Array Anacreon - The Greatest Classics of Ancient Greece

Homer, Hesiod, Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho, Anacreon, Theognis of Megara, Simonides of Ceos, Bacchylides, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Lysias, Demosthenes, Apollonius, Callimachus, Theocritus, Plutarch, Epictetus, Gilbert Murray

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Homer Homer Table of Contents

Introduction

Iliad

Odyssey

Homeric Hymns

Hesiod

Introduction

Works and Days

Theogony

Greek Lyric Poetry

Archilochus

Alcaeus

Sappho

Alcman

Anacreon

Theognis of Megara

Simonides of Ceos

Bacchylides

Pindar

The Oresteia (Aeschylus)

The Life and Work of Aeschylus

Agamemnon

The Choephori (The Libation-Bearers)

Eumenides

The Tragedies of Sophocles

The Life and Work of Sophocles

Ajax

Antigone

Oedipus at Colonus

The Tragedies of Euripides

The Life and Work of Euripides

Medea

Hippolytus

Bacchae

The Comedies of Aristophanes

The Life and Work of Aristophanes

Frogs

Birds

Lysistrata

Herodotus

The Life and Work of Herodotus

The Histories

Thucydides

The Life and Work of Thucydides

History of the Peloponnesian War

Plato

The Life and Work of Plato

Republic

The Apology of Socrates (Plato)

Symposium (Plato)

Phaedo (Plato)

Aristotle

The Life and Work of Aristotle

Poetics

Politics

Nicomachean Ethics

The Orations of Lysias

The Philippics (Demosthenes)

Argonautica (Apollonius)

Hymns of Callimachus

The Idylls of Theocritus

The Rise and Fall of Greek Supremasy (Plutarch)

The Life and Work of Plutarch

Theseus

Solon

Themistocles

Aristides

Cimon

Pericles

Nicias

Alcibiades

Phocion

Demosthenes

Epictetus

The Enchiridion

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

The epos, as we know it, falls into three main divisions according to author and subject-matter. It is a vehicle for the heroic saga, written by ' Homêros'; for useful information in general, especially catalogues and genealogies, written by ' Hêsiodos'; and thirdly, for religious revelation, issuing originally from the mouths of such figures as 'Orpheus,' 'Musæus,' and the 'Bakides.' This last has disappeared, leaving but scanty traces, and the poems of ' Homer and Hesiod' constitute our earliest literary monuments.

All verse embodiments of the saga are necessarily less old than the saga itself. And more than that, it is clear that our Iliad, Odyssey, Erga, and Theogony are not the first, "nor the second, nor yet the twelfth," of such embodiments. These ostensibly primitive poems show a length and complexity of composition which can only be the result of many generations of artistic effort. They speak a language out of all relation to common speech, full of forgotten meanings and echoes of past states of society; a poet's language, demonstrably built up and conditioned at every turn by the needs of the hexameter metre. There must therefore have been hexameter poems before our Iliad. Further, the hexameter itself is a high and complex development many stages removed from the simple metres in which the sagas seem once to have had shape in Greece as well as in India, Germany, and Scandinavia. But if we need proof of the comparative lateness of our earliest records, we can find it in ' Homer' himself, when he refers to the wealth of poetry that was in the world before him, and the general feeling that by his day most great themes have been outworn. 1

The personalities of the supposed authors of the various epics or styles of epos are utterly beyond our reach. There is for the most part something fantastic or mythical in them. Orpheus, for instance, as a sagafigure, is of Greek creation; as a name, he is one of the 'Ribhus,' or heroic artificers, of the Vedas, the first men who were made immortal. Another early bard, 'Linos,' is the very perfection of shadowiness. The Greek settler or exile on Semitic coasts who listened to the strange oriental dirges and caught the often-recurring wail ' Ai-lenû' ('Woe to us'), took the words as Greek, aι

The books of the Iliad are denoted by the capital letters of the Greek alphabet, those of the Odyssey by the small letters ('Woe for Linos'), and made his imaginary Linos into an unhappy poet or a murdered prince. Homer's ancestors, when they are not gods and rivers, tend to bear names like 'Memory-son' and 'Sweet-deviser'; his minor connections -- the figures among whom the lesser epics were apt to be divided -- have names which are sometimes transparent, sometimes utterly obscure, but which generally agree in not being Greek names of any normal type. The name of his son-in-law, 'Creophŷlus,' suggests a comic reference to the 'Fleshpot-tribe' of bards with their 'perquisites.' A poet who is much quoted for the saga-subjects painted on the 'Leschê' or 'Conversation Hall' at Delphi, is called variously 'Leschês,' 'Lescheôs,' and 'Leschaios'; another who sang of sea-faring, has a name 'Arctinos,' derived, as no other Greek name is, from the Pole-star. The author of the Têlegoneia, * which ended the Odysseus-saga in a burst of happy marriages (see p. 48 ), is suitably named 'Eugamon' or 'Eugammon.' 2

As for 'Homêros' himself, the word means 'hostage': it cannot be a full Greek name, though it might be an abbreviated 'pet name,' e.g for 'Homêrodochos' ('hostage-taker'), if there were any Greek names at all compounded from this word. As it is, the fact we must start from is the existence of 'Homêridæ,' both as minstrels in general and as a clan. 'Homêros' must by all analogy be a primeval ancestor, invented to give them a family unity, as 'Dôros,' 'Iôn,' and 'Hellên' were invented; as even the League of the 'Amphictyones' or 'Dwellers-round [Thermopylæ]' had to provide themselves with a common ancestor called 'Amphictyôn' or 'Dweller-round.' That explains 'Homêros,' but still leaves 'Homêridæ' unexplained. It may be what it professes to be, a patronymic (' Homer-sons'). It is easy to imagine a state of society in which the Sons of the Hostages, not trusted to fight, would be used as bards. But it may equally well be some compound meaning 'fitters together,' with the termination modified into patronymic form when the minstrels began to be a guild and to feel the need of a common ancestor.

It is true that we have many traditional 'lives' of the prehistoric poets, and an account of a 'contest' between Homer and Hesiod, our version being copied from one composed about 400 B.C. by the sophist Alkidamas, who, in his turn, was adapting some already existing romance. And in the poems themselves we have what purport to be personal reminiscences. Hesiod mentions his own name in the preface to the Theogony. In the Erga (l. 633 ff.), he tells how his father emigrated from Kymê to Ascra. The Homeric