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FERDOWSI

Ferdowsī was a Persian poet who gave to the Shāh-nāmeh (“Book of Kings”), the Persian national epic, its final and enduring form.

He was born in a village on the outskirts of the ancient city of  ūs. In the course of the centuries many legends have been woven around the poet’s name—which is itself the pseudonym of Abū al-Qasem Man ūr—but very little else, other than his birthplace, is known about the real facts of his life. The only reliable source is given by Ne āmī-ye ‘Arū ī, a 12th-century poet who visited Ferdowsī’s tomb in 1116 or 1117 and collected the traditions that were current in his birthplace less than a century after his death.According to Ne āmī, Ferdowsī was a dehqān (“land-owner”), deriving a comfortable income from his estates. He had only one child, a daughter, and it was to provide her with a dowry that he set his hand to the task that was to occupy him for 35 years. 

The Shāh-nāmeh of Ferdowsī, a poem of nearly 60,000 couplets, is based mainly on a prose work of the same name compiled in the poet’s early man-hood in his native  ūs. This prose Shāh-nāmeh was in turn and for the most part the translation of a Pahlavi (Middle Persian) work, the Khvatāy-nāmak, a history of the kings of Persia from mythical times down to the reign of Khosrow II (590–628).

It also contained additional material continuing the story to the overthrow of the Sāsānians by the Arabs in the middle of the 7th century. The first to undertake the versification of this chronicle of pre-Islāmic and legendary Persia was Daqīqī, a poet at the court of the Sāmānids, who came to a violent end after completing only 1,000 verses. These verses, which deal with the rise of the prophet Zoroaster, were afterward incorporated by Ferdowsī, with due acknowledgements, in his own poem.

The Shāh-nāmeh, finally completed in 1010, was presented to the celebrated sultan Ma mūd of Ghazna, who by that time had made himself master of Ferdowsī’s homeland, Khūrāsān. Information on the relations between poet and patron is largely legendary. According to Ne āmī-ye ‘Arū ī, Ferdowsī came to Ghazna in person and through the good offices of the minister A mad ebn asan Meymandī was able to secure the Sultan’s acceptance of the poem. Unfortunately, Ma mūd then consulted certain enemies of the minister as to the poet’s reward. They suggested that Ferdowsī should be given 50,000 dirhams, and even this, they said, was too much, in view of his heretical Shī’īte tenets. 

Ma mūd, a bigoted Sunnite, was influenced by their words, and in the end Ferdowsī received only 20,000 dirhams. Bitterly disappointed, he went to the bath and, on coming out, bought a draft of foqā‘ (a kind of beer) and divided the whole of the money between the bath attendant and the seller of foqā‘.

Fearing the Sultan’s wrath, he fled first to Herāt, where he was in hiding for six months, and then, by way of his native  ūs, to Mazanderan, where he found refuge at the court of the Sepahbād Shahreyār, whose family claimed descent from the last of the Sāsānians. There Ferdowsī composed a satire of 100 verses on Sultan Ma mūd that he inserted in the preface of the Shāh-nāmeh and read it to Shahreyār, at the same time offering to dedicate the poem to him, as a descendant of the ancient kings of Persia, instead of to Ma mūd. 

Shahreyār, however, persuaded him to leave the dedication to Ma mūd, bought the satire from him for 1,000 dirhams a verse, and had it expunged from the poem. The whole text of this satire, bearing every mark of authenticity, has survived to the present.

It was long supposed that in his old age the poet had spent some time in western Persia or even in Baghdad under the protection of the Būyids, but this assumption was based upon his presumed authorship of Yūsof o-Zalīkhā, an epic poem on the subject of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, which, it later became known, was composed more than 100 years after Ferdowsī’s death. 

According to the narrative of Ne āmī-ye ‘Arū ī, Ferdowsī died inopportunely just as Sultan Ma mūd had determined to make amends for his shabby treatment of the poet by sending him 60,000 dinars’ worth of indigo. Ne āmī does not mention the date of Ferdowsī’s death.

The earliest date given by later authorities is 1020 and the latest 1026; it is certain that he lived to be more than 80.The Persians regard Ferdowsī as the greatest of their poets. For nearly a thousand years they have continued to read and to listen to recitations from his masterwork, the Shāh-nāmeh, in which the Persian national epic found its final and enduring form.

AL-MUTANABBI

Al-Mutanabbī, regarded by many as the greatest poet of the Arabic language, primarily wrote panegyrics in a flowery, bombastic, and highly influential style markedby improbable metaphors.Al-Mutanabbī was the son of a water carrier who claimed noble and ancient southern Arabian descent. Because of his poetic talent, al-Mutanabbī received an education. When Shī’ite Qarmatians sacked Kūfah in 924, he joined them and lived among the Bedouin, learning their doctrines and Arabic. Claiming to be a prophet— hence the name al-Mutanabbī (“The Would-Be Prophet”)—he led a Qarmatian revolt in Syria in 932. After its suppression and two years’ imprisonment, he recanted in 935 and became a wandering poet.

He began to write panegyrics in the tradition established by the poets Abū Tammām and al-Bu turī. A panegyric on the military victories of Sayf al-Dawlah, the  amdānid poet-prince of northern Syria, resulted in al-Mutanabbī’s attaching himself to the ruler’s court in 948.

During his time there, al-Mutanabbī lauded his patron in panegyrics that rank as masterpieces of Arabic poetry. 

Among his lines of praise for Sayf al-Dawlah are ones writ-ten after the prince’s recovery from illness: “Light is now returned to the sun; previously it was extinguished / As though the lack of it in a body were a kind of disease.”The latter part of this period was clouded with intrigues and jealousies that culminated in al-Mutanabbī’s leaving Syria in 957 for Egypt, then ruled in name by the Ikhshīdids. Al-Mutanabbī attached himself to the regent, the Ethiopian eunuch Abū al-Misk Kāf ūr, who had been born a slave. 

But he offended Kāfūr by lampooning him in scurrilous satirical poems and fled Egypt about 960. After further travels—including to Baghdad, where he was unable to secure patronage, and to Kūfah, where he again defended the city from attack by the Qarmatians— al-Mutanabbī lived in Shīrāz, Iran, under the protection of the emir ‘A ūd al-Dawlah of the Būyid dynasty until 965, when he returned to Iraq and was killed by bandits near Baghdad.Al-Mutanabbī’s pride and arrogance set the tone for much of his verse, which is ornately rhetorical yet crafted with consummate skill and artistry. 

He gave to the traditional qa īdah, or ode, a freer and more personal development, writing in what can be called a neoclassical style that combined some elements of Iraqi and Syrian stylistics with classical features.

DU FU

Du Fu is considered by many literary critics to be the greatest Chinese poet of all time, rivaled in that designation only by his contemporary Li Bai.

Born into a scholarly family, Du Fu received a traditional Confucian education but failed in the imperial examinations of 735. As a result, he spent much of his youth traveling. During his travels he won renown as a poet and met other poets of the period, including the great Li Bai, the unofficial poet laureate to the military expedition of Prince Lin, who was arrested when the prince was accused of intending to establish an independent kingdom and was executed. After a brief flirtation with Daoism while traveling with Li Bai, Du Fu returned to the capital and to the conventional Confucianism of his youth. He never again  met Li Bai, despite his strong admiration for his freewheeling contemporary.

During the 740s Du Fu was a well-regarded member of a group of high officials, even though he was without money and official position himself and failed a second time in an imperial examination. He married, probably in741.Between 751 and 755 he tried to attract imperial attention by submitting a succession of literary products that were couched in a language of ornamental flattery, a device that eventually resulted in a nominal position at court.

In 755, during An Lushan’s rebellion, Du Fu experienced extreme personal hardships. He escaped them, however, and in 757 joined the exiled court, being given the position of censor. His memoranda to the emperor do not appear to have been particularly welcome; he was eventually relieved of his post and endured another period of poverty and hunger. Wandering about until the mid-760s, he briefly served a local warlord, a position that enabled him to acquire some land and to become a gentle-man farmer, but in 768 he again started traveling aimlessly toward the south. 

Popular legend attributes his death (on a riverboat on the Xiang River) to overindulgence in food and wine after a 10-day fast.Du Fu’s early poetry celebrated the beauty of the natural world and bemoaned the passage of time. He soon began to write bitingly of war—seen in Bingqu xing (The Ballad of the Army Carts), a poem about conscription—and with hid-den satire, as in Liren xing (The Beautiful Woman), which speaks of the conspicuous luxury of the court. As he matured, and especially during the tumultuous period of755to 759, his verse began to sound a note of profound com-passion for humanity caught in the grip of senseless war.

Du Fu’s paramount position in the history of Chinese literature rests on his superb classicism. He was highly erudite, and his intimate acquaintance with the literary tradition of the past was equaled only by his complete ease in handling the rules of prosody. His dense, compressed language makes use of all the connotative overtones of a phrase and of all the intonational potentials of the individual word, qualities that no translation can ever reveal. He was an expert in all poetic genres current in his day, but his mastery was at its height in the lüshi, or “regulated verse,” which he refined to a point of glowing intensity.

IMRU’ AL-QAYS

The Arab poet Imru’ al-Qays was acknowledged as the most distinguished poet of pre-Islamic times by the Prophet Muhammad, by ‘Alī, the fourth caliph, and by Arab critics of the ancient Basra school. He is the author of one of the seven odes in the famed collection of pre-Islamic poetry Al-Mu‘allaqāt.

There is no agreement as to his genealogy, but the pre-dominant legend cites Imru’ al-Qays as the youngest son of  ujr, the last king of Kindah. He was twice expelled from his father’s court for the erotic poetry he was fond of writing, and he assumed the life of a vagabond. After his father was murdered by a rebel Bedouin tribe, the Banū Asad, Imru’ al-Qays was single-minded in his pursuit of revenge. 

He successfully attacked and routed the Banū Asad, but, unsatisfied, he went from tribe to tribe fruitlessly seeking further help. Through King al- ārith of Ghassān (northern Arabia), Imru’ al-Qays was introduced to the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, who agreed to supply him with the troops that he needed to regain his kingdom. Legend has it that on his return to Arabia the emperor sent him a poisoned cloak, which caused his death at Ancyra (modern Ankara).

The philologists of the Basra school regarded Imru’ al-Qays not only as the greatest of the poets of the Mu‘allaqāt but also as the inventor of the form of the classical ode, or qa īdah, and of many of its conventions, such as the poet’s weeping over the traces of deserted campsites. The open-ing of the long qa īdah by Imru’ al-Qays that appears in the Mu‘allaqāt is perhaps the best-known line of poetry in Arabic: “Halt, you two companions, and let us weep for the memory of a beloved and an abode mid the sand-dunes between Al-Dakhūl and  awmal.”

The hunting scenes and bluntly erotic narratives by Imru’ al-Qays in the Mu‘allaqāt represent important early precedents of the genres of hunt poetry and love poetry in Arabic literature. There were at least three collections (divans) of his poetry made by medieval Arab scholars, numbering as many as 68 poems. The authenticity of the greater part of them, however, is doubtful.

VIRGIL

The Roman poet Virgil, best known for his national epic, the Aeneid (from c. 30 BCE), was regarded by the Romans as their greatest poet, an estimation that subsequent generations have upheld. His fame rests chiefly upon the Aeneid, which tells the story of Rome’s legendary founder and proclaims the Roman mission to civilize the world under divine guidance.

Early Life 

Virgil, whose Latin name was Publius Vergilius Maro, was born of peasant stock. He was educated at Cremona, at Milan, and finally at Rome, acquiring a thorough knowledge of Greek and Roman authors, especially of the poets, and receiving a detailed training in rhetoric and philosophy.During Virgil’s youth, as the Roman Republic neared its end, the political and military situation in Italy was confused and often calamitous. The civil war between Marius and Sulla had been succeeded by conflict between Pompey and Julius Caesar for supreme power. When Virgil was 20, Caesar with his armies swooped south from Gaul, crossed the Rubicon, and began the series of civil wars that were not to end until Augustus’s victory at Actium in 31 BCE. 

Hatred and fear of civil war is powerfully expressed by both Virgil and his contemporary Horace.Virgil’s life was devoted entirely to his poetry and studies connected with it. His health was never robust, and he played no part in military or political life. It is said that he spoke once in the law courts without distinction and that his shy and retiring nature caused him to give up any ideas he might have had of taking part in the world of affairs. He never married, and the first half of his life was that of a scholar and near recluse. But, as his poetry won him fame, he gradually won the friendship of many important men in the Roman world.

Literary Career 

Virgil’s earliest certain work is the Eclogues, a collection of 10 pastoral poems composed between 42 and 37 BCE. Some of them are escapist, literary excursions to the idyllic pastoral world of Arcadia based on the Greek poet Theocritus (fl. c. 280 BCE) but more unreal and stylized. One eclogue in particular stands out as having relevance to the contemporary situation, and this is the fourth (sometimes called the Messianic, because it was later regarded as prophetic of Christianity). It is an elevated poem, prophesying in sonorous and mystic terms the birth of a child who will bring back the Golden Age, banish sin, and restore peace. 

It was clearly written at a time when the clouds of civil war seemed to be lifting; it can be dated firmly to 41–40 BCE. It seems most likely that Virgil refers to an expected child of the triumvir Antony and his wife Octavia, sister of Octavian. But, though a specific occasion may be allocated to the poem, it goes beyond the particular and, in symbolic terms, presents a vision of world harmony, which was, to some extent, destined to be realized under Augustus.One of the most disastrous effects of the civil wars— and one of which Virgil, as a countryman, would be most intensely aware—was the depopulation of rural Italy. The farmers had been obliged to go to war, and their farms fell into neglect and ruin as a result. 

The Georgics, composed between 37 and 30 BCE (the final period of the civil wars), is a plea for the restoration of the traditional agricultural life of Italy. It is dedicated to Maecenas, one of the chief of Augustus’s ministers, who was also the leading patron of the arts. By this time Virgil was a member of what might be called the court circle, and his desire to see his beloved Italy restored to its former glories coincided with the national requirement of resettling the land and diminishing the pressure on the cities. It would be wrong to think of Virgil as writing political propaganda; but equally it would be wrong to regard his poetry as unconnected with the major currents of political and social needs of the time. Virgil was personally committed to the same ideals as the government.In the year 31 BCE, when Virgil was 38, Augustus (still known as Octavian) won the final battle of the civil wars at Actium against the forces of Antony and Cleopatra. 

Virgil, like many of his contemporaries, felt a great sense of relief that the civil strife was at last over and was deeply grateful to the man who had made it possible. Augustus was anxious to preserve the traditions of the republic and its constitutional forms, but he was in fact sole ruler of the Roman world. He used his power to establish a period of peace and stability and endeavored to reawaken in the Romans a sense of national pride and a new enthusiasm for their ancestral religion and their traditional moral values (bravery, parsimony, duty, responsibility, and family devotion). Virgil, too, felt a deep attachment to the simple virtues and religious traditions of the Italian people. 

GAIUS VALERIUS CATULLUS

Gaius Valerius Catullus was a Roman poet whose expressions of love and hatred are generally considered the finest lyric poetry of ancient Rome.No ancient biography of Catullus survives. A few facts can be pieced together from external sources and in the works of his contemporaries or of later writers, supplemented by inferences drawn from his poems, some of which are certain, some only possible. Catullus was alive 55–54 BCE on the evidence of four of his poems, and died young, according to the poet Ovid—at the age of 30 as stated by St. Jerome (writing about the end of the 4th century), who nevertheless dated his life erroneously 87–57 BCE. 

Catullus was thus a contemporary of the statesmen Cicero, Pompey, and Julius Caesar, who are variously addressed by him in his poems. He preceded the poets of the immediately succeeding age of the emperor Augustus, among whom Horace, Sextus Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid name him as a poet whose work is familiar to them. Catullus owned property at Sirmio, the modern Sirmione, on Lake Garda, though he preferred to live in Rome and owned a villa near the Roman suburb of Tibur, in an unfashionable neighborhood.In a poem externally datable to c. 57–56 BCE, Catullus reports one event, a journey to Bithynia in Asia Minor in the retinue of Gaius Memmius, the Roman governor of the province, from which he returned to Sirmio. 

His poetry also records two emotional crises, the death of a brother whose grave he visited in the Troad, also in Asia Minor, and an intense and unhappy love affair, portrayed variously in 25 poems, with a woman who was married and whom he names Lesbia, a pseudonym (Ovid states) for Clodia, according to the 2nd-century writer Apuleius. (She may have been a patrician, one of the three Clodia sisters of Cicero’s foe Publius Clodius Pulcher. All three were the subject of scandalous rumour, according to Plutarch.) His poems also record, directly or indirectly, a homosexual affair with a youth named Juventius.

Among his longer poems are two marriage hymns; one romantic narrative in hexameters (lines of six feet) on the marriage of Peleus with the sea goddess Thetis; and four elegiac pieces, consisting of an epistle introducing a translation of an elegant conceit by the Alexandrian poet Callimachus, followed by a pasquinade, or scurrilous conversation, between the poet and a door, and lastly a soliloquy addressed to a friend and cast in the form of an encomium, or poem of praise.In his lifetime, Catullus was a poet’s poet, addressing himself to fellow craftsmen (docti, or scholarly poets), especially to his friend Licinius Calvus, who is often posthumously commemorated along with him. The conversational rhythms of his poetry, as he managed them for lyric purposes, achieved an immediacy that no other classic poet can rival. 

For the general reader, the 25 Lesbia poems are likely to remain the most memorable, recording as they do a love that could register ecstasy and despair and all the divided emotions that intervene. Two of them with unusual metre recall Sappho, the poet of the Aegean island of Lesbos, as also does his use of the pseudonym Lesbia. The quality of his poems of invective, which spare neither Caesar nor otherwise unknown personalities, is uneven, ranging from the high-spirited to the tedious, from the lapidary to the labored. But their satiric humor is often effective, and their obscenity reflects a serious literary convention that the poet himself defends.

ARISTOPHANES

Aristophanes is the greatest representative of ancient Greek comedy, and the one whose works have been preserved in greatest quantity. He is the only extant representative of the Old Comedy, that is, of the phase of comic dramaturgy in which chorus, mime, and burlesque still played a considerable part and which was characterized by bold fantasy, merciless invective and outrageous satire, unabashedly licentious humor, and a marked freedom of political criticism. But Aristophanes belongs to the end of this phase, and, indeed, his last extant play, which has no choric element at all, may well be regarded as the only extant specimen of the short-lived Middle Comedy, which, before the end of the 4th century BCE, was to be superseded in turn by the milder and more realistic social satire of the New Comedy.

Little is known about the life of Aristophanes, and most of the known facts are derived from references in his own plays. He was an Athenian citizen belonging to the deme, or clan, named Pandionis, but his actual birthplace is uncertain. (The fact that he or his father, Philippus, owned property on the island of Aegina may have been the cause of an accusation by his fellow citizens that he was not of Athenian birth.) He began his dramatic career in 427 BCE with a play, the Daitaleis (The Banqueters), which appears, from surviving fragments, to have been a satire on his contemporaries’ educational and moral theories. He is thought to have written about 40 plays in all.

A large part of his work is concerned with the social, literary, and philosophical life of Athens itself and with themes provoked by the great Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE). This war was essentially a conflict between imperialist Athens and conservative Sparta, and so was long the dominant issue in Athenian politics. Aristophanes was naturally an opponent of the more or less bellicose states-men who controlled the government of Athens throughout the better part of his maturity. Aristophanes lived to see the revival of Athens after its defeat by Sparta.Aristophanes’ reputation has stood the test of time.

SOPHOCLES

Sophocles, one of classical Athens’s great tragic play-wrights, was born in a village outside the walls of Athens, where his father, Sophillus, was a wealthy manufacturer of armour. Sophocles was wealthy from birth, highly educated, noted for his grace and charm, on easy terms with the leading families, and a personal friend of prominent statesmen. Because of his beauty of physique, his athletic prowess, and his skill in music, he was chosen in 480, when he was 16, to lead the paean (choral chant to a god) celebrating the decisive Greek sea victory over the Persians at the Battle of Salamis.

The relatively meagre information about Sophocles’ civic life suggests that he was a popular favorite who participated actively in his community and exercised outstanding artistic talents. In 442 he served as one of the treasurers responsible for receiving and managing tribute money from Athens’s subject-allies in the Delian League. In 440 he was elected one of the 10 stratēgoi (high executive officials who commanded the armed forces) as a junior colleague of Pericles. Sophocles later served as stratēgos perhaps twice again. In 413, then aged about 83, Sophocles was a proboulos, one of 10 advisory commissioners who were granted special powers and were entrusted with organizing Athens’s financial and domestic recovery after its terrible defeat at Syracuse in Sicily. 

These few facts, which are about all that is known of Sophocles’ life, imply steady and distinguished attachment to Athens, its government, religion, and social forms.Sophocles won his first victory at the Dionysian dramatic festival in 468, however, defeating the great Aeschylus in the process. This began a career of unparalleled success and longevity. In total, Sophocles wrote 123 dramas for the festivals. Since each author who was chosen to enter the competition usually presented four plays, this means he must have competed about 30 times. Sophocles won perhaps as many as 24 victories, compared to 13 for Aeschylus, and indeed he may have never received lower than second place in the competitions he entered.Ancient authorities credit Sophocles with several major and minor dramatic innovations. 

Among the latter is his invention of some type of “scene paintings” or other pictorial prop to establish locale or atmosphere. He also may have increased the size of the chorus from 12 to 15 members. Sophocles’ major innovation was his introduction of a third actor into the dramatic performance. It had previously been permissible for two actors to “double” (i.e., assume other roles during a play), but the addition of a third actor onstage enabled the dramatist both to increase the number of his characters and widen the variety of their interactions. The scope of the dramatic conflict was thereby extended, plots could be more fluid, and situations could be more complex.

The typical Sophoclean drama presents a few characters, impressive in their determination and power, and possessing a few strongly drawn qualities or faults that combine with a particular set of circumstances to lead them inevitably to a tragic fate. Sophocles develops his characters’ rush to tragedy with great economy, concentration, and dramatic effectiveness, creating a coherent, suspenseful situation whose sustained and inexorable onrush came to epitomize the tragic form to the classical world. Sophocles emphasizes that most people lack wisdom, and he presents truth in collision with ignorance, delusion, and folly. Many scenes dramatize flaws or failure in thinking (deceptive reports and rumors, false optimism, hasty judgment, madness). The chief character does something involving grave error; this affects others, each of whom reacts in his own way, thereby causing the chief agent to take another step toward ruin—his own and that of others as well. Equally important, those who are to suffer from the tragic error usually are present at the time or belong to the same generation.

AESCHYLUS

Aeschylus, the first of classical Athens’s great dramatists, raised the emerging art of tragedy to great heights of poetry and theatrical power. He grew up in the turbulent period when the Athenian democracy, having thrown off its tyranny (the absolute rule of one man), had to prove itself against both self-seeking politicians at home and invaders from abroad. Aeschylus himself took part in his city’s first struggles against the invading Persians. Later Greek chroniclers believed that Aeschylus was 35 years old in 490 BCE when he participated in the Battle of Marathon, in which the Athenians first repelled the Persians. If this is true, it would place his birth in 525 BCE. Aeschylus’s father’s name was Euphorion, and the family probably lived at Eleusis (west of Athens).

Aeschylus was a notable participant in Athens’s major dramatic competition, the Great Dionysia , which was apart of the festival of Dionysus. He is recorded as having participated in this competition, probably for the first time, in499 BCE. He won his first victory in the theatre in the spring of 484 BCE. In the mean-time,  he  had  fought and possibly been wounded at Marathon, and Aeschylus singled out his participation inthis battle years later formention on the verse epitaph he wrote for himself. His brother was killed in this battle. 

In 480 BCE the Persians again invaded Greece, and once again Aeschylus saw service, fighting at the battles of Artemisium and Salamis. His responses to the Persian invasion found expression in his play Persians, the earliest of his works to survive. This play was produced in the competition of the spring of 472 BCE and won first prize.Around this time Aeschylus is said to have visited Sicily to present Persians again at the tyrant Hieron I’s court in Syracuse. Aeschylus’s later career is a record of sustained dramatic success, though he is said to have suffered one memorable defeat, at the hands of the novice Sophocles, whose entry at the Dionysian festival of 468 BCE was victorious over the older poet’s entry. 

Aeschylus recouped the loss with victory in the next year, 467, with his Oedipus trilogy (of which the third play, Seven Against Thebes, survives). After producing the masterpiece among his extant works, the Oresteia trilogy, in 458, Aeschylus went to Sicily again.Aeschylus wrote approximately 90 plays, including satyr plays as well as tragedies; of these, about 80 titles are known. Only seven tragedies have survived entire. One account, perhaps based on the official lists, assigns Aeschylus 13 first prizes, or victories. This would mean that well over half of his plays won, since sets of four plays rather than separate ones were judged. According to the philosopher Flavius Philostratus, Aeschylus was known as the “Father of Tragedy.”

Aeschylus’s influence on the development of tragedy was fundamental. Previous to him, Greek drama was limited to one actor and a chorus engaged in a largely static recitation. (The chorus was a group of actors who responded to and commented on the main action of a play with song, dance, and recitation.) The actor could assume different roles by changing masks and costumes, but he was limited to engaging in dialogue only with the chorus. By adding a second actor with whom the first could converse, Aeschylus vastly increased the drama’s possibilities for dialogue and dramatic tension and allowed more variety and freedom in plot construction. Although the dominance of the chorus in early tragedy is ultimately only hypothesis, it is probably true that, as Aristotle says in his Poetics, Aeschylus “reduced the chorus’ role and made the plot the leading actor.”

HOMER

Homer is the presumed author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Although these two great epic poems of ancient Greece have always been attributed to the shadowy figure of Homer, little is known of him beyond the fact that his was the name attached in antiquity by the Greeks themselves to the poems. That there was an epic poet called Homer and that he played the primary part in shaping the Iliad and the Odyssey—so much may be said to be probable. If this assumption is accepted, then Homer must assuredly be one of the greatest of the world’s literary artists.

He is also one of the most influential authors in the widest sense, for the two epics provided the basis of Greek education and culture throughout the Classical age and formed the backbone of humane education down to the time of the Roman Empire and the spread of Christianity. Indirectly through the medium of Virgil’s Aeneid (loosely molded after the patterns of the Iliad and the Odyssey), directly through their revival under Byzantine culture from the late 8th century CE onward, and subsequently through their passage into Italy with the Greek scholars who fled westward from the Ottomans, the Homeric epics had a profound impact on the Renaissance culture of Italy. Since then the proliferation of translations has helped to make them the most important poems of the classical European tradition.

Early References 

Implicit references to Homer and quotations from the poems date to the middle of the 7th century BCE . Archilochus, Alcman, Tyrtaeus, and Callinus in the 7th century and Sappho and others in the early 6th adapted Homeric phraseology and metre to their own purposes and rhythms. At the same time scenes from the epics became popular in works of art. The pseudo-Homeric “Hymn to Apollo of Delos,” probably of late 7th-century composition, claimed to be the work of “a blind man who dwells in rugged Chios,” a reference to a tradition about Homer himself. The idea that Homer had descendants known as “Homeridae,” and that they had taken over the preservation and propagation of his poetry, goes back at least to the early 6th century BCE.

It was not long before a kind of Homeric scholarship began: Theagenes of Rhegium in southern Italy toward the end of the same century wrote the first of many allegorizing interpretations. By the 5th century biographical fictions were well under way. The Pre Socratic philosopher Heracleitus of Ephesus made use of a trivial legend of Homer’s death—that it was caused by chagrin at not being able to solve some boys’ riddle about catching lice—and the concept of a contest of quotations between Homer and Hesiod (after Homer, the most ancient of Greek poets) may have been initiated in the Sophistic tradition. The historian Herodotus assigned the formulation of Greek theology to Homer and Hesiod, and claimed that they could have lived no more than 400 years before his own time, the 5th century BCE. This should be contrasted with the superficial assumption, popular in many circles throughout antiquity, that Homer must have lived not much later than the Trojan War about which he sang.

The general belief that Homer was a native of Ionia (the central part of the western seaboard of Asia Minor) seems a reasonable conjecture for the poems themselves are in predominantly Ionic dialect. Although Smyrna and Chios early began competing for the honor (the poet Pindar, early in the 5th century BCE, associated Homer with both), and others joined in, no authenticated local memory survived anywhere of someone who, oral poet or not, must have been remarkable in his time.