Greek literature - Ancient Greek literature (before AD 300), Byzantine literature (AD 300-1453)

The earliest works belong to the oral tradition; the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer come down from c.8th-c BC. Lyric poetry was written from the 6th-c BC (elegiac by Archilochus, erotic by Sappho), and reached perfection with Pindar. The great moment of Greek drama came in the 5th-c BC, with the verse tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the comedies of Aristophanes. Most of these plays are now lost. Simultaneous with these were the historical writings of Herodotos, to be followed within half a century by those of Xenophon; and then the flowering of Greek philosophy with the teachings of Socrates, and the comprehensive works of Plato and Aristotle. During the Hellenistic period (327–37 BC) prose writing continued to flourish, comedy persisted with Menander, while the Ptolemaic court at Alexandria, where Theocritus introduced pastoral poetry, also revived epic and didactic verse. Greek literature survived the Roman dominance into the 2nd-c AD with such writers as Plutarch, Longinus, and Lucian. Modern Greek writers include the poet Constantine Cavafy, the Nobel prizewinner poets Odysseus Elytis and George Seferiades, and the novelists Nikos Kazantzakis and Matilde Serao.

Ancient Greek literature (before AD 300)

Classical Greek

Ancient Greek literature refers to literature written in Ancient Greek from the oldest surviving written works in the Greek language until the 4th century and the rise of the Byzantine Empire. At the beginning of Greek literature stand the two monumental works of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. A third historian, Xenophon, began his 'Hellenica' where Thucydides ended his work about 411 BC and carried his history to 362 BC. Amongst the tide of Greek philosophy, three names tower above the rest: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

Hellenism

By 338 BC all of the Greek city-states except Sparta had been conquered by Philip II of Macedon. The city of Alexandria in northern Egypt became, from the 3rd century BC, the outstanding center of Greek culture. Later Greek poetry flourished primarily in the 3rd century BC.

Roman Age

The significant historians in the period after Alexander were Timaeus, Polybius, Diodorus Siculus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Appian of Alexandria, Arrian, and Plutarch. The period of time they cover extended from late in the 4th century BC to the 2nd century AD.

Eratosthenes of Alexandria, who died about 194 BC, wrote on astronomy and geography, but his work is known mainly from later summaries. One of the most valuable contributions of the Hellenistic period was the translation of the Old Testament into Greek.

Byzantine literature (AD 300-1453)

Byzantine literature refers to literature written in Medieval Greek. If Byzantine literature is the expression of the intellectual life of the Hellenized populace of the Eastern Roman Empire during the Christian Middle Ages, then it is a multiform organism, combining Greek and Christian civilization on the common foundation of the Roman political system, set in the intellectual and ethnographic atmosphere of the Near East. Byzantine literature partakes of four different cultural elements: the Greek, the Christian, the Roman, and the Oriental, the character of which commingling with the rest.

Modern Greek literature (post 1453)

Modern Greek literature refers to literature written in Modern Greek from the 15th century, emerging from late Byzantine times from the 11th century. Erotokritos is undoubtedly the masterpiece of this period, and perhaps the supreme achievement of modern Greek literature. The Korakistika (1819), a lampoon written by Jakovakis Rizos Neroulos and directed against the Greek intellectual Adamantios Korais, is a major example of the Greek Enlightenment and emerging nationalism.