It is easy to be complacent about the Greeks. We know they invented democracy, philosophy, drama, the principle of free speech and other things that we value highly; but how often do we read the works of Homer and Hesiod, of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, of Herodotus and Thucydides, of Plato and Aristotle? How often do we reflect that the Greeks gave the West the very idea of literature? The heritage is so rich that there are whole periods and genres that many readers may never have encountered, except in the most tangential way.

Between the impersonal voice of epic, spoken by the bard under the inspiration of the Muse and reaching us as though from an immemorial past, and the alternating dramatic exchanges of theatre, there is another kind of poetic voice, more individualistic and immediate, now seductive, now angry, now witty and urbane. It is as extraordinary to think that the personal and intimate tone of the Lyric poet coincides with the ideal anonymity of Archaic sculpture as it is to consider that the stick-figures of the Geometric style belong to the same century as Homer’s vivid and powerful characters.