It is said that women in Greek mythology, and by extension Greek art and epic and tragic poetry, play leading roles of great importance and highly charged with meaning. By contrast, the position of the women in Greek society doe not seem to correspond historically with that occupied by the brilliant and outstanding female figures of legend. Two significant figures in Greek mythology, Sappho and Medea, hold great importance in the realm of tragedy and share a number of attributes that warrant a further
Although Sappho played a very significant role in the development of Greek literature, many of her poems have been lost over the decades. The few poems recovered from her nine books are very fragmentary, however even though there is limited available works of Sappho. She was known in antiquity as a great poet. She was referred to as “the tenth muse by Plato. New discoveries of Sappho’s poetry have been found of recent, sometime in February of this year, they are assumed to have come from Egypt. In
Almost every Greek poet from the early 8th century to the early 5th century BCE mentioned gods and religious rituals in their writings. Religion and deities were central to the ancient Greek’s history, their moral beliefs, their actions, and the way they carried out their daily tasks. Hesiod, Archilochus, Alcman, Alcaeus, Sappho, Solon,
The Greeks loved myths and stories which were passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth. Upon adopting the Phoenician alphabet circa 800 BCE, they were able to write down the stories. Homer was known to sing songs about the deeds of heroes and the ways of the gods. He composed two epic poems, the Illiad and the Odyssey. The literary canons depicted war and the journey home, and were based on ancient legends. They were written in a simple, direct, and eloquent language that is