Ancient Greek literary works

Plato's ideal country, Plato's perfect country, represents the ideal and expectation of Greek slaves' harmony.

Prometheus, the greatest tragedy in ancient Greece, represents human resistance and unyielding to nature until compromise.

/view/ 1328029.htm

Or Homer's Epic, which takes quite a long time to read, is very rich and wonderful, among which the Iliad and Odysseus are the most famous chapters.

In philosophy,/question/question/4014205.html.

I also recommend Sappho (630 BC or 6 12 ~ 592 BC or 560 BC), a famous female lyric poet in ancient Greece. People only know that she is a great poet in ancient times: the ancient Greeks praised her, saying that the male poet had Homer and the female poet had Sappho, and Plato once called her the "tenth muse". Her poems had a great influence on the creation of lyric poets Catullus and Horace in ancient Rome, and were highly respected in Europe since then. The portrait of the poet was once printed on a coin. The poet's poems were first compiled into 9 volumes in the 3rd century BC, but only one poem with 28 lines was well preserved. Until19th century, people learned about this poet mainly by quoting other authors. 1898, scholars unearthed a batch of papyrus, which contained fragments of poets' poems. In various modern versions, the poet's poems have 264 fragments, but only 63 fragments contain complete verses, and only 265,438+0 fragments contain complete verses. So far, there are only four nearly complete poems that we can enjoy as literary works. The fourth poem was newly discovered in 2004. This poem has 12 lines and was found on papyrus above the Egyptian mummy. This poem was published in the literary supplement of The Times in the third week of June, 2005 together with the English translation of Oxford scholar Martin West.

Sappho was called a "lyric poet" because at that time, poetry was accompanied by a lyre. Sappho improved lyric poetry in terms of technology and genre, making Greek lyric poetry change from writing poems in the name of gods and muses to singing in a personal voice. She was the first poet to describe personal love and lovelorn.

Sappho has nine volumes of poetry, but at present there is only one complete chapter, and the rest are fragmentary. Since the third century BC, Sappho's name began to appear in poems, plays and various writings, and was gradually deified or demonized according to the needs of the times, or was called the tenth muse; Or portrayed as an ugly woman with dark skin. In the Middle Ages, she was regarded as a heresy by the church, because her poems praised the love of the same sex, and all her poems were burned. If an Egyptian farmer hadn't happened to find Sappho's papyrus poems in the Nile waters at the end of 19, more poems would have been submerged. However, the legend of Sappho has been circulating, especially in the hearts of poets of past dynasties.

Sappho's poems are gentle and elegant, sincere and frank, and most of them pay attention to people's love and desire-different from her previous poems, which take God as the object of singing-full of love advice, sweetness and pain in love or their intertwined feelings, full of pity and jealousy. Reading her poems is like taking risks on a voyage.

Sappho's poetic skills are very high. In the only remaining poems, we can see that she skillfully used metaphor (different from the simile used in Homer's time), which made the images and internal meanings of the poems richer and fuller. For example, she describes pigeons: "Their hearts are gradually cooling down/their wings are hanging down", and the image is beautiful and sad, inlaid with some lonely feelings that she can't say; Another example is "Chariot and Xiao Qi" in the above quotation, which is a metaphor for men except for specific allegations. In addition, sometimes her poems are like The Romantic Period's lyric poems, symbolizing her delicate mood with natural scenery and mountains.

Sappho's poetic style is unique. In the history of western poetry, this style of poetry is called "Sappho style". They are in the form of solo-many tragedies in Homer's era and ancient Greece are collective choruses of choirs-poems are short, mainly expressing feelings and feelings, and syllables are simple and clear. In the meter of "Sappho Style", each paragraph is divided into four lines, and the long and short syllables in each line change slightly in a relatively fixed way. The first three lines are a bit like Homer's six-rhyme verse, and the fourth line is short and lively. According to legend, Solon, the contemporary Athenian ruler of Sappho, was also a poet. When he overheard Sappho's poem, he said, "If I learn her melody, I can die without regret".

Sappho's poetry style is similar to that of ancient China, aiming at making people play the piano and sing, but she often composes her own music. Sappho not only created "Sappho Style" technically, but also reformed the rhythm of poetry creation at that time. Together with other poets, he shifted the object of singing from God to man in style, and expressed his personal sadness and joy in the first person, which was quite innovative at that time.

Most of Sha Fu's works are soft love poems longing for love, and most of them are written by her female disciples. At that time, many young women came to Lesbo Island to worship her school. Sappho not only teaches them art, but also writes them love letters. When the disciples went out to get married, Sappho also gave them wedding poems. In ancient Greece, homosexual feelings prevailed between teachers and students. Teachers taught students to solve doubts and disciples returned them with feelings. Therefore, these poems with strong homosexual feelings were not banned at that time, but were widely spread. Even the currency used in Lesbos is the pattern of Sappho's head. When Sappho was exiled to Sicily for family reasons, the residents there erected a statue for her to show their love. Plato called Sappho "the tenth muse" and considered it as important as the Athenian gods. Solon, the ruler of Athens, was an excellent poet himself, but once he heard a poem by Sappho, he insisted on learning to sing, and said, "As long as I can learn this song, I will die without regret."

Although Sappho was famous at that time, it was said that * * * had nine volumes of works, but due to improper preservation and subsequent religious suppression, it was damaged countless times. Only one complete poem has survived to this day, and the rest have only left fragments. /kloc-In the late 9th century, manuscripts as early as the 8th century BC were excavated in the Nile Valley, and some of them were confirmed as Sappho's works. Later, people found some poems of Sappho wrapped in papyrus in mummies and coffins in Egyptian ruins.

The translation of Sappho's poems is very difficult. Because many fragments are lost, the translator needs to "fill in the gaps" in ancient Greek according to the meaning and rhythm of the context. This kind of "filling" is inevitably speculative, which may be different from the original poem in skill and style, and the expression added by the translator may also be different from Sappho's original intention. But for many readers, without these efforts, Sappho's poems may be buried forever.