in action. The Iliad shows us the passions and the
cruelty found in war; the Odyssey shows us the great
adventures. The Iliad is a story of love and heroism.
These are great epics, studies of man and the life of
man, and the way of life and ideals of a great
civilization which has vanished but still wonderfully
alive in men’s hearts.

• -The theme of the two epics is the affirmation of the

truth that man’s fate is the result of his actions. Ill fate
results from ignorance and unguided and
immoderate passions. The gods give only what man
asks for; his destiny is largely a matter of his own
making.
 WHAT IS
GREEK
DRAMA?
-The drama was the crowning glory of the
Athenian Age. This period has been called by
different terms, one of them being called the
Golden Age because drama flourished at this
point. It has also been called the Athenian Age
because Athens became the white-hot literary
center of Greece. It was a theatrical culture that
flourished in ancient Greece from 700 BC,
especially in the city-state of Athens.
 MAJOR DRAMATISTS OF THE
ATHENIAN AGE
1.Aeschylus (525-456 B.C)
• - Aeschylus was a poet by profession and he was
regarded by the Athenians as the father of tragedy.
He is reputed to have written seventy tragedies, but
only seven have come down to us. His greatest work
is considered to be Prometheus. He also wrote the
trilogy Oresteia, which is composed of three plays:
Agamemnon, Choephoroi, and Eumenides.
 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON
AESCHYLUS
-He was called a soldier playwright, because he took part in the
Battle of Marathon and in the Battle of Salamis.

-He was born in the town of Eleusis, Greece and passed away in the
Italian city of Gela.

-He was believed to have made seventy to ninety plays, but only
seven have been found.

-Clytemnestra
2. SOPHOCLES (496-406 B.C)
• -Sophocles was born in Colonus, Attica. He
is one of the three ancient Greek
tragedians whose plays have survived. He
wrote over 120 plays during the course of
his life, but only seven have survived in a
complete form. For almost 50 years, he was
the most celebrated playwright in the
dramatic competitions of the city-state of
Athens that took place during the religious
festivals of the Lenaea and the Dionysia.
 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON
SOPHOCLES
-He passed away in Athens, Greece.
-He competed in 30 competitions, won 24, and was never judged lower
than second place.

-He wrote 120 plays, but only seven survived intact: Ajax, Antigone,
Women of Trachis, Oedipus Rex, Electra, Philocletes, and Oedipus at
Colonus.

-His greatest play is Oedipus The King.

3. EURIPIDES (480-407 B.C)
• -Euripides was called a modern playwright. He did not
write true tragedies; he wrote merely serious plays.
Aeschylus and Sophocles belonged to an age of faith:
Euripides, much younger than the two, belonged to an
age of growing skepticism. He portrayed the gods, and
it is useless to try to do so; it is certainly silly to worship
them because they are not just.

• -Euripides’ dramatic characters are generally ordinary

and commonplace; or they are boastful, proud, and
stupid. When he was exiled because of his disdain for
the Greek gods, he lived with the king of Macedonia,
who owned very fierce dogs which he unchained by
night. Euripides was killed by these dogs one night as
he went out to take a walk in the king’s garden.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON
EURIPIDES
-Hisoutstanding works are: Medea, Alcestis, Orestes
and The Bacchae.

-After his exile, he lived with the King of Macedonia, who owned
very fierced dogs which he unchained by night. Euripides was
killed by these dogs one night as he went out to take a walk in the
King’s Garden.
4.ARISTOPHANES (452-380 B.C)
• -Aristophanes was the master of Greek comedy, and
he typically belonged to his people and to his age.
It is not easy to appreciate him correctly because
comedy is written to castigate society, and although
the nature of man does not change, the nature of
society changes as time passes.

• -His intention was to attack the faults and

weaknesses of society. He tried to excite bolsterous
laughter by the boldest caricatures and attacks on
prominent men and even the gods.
 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON
ARISTOPHANES
-Also known as "The Father of Comedy" and "the Prince of
Ancient Comedy", Aristophanes has been said to recreate the life
of ancient Athens more convincingly than any other author.

-Some of his plays are: The Birds, The Frogs and The Wasps. The
characters wore masks which were distorted caricatures.
 GREEK LYRIC POETRY

-In Greek literature, as in all other literatures, some forms of

songs, words set to music, were among the earliest modes of
expression. As far as we know by what survives , the highest
development of the lyric poem came later than the development
of the epic. At first men talk about things and events external to
themselves; they recite tales of gods and heroes, that is their
poetry is objective. As they grow more civilized, perhaps more
complicated in their emotions, they sing of their own souls, and
they become subjective.
GREEK LYRIC POETS
1. Sappho
• - One of the earliest of the Greek lyric poets was
Sappho, who in the 6th century B.C was the
acknowledged head of a school of poetry in
Lesbos. The few verses which have survived of
her poetry show her passionate nature, her sharp
sense of joy and pain and of love. In Greece, her
reputation was almost as exalted as that of Homer,
and she was called “the Tenth Muse”. Some of her
known poems were Hymn to Venus, A Girl In Love,
One Girl, and To An Uncultured Lesbian Woman.
2. Pindar
• -was an Ancient Greek lyric poet from Thebes. Of
the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, his
work is the best preserved. Quintilian wrote, "Of the
nine lyric poets, Pindar is by far the greatest, in virtue of
his inspired magnificence, the beauty of his thoughts
and figures, the rich exuberance of his language and
matter, and his rolling flood of eloquence,
characteristics which, as Horace rightly held, make him
inimitable. His poems can also, however, seem difficult
and even peculiar

• -The Hyperboreans
-The greatest lyric poet of ancient Greece and the master
of epinicia, choral odes celebrating victories achieved in
the Pythian, Olympic, Isthmian, and Nemean games.
3. Alcman
• -was an Ancient Greek choral lyric poet from Sparta. He is the
earliest representative of the Alexandrian canon of the nine
lyric poets.
• -Greek poet who wrote choral lyrics in a type of Doric related
to the Laconian vernacular, used in the region that included
Sparta.
• -Alcman’s work was divided by the editors of
Hellenistic Alexandria (3rd and 2nd centuries BC) into six
books, or papyrus rolls, but the poems survived into modern
times only in fragments. The longest is a partheneion (a choral
song for girls) discovered on a 1st-century papyrus in Egypt in
1855. This ode was probably written to celebrate a rite of
passage, and the poem is characterized by sensuous imagery
and erotic implications. The Women Divers, the plot of which is
unknown, may have taken up an entire papyrus roll.
-The Suda, a Byzantine lexicon (late 10th century AD), describes Alcman as a man
“of an extremely amorous disposition and the inventor of love poems.” His learned
verse is full of geographic detail. One fragment, telling of the sleeping world at the
end of the day, was imitated by Virgil, Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, and Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe (in his Wanderers Nachtlied, 1776–80). The fragment’s
sympathy with nature is unusual in Greek poetry. In two other fragments the poet
attributes his poetic creativity to his imitation of nature; he says that he knows how
all birds sing and that he composed his song by using human language to
reproduce the voice of the partridge.

Some of his famous works were Desire and The Mountain Summits Sleep.
4.Alcaeus
• - was a lyric poet from the Greek island of Lesbos who is
credited with inventing the Alcaic stanza. He was
included in the canonical list of nine lyric poets by the
scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria. He was an older
contemporary and an alleged lover of Sappho, with
whom he may have exchanged poems. He was born into
the aristocratic governing class of Mytilene, the main
city of Lesbos, where he was involved in political
disputes and feuds.
The works of Alcaeus are conventionally grouped according to five genres.

1. Political songs: Alcaeus often composed on a political theme, covering the

power struggles on Lesbos with the passion and vigor of a partisan, cursing his
opponents, rejoicing in their deaths, delivering blood-curdling homilies on the
consequences of political inaction and exhorting his comrades to heroic defiance,
as in one of his 'ship of state' allegories.
2. Drinking songs: According to the grammarian Athenaeus, Alcaeus made every
occasion an excuse for drinking and he has provided posterity several quotes in
proof of it.
3. Hymns: Alcaeus sang about the gods in the spirit of the Homeric hymns, to
entertain his companions rather than to glorify the gods and in the same meters
that he used for his 'secular' lyrics
4. Love songs: Almost all Alcaeus' amorous verses, mentioned with disapproval by
Quintilian above, have vanished without trace.
5. Miscellaneous: Alcaeus wrote on such a wide variety of subjects and themes
that contradictions in his character emerge.
Famous Works:
•
-The State
•
-The Storm
•
-Poverty
5. Anacreon
• -was a Greek lyric poet, notable for his drinking
songs and hymns. Later Greeks included him in
the canonical list of nine lyric poets. Anacreon
wrote all of his poetry in the ancient Ionic dialect.
Like all early lyric poetry, it was composed to be
sung or recited to the accompaniment of music,
usually the lyre. Anacreon's poetry touched on
universal themes of love, infatuation,
disappointment, revelry, parties, festivals and the
observations of everyday people and life.
Some of Anacreon’s famous works:

-Youth and Age

-Here Recline You,Gentle Maid

-Wine The Healer

6. Stesichorus
 - was a Greek lyric poet. He is best known for telling epic
stories in lyric meters but he is also famous for some ancient
traditions about his life, such as his opposition to the
tyrant Phalaris, and the blindness he is said to have incurred
and cured by composing verses first insulting and then
flattering to Helen of Troy.
 He was ranked among the nine lyric poets esteemed by the scholars
of Hellenistic Alexandria and yet his work attracted relatively little interest
among ancient commentators, so that remarkably few fragments of his
poetry now survive. As one scholar observed in 1967: "Time has dealt more
harshly with Stesichorus than with any other major lyric poet." Recent
discoveries, recorded on Egyptian papyrus (notably and controversially,
the Lille Stesichorus), have led to some improvements in our understanding
of his work, confirming his role as a link between Homer's epic narrative and
the lyric narrative of poets like Pindar

His famous work was Season of Songs

7. Ibycus
 -was an Ancient Greek lyric poet, a citizen of Rhegium in Magna
Graecia, probably active at Samos during the reign of the
tyrant Polycrates and numbered by the scholars
of Hellenistic Alexandria in the canonical list of nine lyric poets.
He was mainly remembered in antiquity for pederastic verses, but
he also composed lyrical narratives on mythological themes in the
manner of Stesichorus. His work survives today only as quotations
by ancient scholars or recorded on fragments of papyrus
recovered from archaeological sites in Egypt, yet his extant verses
include what are considered some of the finest examples of Greek
poetry.
8. Simonides of Ceos
 -was a Greek lyric poet, born at Ioulis on Ceos. The
scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria included him in the
canonical list of the nine lyric poets esteemed by them as
worthy of critical study. Included on this list
was Bacchylides, his nephew, and Pindar, reputedly a
bitter rival, both of whom benefited from his innovative
approach to lyric poetry. However, Simonides was more
involved than either in the major events and with the
personalities of their times.
 His general renown owes much to traditional accounts of his colourful
life, as one of the wisest of men; as a greedy miser; as an inventor of a
system of mnemonics; and also the inventor of some letters of the Greek
alphabet (ω, η, ξ, ψ). Such accounts include fanciful elements, yet he had
a real influence on the sophistic enlightenment of the classical era. His
fame as a poet rests largely on his ability to present basic human
situations with affecting simplicity.

Some of his famous works are:

-Epitaph At Thermopylae
-Fragment 01
9. Bacchylides
-was a Greek lyric poet. Later Greeks included him in the
canonical list of nine lyric poets which included his
uncle Simonides. The elegance and polished style of his
lyrics have been noted in Bacchylidean scholarship since
at least Longinus. Some scholars, however, have
characterized these qualities as superficial charm.He has
often been compared unfavourably with his
contemporary, Pindar, as "a kind of Boccherini to
Pindar's Haydn".
However, the differences in their styles do not allow for easy comparison,
and translator Robert Fagles has written that "to blame Bacchylides for not
being Pindar is as childish a judgement as to condemn ... Marvell for
missing the grandeur of Milton" His career coincided with the ascendency of
dramatic styles of poetry, as embodied in the works
of Aeschylus or Sophocles, and he is in fact considered one of the last poets
of major significance within the more ancient tradition of purely lyric poetry.
The most notable features of his lyrics are their clarity in expression and
simplicity of thought, making them an ideal introduction to the study
of Greek lyric poetry in general and to Pindar's verse in particular.

Some of his famous works are:

-The Cloud of Fate

-Theseus
-Peace on Earth