Description: The period from the eight to the fifth centuries B.C. was one of extraordinary creativity in the Greek-speaking world. Poetry was apublic and popular medium, and its production was closely related to developments in contemporary society. At the time when the city states were acquiring their distinctive institutions epic found the greatest of all its exponents in Homer, and lyric poetry for both solo and choral performance became a genre which attracted poets of the first rank, writers of the quality of Sappho, Alcaeus and Pindar, whose influence on later literature was to be profound. This volume covers the epic tradition, the didactic poems of Hesiod and his imitators, and the wide-ranging work of the iambic, elegiac and lyric poets of what is loosely called the archaic age.

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