La característica de la literatura Griega

GREEK LITERATURE

• In Western culture the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome are often called “the classical world,” for these two cultures have profoundly influenced the development of Western thought and achievement.

• Ancient Greek and Roman writers produced epics, poems, dramas, histories, oratory, and other works that endure to the present day.

The Heroic Age

• Began in crete by 3000 B., a remarkable culture had developed on this rugged, mountains island located sixty miles south of mainland Greece this civilization is called Minoan.

• Minoan civilization directly influenced the rise of Mycenaean culture, which flourished between 1500 and 1200 B.C. on the Greek mainland.

• Minoan peaceful, he Mycenaeans were both aggressive and enterprising.

• under the leadership of King Agamemnon, the Mycenaeans organized an expedition against the city of Troy in Asia Minor.

• “Trojan War” in the Iliad, one of the earliest epics in Western literature.

• To the Greeks of Homer’s time, the Mycenaean era was known as the Heroic Age… great figures in the epic were looked on as the ancestors of the Greeks and were held up as models of heroic behavior.

The Epic Age

• The earliest surviving works of Greek poetry are two epics now known as the Iliad and the Odyssey.

• After Homer composed his epics, the Greeks developed a script for their language, based on a system borrowed from the Phoenicians. This system became what we know as the alphabet, named for its two initial letters, alpha and beta.

• The purpose of this was to aid commercial dealings, to record Homer’s epics for posterity, the Greek invention of the alphabet opened the door to a remarkable era of literary achievement.

The Rise of the City-States

• Between 700 and 500 B.C., small, fragmented settlements in mainland Greece banded together to form communities. Soon a number of city-states. The typical city-state, called a polis, was ruled by a king.

• In this period of city-states, the Greeks did not think of themselves as a single nation.

• They called themselves Hellenes, believing themselves direct descendants of Hellen, the son of Deucalion, who, according to a Greek myth, was the sole survivor of a great flood and thus the ancestor of all Greeks.

• This cultural identity made the Greeks feel superior to their “barbarian” neighbors, and the resulting sense of unity found expression in various social and religious institutions.

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