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Literature and philosophy in ancient Greece
© Hachette Livre et/ou Hachette Multimédia

Aristote, philosophizes Greek

Principal founder of the Western intellectual tradition with Plato.


By the interest which it presents and the influence that it exerted, the literature of Greek Antiquity is probably largest in the world. Which other literature can be indeed prided to bring together with it only authors of the stature of Homère, Sappho, Eschyle, Sophocle, Euripide, Thucydide, Aristophane, Plato or Aristote, to quote only some of the most eminent names?    

Not only ancient Greece produced a considerable number of masterpieces, but she also and especially invented literary kinds - the epopee, the tragedy, the comedy, lyric poetry, historiography, dialogs and treaties philosophical, art of public speaking, the biography and the novel in prose - of which she will fix the models for many centuries. The Greek literature thus constitutes, in this direction, one of the bases of the Occidental culture.

But the written literature is based itself on a very rich literature oral, made fables and myths, that all the Greeks learned as of childhood, as Plato in the Republic explains it. It is thus not astonishing that most Greek authors are inspired some, that Greek science and philosophy develop starting from a mythical vision of the world, and that historiography itself keeps the trace of its origins in mythology.

The literature and the philosophy of ancient Greece are presented in four parts:



 
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