1. The
Greeks

2. Ancient Greece
• There are no universally agreed upon dates for the
beginning or the end of Classical Greek period. However,
It is estimated to be from the 8th century BC until the 6th
century AD, or for about 1,300 years.
• In the 8th century BC, Greece began to emerge from the
Dark Ages which followed the fall of the Mycenaean
civilization. Literacy had therefore been lost and
Mycenaean script forgotten, but the Greeks adopted the
Phoenician alphabet, modifying it to create the Greek
alphabet (only 1 in 3 words can physically be pronounced
by tongue).
• Written records began to appear in the 9th century BC .

3. The Poem and the Epic
• Homer (around 700BC).
– the Iliad and the Odyssey.
• There are shorter poems by Archilochus and
Sappho (the only surviving literature from
Greek woman) from around 600 BC. .

4. Poets
Homer (700 BC)
• To the classical Greeks, Homer's epics played very
much the same role that the Bible has in today’s
society.
• His writings were used in schools and also used by
people to persuade someone to do something or to
teach a general moral lesson
• It is not known where he lived in Greece
• He was said to be blind, although this was a
common trait to have in Archaic period as poets
were exposed to different ways of perceiving the
world, and were often said to be able to see what
the Greek gods were doing.
• From the time of his birth, the new Greek alphabet
was just being adapted. Homer used this newly
found knowledge to write two long epic poems Iliad
and the Odyssey.
• The subject matter of both of these epics was
probably not of Homer’s own imagination as poets
had been travelling around Greece and preaching of
their creations, however it was Homer himself to be
the first to write them down and to alter them.

5. Playwrights
Play Wrights
Tragedians
• Euripides (425 BC)
– Medea and Phaedra
• Sophocles (450 BC)
– Antigone, Oedipus Rex, and Oedipus at Colonus.
Comics
• Aristophanes (425 BC)
– Lysistrata and The Frogs

6. Playwrights
Euripides 425 BC
• Euripides was the youngest of the three great
tragic playwrights of classical Athens.
• He lived in the last part of the 400s BC, during the
Peloponnesian War. He competed against
Sophocles in many dramatic competitions
• Many of Euripides' plays, like Medea and Phaedra,
have important female characters, and cast these
woman in a sympathetic light in his writings and
though women should be treated more fairly. His
use of woman in his plays of been interpret to
represent the irrational or crazy thinking that
follows your nature instead of your mind. The
action in his plays is between the irrational female
character, and a rational man.
• Euripides insists that we all must acknowledge
both sides of ourselves, the animal and the godly,
and not pretend that we can always rule our
bodies with our minds.

7. Playwrights
Sophocles 450 BC
• He died at the age of about 100
• Sophocles came from a rich and received an excellent
education.
• When Sophocles was six and sixteen years old, he witnessed
the terrors of war between the Athenians and the Persians.
Sophocles did not fight, but he saw his house and all of
Athens, burn down. His experiences are evident in a selection
of his plays, such as ‘Antigone’ where he pleads for the
triumph of reason over wild emotion and anger.
• Sophocles' plays are generally very optimistic, full of the spirit
of Athens in the classical period He sees men (and to some
extent women) as powerful, rational, creative beings, the
masters of the world around them, and the proud creations of
the gods.
• Sophocles wrote over 100 plays in his lifetime, but only seven
survive. This is because around 200 AD when Greece was
under Roman rule, seven plays of Aeschylus and seven plays
of Sophocles and ten of Euripides were collaborated together
in a book which was used in school classes. The only plays
which survived were these ones which were taught in Roman
schools.

8. Playwrights
Aristophanes (425 BC)
• Wrote comedies
• His plays mock politicians of Athens,
sometimes in general, and sometimes
mocking one specific politician.
• One of his plays, Lysistrata, teased and
rediculed the generals who would not end
the Peloponnesian War and said that a
women could do a better job of making
peace.
• Another play, The Frogs, was a sad
commentary on the deaths of Sophocles and
Euripides, and on the difficulty of using art to
make peace.
• The Wasps makes fun of the Athenian jury
system.

9. Prose
Play Wrights
Historiography
• Herodotus (485 BC)
• Plutarch
Philosophers
• Socrates
• Plato
• Aristotle

10. Prose
Herodotus (485 BC)
• "father of history."
• First historian that we know records of
• Herodotus was born in Turkey, in a Greek town called
Halicarnassus. Like other writers of his time, Herodotus was from
a rich family and therefore was able to go to school, and learn of
all the works of Homer as a boy.
• The Persians conquered Herodotus' own hometown of
Halicarnassus shortly before he was born, but when they attacked
Athens and Sparta, in mainland Greece, they were defeated.
Everybody was surprised that Athens and Sparta had been able
to defeat the Persians, and when Herodotus grew up he devoted
his life to trying to explain how this had happened.
• His finding were that:
– that the Persians were ruled by a king, who had too much
power. This power made the king over estimate the Persians’
influence in Greece and think he could control only what the
gods could control, such as the weather, or who won a war.
Pride, says Herodotus, goes before a fall.
• Herodotus also wrote a lot about other cultures that he visited, like
the Egyptians and the Scythians. And he also wrote about places
he had never been, like India and Africa as he believed
knowledge was key to human growth.