Ancient Greek Civilization

The transformation of the Greek world that had resulted from Alexander’s campaigns and the division of
his empire affected every aspect of Greek culture, not least Greek literature. Increased contact with non-
Greek cultures and literatures had the effect of introducing “exotic” elements into Greek literature, but it
also made Greek authors more acutely aware of the need to define and preserve the characteristically
Greek elements of their literary heritage. This led to a need to “take stock,” a need that was satisfied in
part thanks to the patronage of Ptolemy I of Egypt. Near the grounds of his palace at Alexandria he
established a library, associated with the Museum that he also founded. The Museum at Alexandria was a
research institute, fully funded by Ptolemy I and his successors, in which scholars could meet and live at
royal expense while they discussed poetry, science, music, and other aspects of high culture. The
resources of the library facilitated their research and, under royal patronage, the library at Alexandria
grew to become a repository of Greek literature that aimed to collect the entire body of available Greek
texts. The Ptolemies appointed a succession of brilliant scholars to serve as librarians, who organized
and catalogued the library’s holdings, making it possible to identify “gaps” in the collection. Gaps, of
course, can occur only in what is considered to be a discrete entity, and so, for the first time the notion
arose that the Greek literary tradition was closed, that there was a fundamental break between the present
and the past. In addition, Alexandrian scholars saw themselves as literary critics; that is, as authorities in
a position to evaluate and pass judgment on the literary creations of the past. Some of these scholars
accordingly began to construct selective lists of “the best” authors in each of the various literary genres.
In the eighteenth century, a Dutch classical scholar began to use the appropriately Greek word “canon,”
meaning “model” or “standard,” to refer to these lists. While we do not know what word the ancient
scholars themselves applied to them, the effect of these lists was to establish a selective body of earlier
literature to be admired and emulated, thus rewriting the literary history of Greece in terms of the values
of the Hellenistic Period. It is, thus, during the Hellenistic Period that Greek literature first becomes
genuinely “literary,” as it now regards literature as a collection of artifacts in the form of written texts
rather than as an ongoing series of performances in the theater, the courtroom, or the symposium.