Greek Writers

Greek writers are the subject here. Tours in Greece are outings with a host, on the islands as well as the mainland. The topics include Nikos Kazantzakis, Constantine Cavafy, George Seferis, Odysseas Elytis and Yiannis Ritsos. Stratis Myrivilis, Callimachus, Pindar and Theocritus come next, and the page closes on four answers. Related pages explain Greek tragedy, Ancient Greek philosophers and Greek music. A wider choice sits under Greece tours.

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Who are the Greek writers?

Greek writers span a long literary line that begins around 800 BC and runs to the present day. Homer opens the story with the Iliad and the Odyssey. Giorgos Seferis and Odysseas Elytis later took the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The earliest Greek writers did not write at all, because the first Greek literature was completely oral. Oral means passed on by voice, not on paper. Poems of the Preclassical period, before about 500 BC, were meant to be sung or recited. The poet Hesiod left two surviving works, Works and Days and Theogony.

Among ancient Greek writers, Sappho and Pindar stand as the two major lyric poets. Lyric verse is short poetry once sung to a lyre, a small stringed instrument. Hellenistic Greek poetry flourished through Theocritus, Callimachus and Apollonius of Rhodes. The Hellenistic age runs from the death of Alexander the Great until Roman rule took hold.

Modern Greek writers use common Modern Greek, the everyday form of the language. Erotokritos, from around 1600, is a verse romance by Vitsentzos Kornaros, meaning a love story told in poetry. In the 1930s, the Generation of the ’30s brought Modernism into Greek literature. Modernism is an art style that breaks with older forms.

• Byzantine epic: Digenes Akritas is the best known Acritic song, and readers treat it as a surviving Byzantine epic.
• Enlightenment: Adamantios Korais and Rigas Feraios were prominent figures in the Diafotismos, which carried European Enlightenment ideas to Greeks.
• Magazine: Nea Grammata, a literary magazine launched in 1935, became a hub for the Generation of the ’30s.

Greek writers of the Roman period produced the bulk of Ancient Greek novels, long stories in prose. Byzantine authors later added chronicles and encyclopedias to the record. Today, modern Greek literature takes part in the global literary community.

Which novels place Nikos Kazantzakis among the great Greek writers?

Greek writers of the modern age include Nikos Kazantzakis, born in Crete in 1883. He is widely held to be a giant of modern Greek literature. His novels range from Zorba the Greek to Christ Recrucified and The Last Temptation of Christ.

Zorba the Greek first appeared in 1946 under the title Life and Times of Alexis Zorbas. Christ Recrucified followed in 1948, and The Last Temptation of Christ came out in 1955. Cinema spread his fame among English speakers. Films followed in 1964 for Zorba the Greek and in 1988 for The Last Temptation of Christ.

Kazantzakis read law at Athens University from 1902 to 1906. His thesis dealt with Friedrich Nietzsche, a German thinker. He wrote a one-act play, Comedy, in 1909. A later tragedy, The Master Builder, drew on a popular Greek folk myth. Fellow Greek writers included Angelos Sikelianos, whom he met in 1914, and the pair travelled for two years.

The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel occupied him from 1924 to 1938, through fourteen years of writing and revision. The poem sends Odysseus on a final journey after Homer’s story ends. Like Homer’s Odyssey, it has 24 rhapsodies, the sections of an epic, or long story in verse. Critics split over the work, and scholars remain divided today.

• Reporter: As a journalist in 1926, he interviewed Miguel Primo de Rivera of Spain and Benito Mussolini of Italy.
• Nobel bid: In 1946 the Society of Greek Writers put him and Sikelianos forward for the literature prize.
• Late novel: Report to Greco, one of his famous novels, appeared in 1961.

For the scholar Peter Bien, his stories show Greek culture after the Second World War. Among modern Greek writers, Kazantzakis held that Greece belonged to neither East nor West. Its special mission, he believed, was to reconcile Eastern instinct with Western reason.

What makes Constantine Cavafy stand out among Greek writers?

Greek writers count Constantine Cavafy, a poet, journalist and civil servant from Alexandria, among their major modern figures. His poetic canon, or accepted body of work, holds 154 poems. English readers first met them through the novelist E. M. Forster in 1923.

Cavafy is one of the Greek writers born abroad, in Alexandria in 1863. His Greek parents had settled there in 1855. He had six older brothers. Two years after his father died in 1870, the family settled for a while in England. In 1885 he returned to Alexandria and stayed for the rest of his life.

Cavafy refused to publish his work in books. He shared it through local newspapers and magazines, or printed broadsheets, single large sheets, and gave them away. For thirty years he held a clerk’s post at the Egyptian Ministry of Public Works. He renewed it each year, then quit in 1922 and called the act liberation.

His poems fall into three classes by his own instruction: historical, philosophical, and hedonistic or sensual. Hedonistic means devoted to pleasure. His mature verse rarely rhymes, and its lines run from 10 to 17 syllables. His poem Ithaca, from 1911, draws on the homeward journey of Odysseus. Later Greek writers, including Karyotakis, found inspiration in his work.

• Barbarians: Waiting for the Barbarians, from 1904, shows a declining city waiting for outsiders who never arrive.
• Medal: In 1926 the Greek state gave him the silver medal of the Order of Phoenix.
• Review: A favourable review by Gregorios Xenopoulos in 1903 introduced him to mainland Greek writers and critics.

Forster pictured him as a Greek gentleman wearing a straw hat. Cavafy died of cancer of the larynx, the voice box, on 29 April 1933, his 70th birthday. Schools in Greece and Cyprus teach his poetry, as do universities around the world.

How did George Seferis bring the Nobel Prize to Greek writers?

Greek writers received their first Nobel Prize through George Seferis in 1963. Seferis was the pen name, or chosen writing name, of the poet and diplomat Georgios Seferiadis. In total, he was put forward four times, starting in 1955.

Seferis was born in Smyrna in Asia Minor, now Izmir in Turkey. His father, a lawyer and later a university professor, also wrote poetry and translated. In 1914 the family moved to Athens. While he studied law in Paris in 1922, his family fled Anatolia. A sense of exile from that childhood home runs through his verse.

Among Greek writers, Seferis also served the state as a career diplomat. He returned to Athens in 1925 and joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs the next year. In wartime he followed the exiled Greek government to Crete, Egypt, South Africa and Italy. His final post was Ambassador to the United Kingdom.

His first collection, Strophe, appeared in 1931 and set out to renew the stanza, a group of lines. For Greek writers, Mythistorema, a compound poem of 1935, stands as the key text of Modernism. It mixes plain, almost unpoetic speech with history and mythology. Seferis first visited Cyprus in November 1953, and the island inspired Log Book III.

• Prize words: The prize praised lyric writing drawn from his strong feeling for Hellenic, meaning Greek, culture.
• Public stand: On 28 March 1969 he made a statement against the military regime, copied to Athens newspapers.
• Funeral: At his funeral, huge crowds sang his banned poem Denial, set to music by Mikis Theodorakis.

Honorary degrees came from Cambridge in 1960, Oxford and Thessaloniki in 1964, and Princeton in 1965. A stanza from Mythistorema featured at the opening of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games. Greek writers gained a second Nobel laureate, Odysseas Elytis, in 1979.

Which poems earned Odysseas Elytis his place among Greek writers?

Greek writers of the twentieth century include Odysseas Elytis, a poet with family roots on Lesbos. His poetry ran for over forty years, and the Nobel Prize in Literature came in 1979. He ranks among the highly praised poets of his time.

His family made soap and olive oil in Heraklion, Crete, from 1895. Odysseas, last of six siblings, was born on 2 November 1911. The household left for Athens in 1914, and his father moved the soap factory to Piraeus. During tuberculosis, a lung illness, in 1927, he read poetry by Greek writers and discovered Cavafy.

In 1935 Elytis published his first poem in the journal New Letters. Friends such as George Seferis had urged him on. That year brought lifelong friendship with Andreas Embirikos, a writer who let him use his vast library. Among other Greek writers, he kept close ties with his best friend Nikos Gatsos.

Service in the Greco-Italian War marked him deeply and fed a famous poem of 1946. Its title is Lay Heroic and Funeral for the Fallen Second Lieutenant in Albania. His landmark work, Axion Esti, won the First State Poetry Prize in 1960. Mikis Theodorakis set it as an oratorio, a concert work for voices, first performed in 1964.

• Paris: He lived in Paris from 1948 to 1952 and attended philology and literature seminars at the Sorbonne.
• Radio: Twice, from 1945 and from 1953, he ran programmes for the Greek National Radio Foundation.
• Museum: On Lesbos, Elytis and Tériade laid foundations for a museum dedicated to the painter Theophilos.

Like other Greek writers, he also produced essays, collected as The Open Papers. His poetry exists in eleven languages. He also made collage pictures, built from pasted scraps. In 1975 Thessaloniki University gave him an honorary doctorate, and Mytilene made him an honorary citizen.

Among Greek writers, what did Yiannis Ritsos leave behind?

Greek writers and political life meet in Yiannis Ritsos, a poet who disliked being labelled a political poet. Even so, he carries the title of great poet of the Greek left. He joined the Greek Resistance during the Second World War.

Ritsos published Tractor in 1934, the year he joined the Communist Party of Greece. Among established Greek writers, the respected Kostis Palamas praised his talent in public. Pyramids followed in 1935. Leftist critics first judged the language of both books too embellished, meaning overly decorated. They also found him too focused on form.

After the rule of Ioannis Metaxas began in 1936, Ritsos turned towards surrealism. Surrealism is an art style built on dreams and surprising images. The year 1937 brought The Song of my Sister, and 1938 brought Symphony of the Spring. During the Axis occupation he joined the National Liberation Front and wrote poems for the Resistance.

Ritsos was arrested in 1948 and spent four years in prison camps. In 1967 he was sent to a camp on Gyaros, later to Samos and finally Lemnos. At times, his poetry faced bans in Greece. One critic singled out Romiosini, from 1954, a long tribute to the spirit of the Resistance.

• Praise: Beyond Greek writers, the French poet Louis Aragon once called Ritsos the greatest poet of the age.
• Nobel debate: Pablo Neruda said Ritsos had a stronger claim to the Nobel Prize than he did.
• Awards: The Lenin Peace Prize came in 1975, and a Golden Wreath at Struga in 1985.

His Moonlight Sonata won the first Greek state poetry award. Ritsos now counts among the great poets of the twentieth century. Greek writers placed beside him include Cavafy, Kostas Karyotakis, Angelos Sikelianos, Seferis and Elytis. He reached the final Nobel shortlist at least once, in 1973.

What links Stratis Myrivilis to the National Society of Greek Writers?

Greek writers from Lesbos include Stratis Myrivilis, a novelist and short story author born in Sykaminea. The name was a pseudonym, a made-up writing name, for Efstratios Stamatopoulos. He earned three nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Myrivilis was born in 1890 and moved to Mytilene in 1905 for secondary school. A year as a village schoolmaster came next, then law studies at Athens University. He left those studies to volunteer for the First Balkan War in 1912. During the Second Balkan War he was shot twice in the leg.

His first book, Red Stories, appeared in 1915 as a set of six short stories. In the First World War he served on the Macedonian Front and later in the Asia Minor Campaign. The novel Life in the Tomb first ran in parts in the weekly Kambana in 1923 and 1924.

A longer, revised version came out in Athens in 1930. Myrivilis then grew famous across Greece almost overnight. The work marked a turning point for Greek prose fiction, showing its coming of age. Among Greek writers, the novel made him a master craftsman of prose. He settled in Athens and edited the newspaper Demokratia.

• Radio: In 1936 he became General Programme Director of the Greek National Broadcasting Institute.
• Academy: He joined the Academy of Athens in 1958 after six unsuccessful nominations.
• Society: In 1946 he founded the National Society of Greek Writers and became its first president.

Greek writers of the Generation of the ’30s count Myrivilis among their number. English readers know The Schoolmistress with the Golden Eyes through Philip Sherrard’s translation of 1964. He died in an Athens hospital on 19 July 1969, after a long illness.

How did Callimachus sort the work of earlier Greek writers?

Greek writers of the past were catalogued by Callimachus, an ancient poet, scholar and librarian working in Alexandria. At the Library of Alexandria he compiled the Pinakes, a full catalogue of all Greek literature. His own output ran to over 800 works.

Callimachus came from a leading family in Cyrene, a Greek city on the coast of modern Libya. His grandfather, who had the same name, was a general for the city. The date of his birth is unknown, though scholars place it around 310 BC. During the 280s BC he is thought to have studied at Alexandria under Praxiphanes.

An early spell as a schoolteacher in the suburbs is reported but disputed. The Ptolemies, the Greek ruling family of Egypt, then became his patrons and employers. A patron is a wealthy supporter of artists. Among Greek writers of his age, he shared traits with Aratus, Apollonius of Rhodes and Theocritus.

His main works include the Aetia, a four-book poem, and six religious hymns. He also wrote around 60 epigrams, which are brief, forceful poems, and the narrative poem Hecale. He favoured small, obscure topics over epic poetry, the leading art form among Greek writers of his day. He admired Homer, yet regarded him as impossible to imitate.

• Losses: Apart from the Epigrams and Hymns, nearly all his writing is lost or survives in fragments.
• Palatine Anthology: This 10th-century manuscript, found at Heidelberg in 1606, preserves the bulk of his epigrams.
• Roman readers: Catullus, Horace, Vergil, Propertius and Ovid treated his poetry as a chief model.

Modern classical scholars rank him among the influential Greek writers of poetry. The Hellenist, or scholar of Greek culture, Kathryn Gutzwiller says he reinvented Greek poetry for his age. Through Roman verse, his personal style went on to influence modern literature.

What did Thebes give Greek writers through Pindar?

Greek writers from ancient Thebes include Pindar, a lyric poet born around 518 BC. Of the nine canonical lyric poets, a standard list of ancient Greece, his work survives best. He was the first Greek poet to ask what poetry is.

Pindar was born in Cynoscephalae, a village in Boeotia not far from Thebes. A tale says that bees built a honeycomb in his mouth when he was young. That story explains his honey-like verses. He studied lyric poetry in Athens under Lasos of Hermione. Among Greek writers, Corinna is also said to have given him helpful criticism.

Pindar was about twenty in 498 BC when the ruling family of Thessaly ordered his first victory ode. A victory ode is a song praising a winner at athletic games. He wrote the music and arranged the dances for these odes himself. His commissions are said to have taken him to Olympia, Delphi, Corinth, Nemea, Sicily and Macedonia.

His fame drew him into Greek politics. One ode from 470 BC celebrated Greek victories over foreign invaders. His fellow Thebans, who had sided with the Persians, disliked it. Praise of Athens reportedly led Thebes to fine him 5,000 drachmae, which were ancient Greek coins. Athens is said to have replied with a gift of 10,000 drachmae.

• Aegina: Leading citizens of the island of Aegina ordered about one quarter of his victory odes.
• Verdict: The writer Quintilian judged Pindar by far the greatest of the nine lyric poets.
• Rivals: Other Greek writers at the same venues competed with him for the favours of patrons.

Among ancient Greek writers, the comic playwright Eupolis said public dislike of elegant learning had silenced his poems. His verse shows the beliefs of Archaic Greece as the Classical period began. The writer Pausanias described his tomb in Boeotia.

How did Theocritus give Greek writers pastoral poetry?

Greek writers owe pastoral poetry, verse about shepherds and country life, to Theocritus, its creator in ancient Greek. Sicily was his home, and he was born around 300 BC. Little is known of him beyond what his own poems can reveal.

Theocritus belongs to the Greek writers of Sicily. He calls Polyphemus, the Cyclops in the Odyssey, his countryman. Scholars speculate that he was born in Syracuse and lived on the island of Kos. Egypt under Ptolemy II is another possible home. An old epigram names him as the son of Praxagoras and Philinna.

His poems, called Idylls, divide into bucolics set in the country and mimes set in a town. Bucolic means about herdsmen and farm life. There are three mimes. In the mime numbered 15, Gorgo and Praxinoë go to the festival of Adonis. In Idyll 1, Thyrsis sings to a goatherd about Daphnis, a mythical herdsman.

Kos is the setting of Idyll 7, known as the Harvest Feast. Its speaker, the poet himself, goes by the name Simichidas. Among Greek writers, he praises Philitas, an older poet of Kos. In Idyll 11, Polyphemus turns to song for comfort in his love for the sea-nymph Galatea. A nymph is a nature spirit in Greek myth.

• Dialect: The Suda, a reference work, says he wrote bucolic poems in Doric, an old Greek dialect.
• Editor: Among later Greek writers, the grammarian Artemidorus of Tarsus reportedly edited these poems first.
• Virgil: The Roman poet Virgil mastered this pastoral type of verse in his Eclogues.

Theocritus also staged singing matches, a contest form, in his bucolic poems. In these, a second singer varies the theme chosen by the first. Idylls 4 and 5 are set near Croton. Another poem is the marriage song of Helen.

What do travellers ask about Greek writers, and what are the answers?

Greek writers prompt four questions here, from the modern age back to ancient Teos. They concern a writer from Vize, a children’s author, a poet of Preveza and an ancient singer. The answers are Georgios Vizyinos, Penelope Delta, Kostas Karyotakis and Anacreon.

Which of the Greek writers was called a painter of souls?

Georgios Vizyinos earned that phrase as a short story writer and poet. His verse focuses on ethnography, the study of peoples. He was born as Georges Syrmas in Vize, north-west of Constantinople. At age 10 he moved to Constantinople to live with an uncle and learn tailoring.

Which one of the Greek writers wrote The Secrets of the Swamp?

Penelope Delta, widely celebrated for children’s literature, wrote it. The novel came out in 1937 and is set around Giannitsa Lake, during the Greek struggle for Macedonia. Her other major novels are Trellantones, or Crazy Anthony, from 1932, and Mangas, from 1935. Mangas follows the family’s Fox Terrier dog.

Among Greek writers, who wrote the poem Preveza?

Kostas Karyotakis wrote Preveza, about the town where he lived for just 33 days in 1928. He was born in Tripoli, and his father’s work as a county engineer moved the family around Greece. His first collection of poetry, The Pain of People and of Things, came out in February 1919.

Who among ancient Greek writers composed drinking songs?

Anacreon, a lyric poet, lived from about 573 to 495 BC. He is known for his drinking songs and erotic poems, meaning poems about desire. He came from Teos, on the coast of Ionia, now in Turkey. Himerius says he was invited to Samos to teach Polycrates, the island’s future tyrant, or sole ruler.