The origin of epic, tragedy, philosophy and history — the wellspring to which the West forever returns.
★ Suggested first work to enter the reader: Homer — the Odyssey
The fountainhead of Western literature; the Iliad and Odyssey set the measure for epic, heroism and the human condition.
The lyric poet against whom all others are measured; her fragments burn with a directness of feeling unmatched in antiquity.
Master of tragedy; Oedipus Rex and Antigone frame the eternal collision of fate, law and conscience.
The greatest lyric poet of ancient Greece after Sappho; his victory odes set the enduring standard for the poetry of praise.
Father of tragedy; he added the second actor and turned ritual into the towering drama of the Oresteia.
The most modern of the tragedians; he gave voice to women, outcasts and the irrational in the human heart.
Earliest Greek poet after Homer; he set down the birth of the gods and the farmer's moral year.
In the Republic and the dialogues he founded Western philosophy as the pursuit of the good, the true and the just — and preserved the voice of his teacher Socrates.
The first systematic mind; from ethics to poetics to physics he mapped nearly the whole field of knowledge.
The pre-Socratic of flux and fire; his fragments hold that all things flow and that strife is the father of all.
The Cynic who lived in a jar and mocked convention; philosophy as radical, provocative practice.
His Parallel Lives shaped the West's idea of character and virtue by setting Greek against Roman.
Master of Old Comedy; his satires turned the whole of Athenian life — war, philosophy, politics — into brilliant ridicule.
Author of Daphnis and Chloe, the tender pastoral romance that shaped the European love story.
Satirist of genius; his A True Story is a founding fantasy of voyages to the Moon.
The ‘Father of History’; his inquiry into the Greco-Persian Wars invented the writing of history itself.
In the History of the Peloponnesian War he founded the rigorous, political analysis of events, cause and power.
Soldier-historian and pupil of Socrates; his Anabasis recounts the epic march of the Ten Thousand.
