Literature. No aspect of the legacy of Greece to later Western culture has been as influential as its literature. The words by which we describe so many literary forms—epic, hymn, didactic, drama (tragedy and comedy), lyric, history, rhetoric, philosophy—are Greek in origin and thus betray the fact that they are in effect Greek inventions. In some cases we can now glimpse at developed literary forms from earlier cultures predating our earliest known Greek examples, but these were unknown to Greeks in historical times and certainly to their European heirs; in effect, Western literary culture begins with the Greeks and, it is widely thought, also reaches its highest development in the pioneering yet sophisticated work of the Archaic (700-480 B.C.E.) and Classical (480-323 B.C.E.) periods of Greece.

Homeric Poems. Many aspects of this overall picture can be illustrated already in what...