Literature

Several genres of modern literature have their origins in ancient Greece. Drama is a prime example—the genres of tragedy and comedy were both originally developed in Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries b. c.e. Aristotle, the Athenian philosopher and tutor to Alexander the Great, wrote that all drama should be ordered according to three unities: unity of time, of place, and of action (Poetics). Put simply, he said that all plays should deal with one topic in one day in one place. The seventeenth-century French dramatists Corneille and Racine took this notion so seriously that, in their works, a hero can travel from France to Spain (off scene, of course), defeat an Arabic army, return to France, and get married in one day, so as to stick to the Aristotelian unities. The fine art of publicly ridiculing celebrities was also popularized by the Greeks in their comedies, wherein one could watch the philosopher Socrates with his head literally in the clouds, the Athenian and Spartan armies brought low by a sex boycott from their wives, and even the god Dionysos wetting himself on stage.

Beyond merely the form of literature, the Greeks contributed much symbolic language to modern literature. Many allusions in Western literature come from Greek mythology. In his poem "The Raven," Edgar Allan Poe tells us:

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,

In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore;

Not the least obeisance made he; not an instant stopped or stayed he;

But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door—

Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door—

Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Pallas is an epithet or nickname for the wisdom goddess Athena, and thus refers to sanity and reason, both of which the narrator is about to lose completely, as evidenced by the Raven overshadowing this image.

More recently, in the song "Wrapped Around Your Finger" by the Police, the

Narrator claims that he is "caught between the Scylla and Charybdis." Here he refers to two monsters present in Homer's Odyssey—Scylla, a six-headed monster who ate sailors for lunch, and Charybdis, who sucked up sea, boat, and, of course, sailors thrice per day for fun. Being caught between these two monsters is a poetic and erudite way of expressing the concept of being stuck between a rock and a hard place.