Classical Literature: A Very Short Introduction

Citation

Allan, W. (2014). Classical Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Chapter Summary

The book is a volume in Oxford's Very Short Introductions series: about 125 pages of text in nine chapters, followed by a one-page epilogue, a list of further reading and an index, with eight illustrations and maps. After an opening chapter on general questions, each chapter takes one genre and moves between Greek and Latin examples. The period covered runs from about 750 BC to AD 500, but in practice, as Vincent Hunink's review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR 2014.08.25) points out, the book leaves out Christian writing and almost everything after AD 200. Translations are used throughout; no Greek or Latin is required.

Chapter 1: History, genre, text

The opening chapter frames the whole subject. It sets out the conventional periods (archaic, classical, Hellenistic and imperial for Greek; Republican and imperial for Latin), explains how ancient texts survived into the modern age, and introduces genre as the organising idea of the book, including the ancient ranking of genres from "high" forms such as epic, tragedy and history down to "low" ones such as comedy, satire, mime and epigram. Hunink notes that it also covers imitation and rivalry with predecessors and the Greek influence on Roman writing.

Chapter 2: Epic

Epic is presented as a prestigious but flexible form that kept its appeal in societies where war was constant, because it celebrated and examined heroism, loyalty and masculinity. The chapter runs from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey through Apollonius' Argonautica and Ennius' Annals to Virgil's Aeneid, and ends with didactic epic, the poetry that set out to teach farming, hunting, philosophy or science.

Chapter 3: Lyric and personal poetry

This chapter groups poetry spoken from the point of view of an "I", from early Greek lyric to Roman love elegy. It divides Greek lyric into iambus, elegy and lyric proper (solo and choral), places it in its performance settings, the symposium and the public festival, and discusses Sappho, Pindar, Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid and Horace. Hunink singles out its pages on Archilochus and Sappho and its reading of Roman elegy.

Chapter 4: Drama

Tragedy and comedy are treated as mass entertainment and as part of community life. The chapter considers how each surviving playwright engages his audience's values, covering the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the comedies of Cratinus, Eupolis and Aristophanes, the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence and the tragedies of Seneca. Hunink found its account of Greek tragedy, built around human suffering and the emotions it provokes rather than around Aristotelian rules, especially thought-provoking.

Chapter 5: Historiography

The chapter asks how Greeks and Romans thought and wrote about their past: how far historians researched rather than retold earlier versions, how other genres shaped history writing, and how individual historians defended their claims to truth. It argues that, whatever their failings by modern standards of accuracy and impartiality, the ancient historians achieved something considerable, and that a history reveals its own author's period as much as the one it describes. Hunink notes attention to Cato's historical prose.

Chapter 6: Oratory

At about ten pages this is one of the shortest chapters. It explains why public speaking mattered so much, why rhetoric formed the core of higher education from the fifth century BC, and Aristotle's three types of oratory (deliberative, forensic and display), with Demosthenes and Cicero as the leading Greek and Roman orators.

Chapter 7: Pastoral

Pastoral is traced from its invention by Theocritus at the Alexandrian court in the early third century BC, where learned city poets cultivated a nostalgia for rural simplicity, to Virgil's Eclogues, in which contemporary politics and civil war break into the pastoral world.

Chapter 8: Satire

Roman satire is followed from Lucilius in the second century BC to Juvenal in the early second century AD. The chapter looks at the satirists' targets and personae, the Roman narrative of moral decline, and whether satire reinforced or challenged social norms; Juvenal receives the fullest treatment.

Chapter 9: Novel

The last chapter covers the ancient novel as a late arrival: the five surviving Greek novels from the mid-first century AD onwards, with their love-and-adventure plots and increasingly sophisticated narration, how their values related to audiences under Roman rule, and the Latin novels of Petronius and Apuleius, which play even more freely with generic convention.

Key Concepts

Framework (Chapter 1)

• Periodization: the division of Greek literature into archaic, classical, Hellenistic and imperial periods, and Latin into Republican and imperial.
• Genre and its hierarchy: the ancient sense that each kind of writing had its own rules and rank, from epic and tragedy down to satire and epigram.
• Transmission: how texts written more than two thousand years ago reached modern readers.

Poetry and drama (Chapters 2–4, 7–8)

• Didactic epic: epic poetry whose aim was to instruct, on subjects from farming to science.
• Performance context: the symposium, the festival and the theatre as the places where poetry and drama met their audiences.
• Roman love elegy: first-person love poetry which, in Hunink's summary of the chapter, let a Roman male reader experience the loss of power and self-control.
• Persona in satire: the voice the satirist adopts in order to attack his targets.

Prose (Chapters 5–6, 9)

• Historiographical method: the question of research versus retelling, and how historians claimed truth.
• Three types of oratory: deliberative, forensic and display speeches, after Aristotle.
• Generic play in the novel: the manipulation and parody of convention in Petronius and Apuleius.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Brevity with a clear shape. One framing chapter and eight genre chapters give a map of the field that can be read in a few sittings. Hunink, reviewing the book in BMCR, called it suitable for undergraduates and general readers and praised its light, sometimes witty style.
• Greek and Latin together. Each genre is followed across both literatures, so the reader sees, for example, how pastoral moved from Alexandria to Virgil or how the novel developed from the Greek romances to Petronius and Apuleius.
• Arguments, not only lists. The chapter abstracts and Hunink's review both show the chapters making claims about why genres mattered to their audiences, such as tragedy built around suffering, epic and the values of a warrior society, satire and the idea of decline.
• A route into further reading. The book ends with a further reading list, and Hunink expected it to send readers on to longer works.

Limitations

• Wide omissions. Philosophy and technical prose are excluded, along with Christian literature and nearly everything after AD 200. Hunink lists Plato, Cicero's philosophical works, Marcus Aurelius, Pliny the Elder, Suetonius and Martial among the absentees. Allan's reply (BMCR 2014.08.54) explains that the 125-page limit and the existence of separate Very Short Introductions on ancient philosophy and Christianity shaped the selection.
• Uneven balance. Hunink questioned the place given to pastoral, the ten pages for all of oratory, and a tilt towards poetry and towards Greek over Latin.
• Not a textbook. Allan states that the series aims at the general reader and that the book does not claim to replace a full textbook; Hunink, for his part, would recommend it only as a companion to a longer history.

Where It Fits in the Course

In the classical literature course this is the shortest way in, suited to the first week or to reading before the course begins. Richard Rutherford's Classical Literature: A Concise History is the natural next step: Hunink describes it as a reliable guide of about 350 pages, also organised genre by genre, and both he and Allan treat it as the textbook to which this book is a companion. Because the two books share a genre-based plan, a chapter of Allan can be read as a preview of the corresponding Rutherford chapter.

The larger histories, Albin Lesky's A History of Greek Literature and Gian Biagio Conte's Latin Literature: A History, are reference works for detailed study of individual authors, arranged by period and author rather than by genre. The translations of the Iliad (Emily Wilson), the Odyssey (E. V. Rieu) and the Aeneid (Robert Fitzgerald) are the primary texts that Chapter 2 introduces; reading that chapter before starting them gives the context of heroic values and the epic tradition.

How to Use This Book

The book suits anyone beginning classics or a literature degree with no Greek or Latin, and general readers who know the names Homer and Virgil but little more. Read Chapter 1 first, since its account of periods and genre underpins everything else. After that the genre chapters can be taken in any order; a sensible plan is to read each one just before meeting that genre in the course (Chapter 2 before Homer or Virgil, Chapter 4 before the plays, Chapter 5 before the historians).

Read with a timeline or map at hand and note the authors named in each chapter, then look them up in Rutherford or the larger histories. Fill the gaps the book leaves deliberately: for philosophy, Plato and Cicero's philosophical works, and for Christian and late antique writing, separate reading is needed. Use the further reading list to choose a translation and a longer study for each genre you want to pursue.