Season 3: Ancient Greek Writers of the Classical and Hellenistic Periods

Early Greek Writers: Lyric Poetry and Theater

greek writers sappho and alcaeus

Literature was always part of the ancient Aegean world. Following the semi-legendary careers of Hesiod and Homer, around 600 BCE, Greek writers began composing lyric poetry, and performing and singing it in settings like the one shown here. The painting is Lawrence Alma-Tadema‘s Sappho and Alcaeus (1853).

After the Iliad, Odyssey, and Theogony, ancient Greek writers began producing lyric poetry. Greek lyric poetry comes from the word “lyre.” It’s distinguished from epic poetry in several ways. Lyric poetry is generally shorter. Poets often produced it for specific occasions. And unlike the third-person narratives of Homer and the Pentateuch, Greek lyric poetry was often personal in nature, chronicling the autobiographical experiences of the poets themselves. In Episode 25: Lyrical Ballistics, we take a long look at Greek lyric poetry, from the pornographic yarns of Archilochus, to the love poems of Sappho, to the sports odes of Pindar.

Lyric poetry was only one genre of ancient Greek literature. Aside from ancient Greek epics and philosophy, ancient Greek theater was likely the most famous cultural product of the Classical Aegean world. And the bulk of what survives of it today first came to the stage in Athens, between about 472 and 395 BCE, at a festival called the City Dionysia. This annual festival saw the production of most Greek tragedy and comedy still extant today. In Episode 26: Ancient Greek Theater, we take a long look at how ancient Greek writers got their plays staged at this festival, how the public enjoyed them, and what an ancient Greek theater actually looked like.

Classical Greek Tragedy: Aeschylus and Sophocles

greek writers euripides medea

Larger-than-life mythological characters fill ancient Greek tragedies, like Euripides’ Medea (431 BCE). Tragic heroes are a varied lot. They tend, however, to have a superabundance of pride, or hubris, and little instinct for compromise or moderation. The painting is Germán Hernández Amores‘ Medea (1887).

Aeschylus and Sophocles are the archetypal Greek tragedians. Each playwright left behind far more material than has survived. Nonetheless, plenty of material has survived from each of these ancient Greek writers. Our podcast covers Aeschylus’ Orestian Trilogy in its entirety. The story of Agamemnon coming home from the Trojan is a grim one. A wife kills a husband. A son kills a mother. Yet the trilogy’s final play, the Eumenides, has a soaringly happy ending. In Episode 27, Episode 28, and Episode 29, we read the Orestia in its entirely. Ultimately, the plays are about larger-than-life mythological characters, gods, and monsters. But they also make an ultimate and optimistic statement about contemporary Athenian history.

Sophocles, another of the most famous Greek writers in history, lived a generation after Aeschylus. Allegedly, he staged an immense number of plays, though most haven’t survived. In our podcast, we read a trio all set in the city of Thebes and commonly associated with each other. These are Oedipus the King (Episode 30), Oedipus at Colonus (Episode 31), and Antigone (Episode 32). Sophocles’ Oedipus plays are fables, certainly, about a cursed and legendary king. At the same time, in each tragedy, Sophocles adds clues to what he and other Athenians were experiencing at several pivotal junctures in the late 5th century BCE.

Classical Greek Comedy: Aristophanes

Aristophanes wrote what historians call Old Comedy. This style of comedy was crude. Old comedy often selected and satirized specific people, movements, and organizations. Relatedly, playwrights engineered Old Comedy for specific occasions. And most of all, Old Comedy was funny. Its bottom line was laughter, though ideological persuasion could often be a close second. The two works of Aristophanes that we read in Literature and History exemplify all of this. The Clouds (Episode 35) lampoons the philosopher Socrates, and more generally the philosophical climate of Athens in the late 400s. Lysistrata (Episode 36) pokes fun at demogogues who urged on the Peloponnesian War. At his best, Aristophanes can be disgusting and inspiring; ruthless and optimistic, all at once.

Euripides: An Unclassifiable Ancient Greek Writer

Euripides is often called a tragedian. Indeed, the two plays that we read from Euripides in the podcast, Medea (Episode 33) and The Bacchae (Episode 34) are dark, bloody stories. The first, the tale of an immigrant mother who butchers her children, might be the most famous ancient Greek play ever staged. The second is the tale of a sanctimonious king torn to pieces by religious zealots. Yet in spite of the blood and thunder of his most famous plays, Euripides had an incredible range as a playwright. Late in his career, he began experimenting with the boundaries of tragedy and comedy, writing what are sometimes called Euripidean romances. These plays include Ion, Iphigenia at Tauris, and Helen. They are adventure stories, chronicling the fates of innocent, morally upright protagonists in imperfect worlds. Euripidean romances, which generally have happy endings, were immensely influential on the next few generations of ancient Greek writers.

Ancient Greek writers at work during the Hellenistic period lived in a different world than their predecessors. The painting is Stefan Bakalowicz‘s Antique Beauty.

Ancient Greek Writers of the Hellenistic Period (323-31 BCE)

The tail end of Season 3 moves into the 300s and 200s BCE. Alexander of Macedon destroyed and destablized the tentative peace between the Athenian and Achaemenid empires. He died young and left behind a mess. Compact city states gave way to sprawling empires. Immigration and deracinaton threw citizens all over the Mediterranean. And literature changed, too. Written texts became more common. And both plays and poetry became more concerned with the individual – her emotional experiences, and her wellbeing in an uncertain world. In this world, New Comedy rose as a new theatrical genre. Its sole surviving play, Menander’s Dyskolos, (Episode 37), startlingly, looks more like Shakespeare than Aristophanes.

While New Comedy flourished on Hellenistic stages, a new kind of epic seems to have into being at the same time. Our chief example is Apollonius of Rhodes’ Jason and the Argonauts (c. BCE 250, Episode 38 and Episode 39). The Argonautica is certainly a swashbuckling adventure story, like Homer’s Odyssey. Yet its careful concern with the interior emotional experience of Jason’s wife Medea marks it as the product of quite a different period of history than the one that produced Euripides’ Medea.

The closing episodes of this season consider some of the greater cultural evolutions of the Hellenistic period. Ancient Greek writers were spending more time pondering the interior emotional worlds of their protagonists. Meanwhile, cult religions of the period, centered on the individual and posthumous salvation, exploded during the fourth century BCE and afterward. Public sacrifices at ancestral temples were difficult when such temples were pulverized, and the public in question had been scattered by war and diaspora. Episode 40: Hellenism and the Birth of the Self considers this theological evolution. Finally, Episode 41: Everything So Far reviews where the podcast has been, and introduces the coming season on Roman literaure. Additionally, it announces our Bonus Series Rad Greek Myths, a bonus sequence on major Greek myths not extant in surviving source texts. Next up is Season 4: Roman Literature.
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