Greco-Roman Period

DR. KALYANI VALLATH

Greek Classicism
 Ancient Greece
Three periods: Arch ic
Arch ic
• Time of Homer
• Before this, it was the Greek Dark
Ages, marked by ignorance,
injustices, and various kinds of
misery
Cl ssic l Cl ssic l Hellenistic
• Flowering of arts and letters
Hellenistic
• Greece politically declined, but
culturally dominated
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 Archaic Period Period
• About 9th Century BC to 5th Century BC
City-st tes formed
• Constantly at war with one another
• Ruled by tyrants
• Persians were their common enemy
Poets
• Homer
• Hesiod
• Sappho
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Homer
(8th century BC)
• Greatest of the Greek epic poets

• Nothing de nite known of his life

• ancient period onwards

Many Lives of Homer have been written from

• Believed
minstrel
to have been a blind, a wandering
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 Works
The Ili d
• Epic

• One of the oldest extant (existing) works in Western literature

• Set against the Trojan War

• Deals mainly with the ghting between Agamemnon and Achilles

The Odyssey
• Sequel to The Iliad

• Depicts the journey of Odysseus or Ulysses back home to Ithaca,

after the fall of Troy
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 •
Classical Period
5th-4th century

• Athens

• Athens emerged as the most powerful of

the Greek city-states

• Ruled by the famous ruler, Pericles

• Tremendous owering of the arts and
letters

• Disciplines such as political thought,

aesthetics, physics, ethics, linguistics,
biology, logic and mathematics developed
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 •
Rise of
Pre-Socratic philosophers (6th century BC)

• Thales of Miletus
Philosophy • Anaximander
• Xenophanes of Colophon
• Pythagoras
• Heraclitus
• Parmenides
• Zeno of of Elea
• The Sophists (founder Zeno of Citium)
• Socrates, Plato, Aristotle
 Classical Drama Tr gedy
• Emerged in Athens in the late 6th century BC
• As a part of religious festival Dionysia
• Dionysus is the god of wine and ecstasy
• Known as Bacchus among the Romans
Comedy
• Developed later in association with the “satyr
play”

• Usually based on mythological subjects

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Greek Theatre • Koilon or Theatron
• Orchestra
• Thymele
• Scene or Skene
• Proscenion or Proscenium
• Diazoma
Greek Tragedy: • Prologue

Structure • Parados

• Episodes and Stasimon

• Exodus
The Tragedians
• 3 tragedians
• Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides
• At the beginning, there was only one actor in a tragedy, who
interacted with the Chorus
• Aeschylus
• Introduced the second actor and thus brought variety into
drama (says Aristotle in Poetics)
• Chorus has less importance
• Made costumes more elaborate
• Sophocles
• Introduced the third actor
• No more than three actors were there in Greek tragedy
Aeschylus
(c. 525-c. 456 BC)
• Father of tragedy

• Dionysia, Aeschylus always won the rst prize

In the competitions held at the festival of

• His plays had a strong moral and religious

basis

• Most famous work is the trilogy The Oresteia

• poets
Sons Euphorion and Euaeon became tragic
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The Oresteia • A trilogy
• Agamemnon
• The Libation Bearers (Choephoroi)
• The Eumenides
• Satyr Play Proteus
(lost except for two lines)
The Oresteia
• Story of the Greek hero Agamemnon, who is killed by his wife
Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus
• Clytemnestra is the twin sister of Helen of Troy
• Helen and Clytemnestra were born of the “double egg” laid by Leda,
the swan, who was raped by Zeus
• Agamemnon’s children Orestes and Electra take revenge upon her
• Orestes kills Clytemnestra, his mother
• Orestes is haunted by the Eumenides, as a punishment for committing
matricide
Other Extant • The Persians

Plays • The Suppliants

• Seven Against Thebes
• Prometheia
• Prometheus Bound
• Prometheus Unbound
• Prometheus, the Fire-Bringer
Sophocles
• Also won prizes in dramatic competitions

• Believed to have written over a hundred plays; most

of them lost.

• style of his own.

Initially imitated Aeschylus, but later developed a

• than those of Aeschylus

Characters are more developed and individualistic

• Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone

Theban Trilogy: Oedipus Rex (Oedipus the King),
Oedipus Tyrannus (Latin, Oedipus Rex)
• When Oedipus is born to Laius and Jocasta, the King and Queen of Thebes,
the Delphic Oracle prophesizes that he will kill his father and marry his
mother
• Oedipus’s parents sent the child to be killed, but he is brought up by a
childless couple
• Oedipus eventually comes to know of the prophecy
• One day, he quarrels with a man and kills him, without knowing that he is his
father, Laius
• By solving the riddle of the sphinx, Oedipus becomes the King of Thebes,
marries the widowed queen, Jocasta, and has children by her
• When the truth is revealed by another prophecy, Jocasta kills herself and
Oedipus blinds himself
Oedipus Colonus
• The last of the Theban plays to be written

• Starts in the grove of the Furies where Oedipus is a miserable beggar dressed in rags living
in the company of his daughter Antigone

• King Theseus is kind to him, but he is neglected by his sons who are ghting each other

• Oedipus knows it is because of his own curse, and will lead to their destruction

• Creon comes and tries to take Oedipus back to Thebes

• Oedipus’s death is prophesied to bring good fortune to the place where he dies and he
refuses to leave Colonus

• Oedipus dies and is mourned by his daughters

• Theseus defends Colonus from Creon’s army

• Polynices and Etiocles kill each other and Antigone decides to bury Polynices’ body

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Antigone
• Polynices and Etiocles have killed each other in a civil war
• King Creon gives Etiocles a hero’s burial but leaves Polynices’s body at the gates
of Thebes as a punishment for rebelling against the state
• Antigone de es the law of the state and does her duty—buries her brother’s body
• Creon warns Creon against making gods angry, but the king orders for her to be
walled up alive in a cave
• Though Creon eventually relents, Antigone hangs herself in the cave
• Creon’s son Harmon who loved her kills himself and so does Creon’s wife
Euridyce
• Creon’s stubbornness and pride thus destroys him
• The play shows the con ict between the laws of the gods and the laws of the
state
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Other Extant • Ajax

Plays • Women of Trachis

• Electra
• Philoctetes
Euripides
• Author of over ninety plays, much of it lost
• Took the major step of depicting mythical heroes as
ordinary people with inner lives and motives

• Socrates. (Neither of them cared much for accepted

In his intellectual daring, Euripides is often compared to

conventions and advocated unconventional and new ideas)

• Comic poets like Aristophanes lampooned Euripides as well

as Socrates in their plays.

• Euripides’s most famous play is Medea

Some Extant • Hippolytus

Plays • Andromache
• The Trojan Women
• Iphigenia in Tauris
• Phoenician Women
• Orestes
• Bacchae
• Cyclops
Aristophanes
• 5th century BC
• Stalwart
Menander
of comedy, which came to be known as Old Comedy, in contrast with the New Comedy of

• Eleven surviving plays

• The Clouds
• Cruelly caricatured Socrates, which led to the philosopher’s trial and death according to Plato
• The Wasps
• Through the character Philocleon, makes fun of the Athenians’ excessiveness fondness of lawsuits
• Lysistrata
• A woman ends the Peloponnesian War by getting women of the land to deny sex to their men
• The Frogs
• Here, Dionysus himself, dressed in an absurd fashion, goes to Hades to bring back the best
playwright from death
• There
poet.
is a famous scene in the play between Aeschylus and Euripides, regarding who is the better
Menander
• 4th century BC
• Associated with New Comedy
• characters
More generalized situations and stock

• which satirized real individuals and local

In contrast to Old Comedy of Aristophanes,

issues

• Menander’s New Comedy eventually led to the

development of Comedy of Manners
Plays
• Much of Menander’s work was considered lost, except for small
fragments

• In 1907, a manuscript called Cairo Codex was discovered which

contains large portions of many plays

• Dyskolos

• Samia

• Perikeiromene (The Girl with Her Hair Cut Short)

• Epitrepontes
Pindar
• 5th cent BC poet, at the beginning of the Classical
Period

• Odes

• Encomiastic

• Accompanied by music and dance

• Bold and formal language
• Three types of stanzas in each ode, based on choral
dance positions: strophe, anti-strophe and epode

• A major group of Pindar’s odes are the “Victory Odes”

• was developed by Abraham Cowley

A variation of the Pindaric Ode, called Irregular Ode,
Plato
(c. 428 BC-c. 348 BC)
• Born of an aristocratic family in the island of Aegina
near Athens in 428 BC

• Real name was Aristocles, which means “glorious” and

he was called Plato, meaning “broad-shouldered”

• respect for tradition and a keen political sensibility

Received excellent education, which aroused in him a

• came under the in uence of Socrates

By the age of 20, like all young men of Athens, Plato
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The Academy
• After the death of Socrates in 399 BC, Plato left Athens and travelled to Italy, Sicily and
Egypt
• Later, he returned to Athens
• In 387 B.C. Plato, along with the mathematician Thaetetus, founded the philosophical
school, the Academy
• The Academy became very famous due to the Neoplatonists, and functioned until A.D.
526, when it was closed down by emperor Justinian for its pagan orientations
• At Plato’s Academy, subjects like mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, biology and
political theory were taught
• At the gate of the academy was written: “Let no one without mathematics (geometry)
enter.”
• Aristotle was a student at the Academy, and later teacher
The Dialogues
• Much of Plato’s philosophy is in the form of dialogues, usually between
Socrates and someone else
• Called Socratic Dialogues
• Deal with some moral or philosophical problem
• 36 Dialogues, including
• Republic, Protagoras, Apology, Gorgias, Ion, Phaedrus
• Republic is a vindication of the idea that good life is possible only in an ideal
state. And the aim of a good life is justice.
• Never wrote a single work on poetry. His ideas on poetry have to be
extracted from various Dialogues
Aristotle
(384 BC-322 BC)
• Aristotle was born to a well-to-do family in the
Macedonian town of Stagira in 384 BC

• His father, Nicomachus, was a physician

• Inhim367, when Aristotle was seventeen, his uncle sent
to Athens to study at Plato’s Academy

• Spent 20 years there, as a pupil and as a teacher

• After Plato’s death, Aristotle left the Academy

Life away from Athens
• Joined the philosophical circle of Hermeias in Assos, in Asia Minor, where Hermeias was
the tyrant
• When Hermeias was killed by the Persians, Aristotle moved to the island of Lesbos in the
eastern Aegean
• Joined another former Academic, Theophrastus in biological studies
• Philip of Macedon invited Aristotle to serve as tutor to his thirteen-year-old son Alexander.
 Lyceum and After
• Back in Athens, founded his own school, Lyceum
• Most of his great works written during this period
• Under his direction, his students and associates carried out research on philosophical and
scienti c topics
• In 323 BC, Alexander died
• Aristotle once again left Athens and took refuge in his mother’s birthplace, Chalcis
• He died in 322 at the age of sixty-two
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Aristotle’s Works
• What the Westerners know of Aristotle today was left to them by
Arab philosophers such as Averroes in the twelfth century

• The works known in Aristotle’s own lifetime were some 27 dialogues

modelled on those of Plato, but these are now lost

• Surviving works include Poetics, Rhetoric and Nichomachean Ethics

• Poetics

• Written for serious students in the manner of notes for lectures

• First edited by Andronicus in the rst century BC

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Greek Historians • Herodotus
• Thucydides
• Polybius
• Plutarch
• Philosopher, teacher, biographer
• Wrote Parallel Lives
Hellenistic Period • The period is from the time of Alexander the
Great

• Alexander died in 323 BC

• Alexander’s successors established Greek
cities and kingdoms in Asia and Africa

• Upto the Roman annexation of Greece in

146 BC (2nd cent.)

• After this, the “Roman period” in Greece

• Rise of the Roman Empire during this
period

• Rise of Roman Classicism

Roman Classicism
 •
Early Roman
In Rome, monarchy was overthrown and replaced
by the republic in the 6th century BC

History • 1st cent. BC: Transitional period, Republic was

transforming into an Empire

• Caesar, Pompey and Crassus formed First

Triumvirate

• Julius Caesar rose to being dictator (equivalent of

emperor)

• On the Ides of March, that means the 15th of March,

44 BC, Julius Caesar was assassinated by the
republicans (people who supported the republic
against the empire)

• Civil War broke out between republicans and

Caesar’s supporters
 •
The Roman
In the Civil War, republicans were defeated

• Antony, Octavian and Lepidus formed the

Empire Second Triumvirate

• Another Civil War broke out between

Octavian and the combined forces of Mark
Antony and his beloved, Cleopatra of Egypt

• This was the Battle of Actium of 31 BC,

the nal war of the Roman Republic

• Antony and Cleopatra died

• Octavius Caesar won and became the rst
emperor of Rome. And he took the title
Augustus Caesar
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 •
Roman
Profoundly in uenced by Greek philosophy, culture
and literature

Classicism • Stoic philosophy

• Duty, discipline, political involvement

• Epicureanism

• Pleasures of everyday life

• As in the expression “Carpe Diem”
• Skepticism

• Loss of belief in higher values

• Beauty is eeting
• Cynicism

• The belief that people are motivated purely by self-

interest

• Roman Classicism in uenced European Renaissance

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Virgil
(70-19 BC)
• Father of pastoral poetry
• Eclogues (or Bucolics)
• Georgics
• The Aeneid
• Epic modelled after Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey
• Follows the Trojan refugee Aeneas as he struggles to ful l his destiny and arrive on the
shores of Italy, thus founding the city of Rome
• Makes use of the symbolism of the Augustan regime
• Strong associations between Augustus and Aeneas, the one as founder, and the other as
rebounder of Rome
• Virgil’s work has profound in uence on Western literature
• In Dante’s Divine Comedy, Virgil appears as Dante’s guide through hell and purgatory
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Horace
(65-08 BC)
• Roman classicist who lived in the rst century BC

• Odes

• Homostrophic (same stanza throughout the ode)

• Calm, meditative, colloquial

• Satires
• Speaker is an urbane, witty, tolerant man of the world
• Aimed “to laugh people out of their follies”

• Epistles (Letters)

• Ars Poetica (Epistle to Piso)

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 Ovid
(43 BC-c. AD 17)
• Witty, sophisticated love poems
• Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love)
• Scienti c, didactic work on how to nd and keep a lover
• Humorous satirical style

• Metamorphoses

• Ovid’s time
Narrative poem beginning with the creation of the world and ending in

• The greatest source of mythology for Renaissance writers

• Augustus Caesar banished Ovid to an isolated island and he died in exile

• This is the story of David Malouf’s novella An Imaginary Life (1978)
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Seneca the Younger
(c. 4 BC-AD 65)
• Roman statesman, dramatist, poet and Stoic philosopher
• Emperor Nero’s teacher and con dant
• It is legendary that Nero played the ddle while Rome burnt

• Seneca committed forced suicide at Nero’s orders

• Upheld the principles of Stoicism, Cynicism & Epicureanism

• Tragedies of Blood
• Intense, violent melodramas in rhetorical language
• Famous: Thyestes

• became the models for tragedy on the Renaissance stage

Senecan revenge tragedies rediscovered by Italian humanists in the mid-16th century;
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Major Plays • Thyestes
• Agamemnon
• Oedipus
• Phaedra
• Medea
Plautus
(c. 254 BC-184 BC)
• Wrote comedies that are versions of Greek New Comedy
• mistaken identities, cunning servants, deceived masters
Stock characters: young men in love with slave girls,

• Amphitryon

• Menaechmi
• Cistellaria (The Casket Comedy)
• Miles Gloriosus (The Swaggering Soldier)
• Rediscovered in the Renaissance, Plautine plots furnished
the basis for hundreds of comedies in every European
language

• English Restoration Comedy is Plautine in form and spirit

 Terence
(c. 195 BC-159 BC)
• Younger contemporary of Plautus, who wrote comedies
that are the earliest intact works of Roman literature

• Slave who was later freed

• More re ned style of expression
• Plays are Latin versions of Greek plots

• All his 6 comedies have survived

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Extant Plays • Phormio (The Scheming Parasite)
• Andria (The Girl from Andros)
• Adelphoe
• Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-
Tormentor)
• The Eunuchs
• Hecyra (The Mother-in-Law)
Cicero
(106 BC-43 BC)
• Statesman, lawyer, scholar, writer and orator
• Upheld republicanism during the nal civil war of Roman
Republic that killed Julius Caesar

• Founder of Ciceronian rhetoric

• possible because the speaker and audience assume
A kind of dramatic performance where judgment is

character roles

• Wrote very famous historical and philosophical works

• “On Arguments” (De Inventione)
• “On the Orator” (De Oratore)
• “On the Commonwealth" (De Re Publica)

• "On Laws" (De Legibus)

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