FAMOUS WRITERS AND DRAMA FROM GREECE (Autosaved) (Autosaved)
FAMOUS WRITERS AND DRAMA FROM GREECE (Autosaved) (Autosaved)
FAMOUS WRITERS AND DRAMA FROM GREECE (Autosaved) (Autosaved)
• What word starts with the letter E ends with the letter E but only has one
letter in it?
Envelope
Water
• Re-arrange the letters, O O U S W T D N E J R, to
spell just one word. What is it?
• A toothbrush. Come on
• Once in a Blue
Moon
• Lost in Space
FAMOUS WRITERS AND
DRAMATISTS FROM
GREECE
INTRODUCTION
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.
-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.
-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.
-Some of his plays are: The Birds, The Frogs and The Wasps. The
characters wore masks which were distorted caricatures.
GREEK LYRIC POETRY
• -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.