Handprints. Patterned scratches. Boxy men and animals drawn in blood or crude plant dyes. These signs made in cave by early homo sapiens and their Neanderthal brethren were the origin of writing and became the first stories. What could not be told through simple cave art were passed down through the generations by tribe elders or shaman, whose first medicines were the poetry of prayer. This was the dawn of literature.

Fast forward a few millennia. Storytelling has developed intricate complexity as society has increased in complexity with the birth of agriculture. Some larger societies (notably, the Sumerians and their Epic of Gilgamesh) started to develop codified writing in the form of pictographs. Instead of literal pictures of events, symbols started standing in for ideas, and it took a literate and critical mind to translate the squiggly symbols into stories. This was the birth of critical analysis. Yet the early language systems of the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Vedic Indians paled in comparison to the invention of the alphabet by the Phoenicians. Here were interchangeable letters that, depending on their pattern, created different meanings. This not only made reading language easier (as there were fewer symbols to memorize) but also allowed for more flexibility in writing (as new words could be decoded more easily than to pictographs). While the trade-focused Phoenicians used their miraculous alphabet for little more than accounting records, a rising civilization took their alphabet and used it to lay the foundations of Western culture. They were the ancient Greeks.

The Rise of the First Literary Movement

There are several common misconceptions about the ancient Greeks. Like the idea that Greece was one civilization: Greece was actually a loose confederacy of city-states that shared a common language and ethnicity but held different cultural values. Think of them like the thirteen colonies before the Constitution: while all English, each colony had radically different values (education vs. wealth vs. religious freedom, etc) and would fight with other states... yet all would unite to fight against an outside foe (like France in the French and Indian War). The Greeks were the same way: Athens valued education and democracy, Sparta valued strength and equality, Corinth valued cunning and strategy, etc. This is not to say that Athens--where most Greek literature originates--was the only source of literature: one of the most celebrated Greek poets is Sappho of Lesbos, and the Spartans often wrote beautiful poetry (granted, the poems were always about war, but they still wrote poetry).

So where did the misconceptions of a unified Greece and a solely-literate Athens start? Alexander the Great. His father Phillip II conquered northern Greece and inspired the young Macedonian to follow in his footsteps and conquer most of the known world before 30, including Egypt, the Middle East, and even western India. But someone else inspired Alexander: a man named Aristotle, who was Alexander's tutor from a young age. Aristotle was an Athenian philosopher who was a student of Plato and was called the smartest man of his time. Aristotle taught Alexander all of the popular Athenian authors--Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Pericles, and Xenophon--and his values became Alexander's. Then Alexander conquered the known world, and his (read: Aristotle's) ideas of culture and literature became the de-facto ideas of literature. In this way, two men--Aristotle and Alexander--created western culture and our idea of what literature is.

So what did Aristotle teach Alexander about literature? In his book Poetics, Aristotle mentions six elements that create good literature:

• PLOT: Aristotle called plot an "arrangement of incidents," implying that a story had to have a series of events where problems (incidents) occurred.
• CHARACTER: Incidents have to happen to people, so Aristotle theorized that the people in a story--the characters--were key to the incidents affecting the audience.
• THOUGHT: And how would the incidents affect the audience? Aristotle reasoned that audiences like stories because we put ourselves in the roles of the character and consider how we would react in a similar situation. This idea of subsuming the character's thought (which is called imaginative rehearsal) is the backbone of why we read literature--it allows us to experience something outside ourselves and release pent up energies and emotions. Borrowing a term from his teacher Plato, Aristotle called this release catharsis.
• LANGUAGE: For Aristotle, language supported plot, character, and action: it literally tells the audience what the plot is and who the characters are. For Aristotle, language had to be artfully written with "embellishments" to be simple enough that everyone could access the thought, yet beautiful enough that the writing carried weight as something extraordinary.
• RHYTHM: One way Aristotle noted that language could be extraordinary is through rhythm. Most all Greek literature was written in verse (specifically, trochaic hexameter) to give it a familiar yet unnatural rhythm as opposed to the prose of political speeches and writings. Aristotle that songs and rhythmic verse resonated more with people and helped convey thought more easily.
• SPECTACLE: Yet a solid plot, developed characters, meaningful ideas, beautiful words, and a pleasing rhythm were not enough for Aristotle. To reach catharsis, Aristotle claimed one more element must be present: spectacle. Aristotle argued that without spectacle to give the audience something new, they would grow bored and disengage from the work.

Remember, Aristotle did not invent these features of literature: he merely noticed these six patterns in all of the literature he observed. Was he right? Good question: literary critics have argued for centuries if his six elements have held up. The crux of the debate is that literature was very homogeneous in Aristotle's time--he didn't have our perspective of what came later, literature that bucked his trends and broke his rules, relegating the Greeks to not the literary absolute but a mere literary movement. While we can use our historical distance to critique Aristotle, we can also use it to identify tropes in classical literature that distinguish the ancient Greeks from future eras in literature. Tropes like...

Remember how Aristotle thought writing should be simple enough for everyone to follow? Part of this idea was sticking to the unities of time, place, and action. By unity, he meant that every story would happen in one location, revolve around one conflict, and take place over a single day. All the Greek plays stuck to the unities. As far as epic stories like The Odyssey where a character travels from place to place over a decade, the unities define where chapters break: epics were originally read by an orator aloud, one chapter per night, and as soon as the story switched locations, solved conflicts, or ended a day, the chapter would end. This isn't to say that these works didn't have story arcs or overarching conflict--these weren't characterized as action, however, as they weren't the immediate obstacle. So while Poseidon's curse on Odysseus fuels the entire plot of The Odyssey, each chapters focus on an immediate problem (the cyclops, Circe, the suitors, etc).

Drama was especially formulaic for the Greeks. Every tragedy consisted of a prologue that revealed the main conflict to the audience so they knew what the play would be about; a parodos, which was a marching chant repeated as the chorus turned toward the alter in the middle of the stage (strophe), turned away from the alter (antistrophe), or stood still and faced the audience (epode); several scenes alternating between episodes (actors interacting) and stasimons (chorus commentaries and reactions); and the exodos, an exit song by the chorus.

Comedy followed a similar structure: a prologue; the parados; an agon (a verbal contest between two characters); the parabasis (the chorus members remove their masks and step out of character to address the audience about how play represents a topical issue); a choral song broken up into an ode (a question to a god by half the chorus), an epirrhema (advice for the audience), an antode (and answer to the question by the other half of chorus), and antepirrhema (an admission of ignorance); episodes and stasimons; and either and exodos or a comos (a riotous party).

The tightly controlled patterns of drama were meant to reflect the patterns of life. Conflicts centered around problems people would commonly encounter. Children would rebel against parents. A loss of money would leave characters hungry. Even the minor aches and pains of age didn't escape the notice of the Greek writer. The Greeks mastered tragedy way before they even attempted comedy as tragedy was a far more common occurrence. Early comedies weren't even comedies--they were satyr plays about sexual conquests that reflected the carnal desires of life. The Greeks preferred stories about real people dealing with real problems like marital infidelity or ungrateful children or political instability.

Or Zeus impregnating you as a shower of golden light.

Most of Greek literature seems fantastic to us and contrary to the idea of reflecting the natural patterns of life, yet the Greeks believed interactions with gods was a realistic and commonplace event. Much of this was based on their ignorance of the natural world: we know that lightning is not the weapon of a vengeful god, but to the Greeks, Zeus was not only a logical but a necessary explanation. If life was full of suffering and tragedy, it was a comfort to know that capricious gods were responsible (and if you're curious how society reacts to the idea that there are no gods defining our purpose, check out the existentialism of Modernism). The presence of gods were just as natural to the Greeks as air or water.

Not everything ends in tragedy in Greek literature, though. In fact, not every death ends in tragedy. Take Arachne, who hangs herself and is turned into a spider. Or Orion, who dies of a grisly evisceration but then is set among the stars themselves. Then there's Pygmalion, who loves his pretty statue so much that it become a real girl so he can... well, more properly love it.

These are all twists of fate facilitated by those ubiquitous gods that populate Greek literature who, since they can do anything, bring about unpredictable but well-deserved miracles at the last minute. This literary trope is called deus ex machina, a term from the Greek theatre that literally means "god from the machine" (Greek gods in plays were lowered onto the stage by a giant crane called The Machine). Just as hamartia served to show audiences how their flaws would lead to ruin, deus ex machina served to give audiences anticipating tragedy hope that their suffering would lead to redemption in the eyes of occasionally sympathetic gods. Note that deus ex machina is not as prevalent in Greek comedies--since everything turns out already, it doesn't serve much of a purpose.

As mentioned, Aristotle believed that literature should not sound like regular speech but be more artistic and embellished. For Aristotle, characters should talk the way that we ideally would talk--with proper syntax that is perfectly correct, interesting diction that would invoke vivid imagery, and a heightened tone that treat every conflict as an epic battle over life and death. Basically, Aristotle argued that literature should have an artistic style, or a specific identifiable way that a writer writes based on use of tone, imagery, diction, and syntax.

For the ancient Greeks, style was defined by breaking conventions without making the writing incomprehensible. Literature was a recent invention and "experimental" style was limited to introducing a second actor to plays (Aeschylus), introducing a third actor (Sophocles), or giving the chorus members individual personalities (Aristophanes). Notably, Euripides wrote plays that were nuanced, mixed up traditional play structures, and sometimes even violated the unities... and he was extremely unpopular. Audiences couldn't follow his plays because they were too different, and he became a literal warning to writers to not be too unique.

So how could an author embellish writing without making things too foreign? One way was to use a regular rhythm to create consistency in the language. Another way was to develop a set of syntactic devices that several authors would all use and thus train an audience to understand through constant use. One common device was euphemism, which started giving phrases double meaning; audiences could enjoy euphemism because, even if the ulterior meaning was lost, audiences could understand the direct meaning. Another common device was stichomythia, which is a set of quick lines between two arguing characters. Audiences liked stichomythia because, even if they couldn't keep up with the rapid-fire dialogue, they could understand that the characters were in an argument.

Speaking of mythic qualities, myth as a structure is a cycle: the end of one story feeds into the next story. Greeks mainly wrote about their gods and their legendary history, and thus the same stories kept being told. Take the Orestes: Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon (Agamemnon), so Agamemnon's son Orestes kills Clytemnestra (Libation Bearers), so Orestes is put on trial for the murder by the gods (Eumenides). Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides all wrote plays about the lives of Oedipus, Medea, and the fall of Thebes. Homer wrote six epics, each of which set up the next epic: the Trojan War in The Iliad leads into the postwar journeys of Odysseus in The Odyssey which leads into the death of Odyesseus in The Telegony (lost). Plays were even performed in cycles: writers would write trilogies of tragedies with a satyr play and present all three together to emphasize the cyclical nature of narrative.

The cyclical nature of life and repeated stories was also reflected in why the plays were written. Greek authors used older stories to comment on contemporary events to show audiences that history repeats itself and history is a cycle. The reason the story of the fall of Thebes (Oedipus, the war between his sons, and the rebellion of his daughter Antigone) was so popular with authors in the 400s BCE because the writers used the story to mirror the then-occurring Peloponnesian War. The war that brought down Thebes (The Seven Against Thebes) was depicted as a brutal war that violated the rules of civilized warfare and thus destroyed both sides, thus the Athenian writers used it to critique the uncivil battle tactics of the Delian and Peloponnesian Leagues in the War. Comedies equally critiqued current events through satire: in The Clouds, Aristophanes mocks the reverence of Socrates and the academy while in Lysistrata he lampoons both warlike Athens and Sparta as simpering fools who cower before the wisdom of women.

The truth of Greek tragedy and hubris is that nothing lasts. This is true of the Greek heroes. This is true of the capricious gods. And this was ultimately true of ancient Greece. The Peloponnesian War ended Athenian democracy and the Golden Age wherein literature flourished, and while Aristotle and Alexander spread the master works of Greek literature throughout the world, Greek literature declined throughout the 300s until their literary output, like their beautiful temples, became fragmented ruin. With the burning of the library of Alexandria, most Greek literature became lost to history. Aeschylus wrote 90 plays: only seven are left. Sophocles wrote over 120 plays: he also had only seven survive. Sappho was known throughout the ancient world for her anthology of over 10,000 lines of poetry: only a single complete poem ("Ode to Aphrodite") survives.

Yet while Greece faded into ruins, their impact on literature is immeasurable. Classical Greek literature became the benchmark on which all other literature is judged. Other classical movements (ancient Rome, Biblical era) aped and further developed the features of ancient Greek literature. The Renaissance and Enlightenment returned to the principles and themes of ancient Greece, and ancient Greek works are still universally taught, referenced, and adapted by modern authors. Only the Bible, Shakespeare, and The Divine Comedy rival The Odyssey, The Iliad, and the Roman remixes of Greek myths in Metamorphoses as the most referenced works in Western culture... and the Bible, Shakespeare, and Dante all reference ancient Greek literature. The Greeks laid the foundation for all western literary structure, literary archetypes, and literary criticism, and without them, all of literature would look very different.

• Homer: The Iliad (c. 8th century BCE), The Odyssey (c. 8th century BCE)
• Sophocles: Women of Trachis (c. 450 BCE), Antigone (c. 442 BCE), Ajax (c. 440 BCE), Oedipus Rex (c. 429 BCE), Philoctetes (409 BCE), Electra (c. 407 BCE), Oedipus at Colonus (401 BCE)
• Aeschylus: The Persians (472 BCE), Seven Against Thebes (467 BCE), The Suppliants (c. 460 BCE), The Oresteia [Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides] (458 BCE), Prometheus Bound (c. 456 BCE)
• Euripides: Medea (431 BCE), Andromache (c. 425 BCE), Electra (c. 420 BCE), The Trojan Women (415 BCE), Bacchae (405 BCE)
• Aristophanes: The Clouds (423 BCE), The Wasps (422 BCE), The Birds (414 BCE), Lysistrata (411 BCE), The Frogs (405 BCE)
• Plato: Apology of Socrates (399 BCE), Republic (c. 380 BCE), Symposium (c. 370 BCE)
• Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics (350 BCE), Poetics (c. 335 BCE), Rhetoric (c. 322 BCE)

Further Reading

Aristotle. Poetics (c. 335 BCE), translated by Malcolm Heath. Penguin, 1997.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With 1000 Faces (1949). New World Library, 2008.

"WORDS." The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama (Sixth Edition), edited by W. B. Worthen. Cengage Learning, 2010, pp. ######

Martin, Richard P. "The Myth Before Myth Began." Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, 2012.

Petridou, Georgia. Divine Epiphany in Greek Literature and Culture. Oxford University Press, 2016.