Library of useful knowledge

CONTENTS : V. 1. Characteristics of the Greek literature -- Religion of the Greeks -- Earliest popular songs -- Origin of the epic poetry -- Homer -- The cyclic poets -- The Homeric hymns -- Hesiod -- Other epic poets -- The elegy and the epigram -- Iambic poetry -- Progress of the Greek music -- The Aeolic school of lyric poetry -- Choral lyric poetry -- Pindar -- Theological and philosophical poetry -- The early Greek philosophers -- The early Greek historians -- Herodotus -- Literary predominance of Athens -- Origin of the Greek drama -- Form and character of the Greek tragedy -- Aeschylus -- Sophocles -- Euripides -- The other tragic poets -- V. 2. Origin and structure of the old comedy -- Aristophanes -- The other poets of the old comedy : the middle and new comedy -- Lyric and epic poetry during this period -- Political oratory at Athens previously to the influence of rhetoric -- The rhetoric of the sophists -- The beginnings of regular political and forensic oratory among the Athenians -- The political historiography of Thucydides -- The new cultivation of oratory by Lysias -- Isocrates -- The new beginning of Attic training : foundation of the Socratic schools -- Xenophon and Ctesias -- Plato -- Aristotle -- Demosthenes -- Orators contemporary with Demosthenes -- Rhetorical historians and provincial antiquaries -- Medical literature : writings attributed to Hippocrates -- The school of Alexandria : poets -- Prose writers of Alexandria -- V. 3. Schools of philosophy -- Cultivation of the theory of rhetoric -- Treatment of history : Polybius and his immediate predecessors -- Greek literature domesticated at Rome -- Learned history and geography under the Caesars -- New flight of rhetoric in the second century -- Oriental tendencies of Greek philosophy : Neo-Platonism -- The opposite tendency : Lucian -- History and geography under the Antonines and their successors -- Scientific scholars and learned collectors -- Last days of paganism : heathen rhetoricians and philosophers -- Antagonism of Christianity : opponents of heathen literature -- Echoes of the old literature : romances, the epic school of Nonnus -- General view of the cultivation of literature at Byzantium.