Greek literature dates back from the ancient Greek literature, beginning in 800 BC, to the modern Greek literature of today.
Idealized portrayal of Homer
Herodotus
Plato
Sophocles
Ancient Greek literature is literature written in the Ancient Greek language from the earliest texts until the time of the Byzantine Empire. The earliest surviving works of ancient Greek literature, dating back to the early Archaic period, are the two epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, set in an idealized archaic past today identified as having some relation to the Mycenaean era. These two epics, along with the Homeric Hymns and the two poems of Hesiod, the Theogony and Works and Days, constituted the major foundations of the Greek literary tradition that would continue into the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods.
A Greek manuscript of the beginning of Hesiod's Works and Days
Linear B tablet from the Archaeological Museum of Mycenae
Tablet MY Oe 106 (obverse) exhibited at the Greek National Archaeological Museum
A painting by the French Neoclassical painter Thomas Degeorge depicting the climactic final scene from Book Twenty-Two of The Odyssey in which Odysseus, Telemachus, Eumaeus, and Philoetius slaughter the suitors of Penelope
