The Pelican History of Greek Literature

by Peter Levi

It is from the ancient Greeks that we have inherited the most remarkable body of stories ever to emerge from the human imagination.

Peter Levi's excellent work covers every major writer and literary genre from Homer to Plutarch, from lyric to historiography. While the book concentrates on writers whose work survives in some volume and whose stature the passage of time has confirmed, we also read of many who survive only in fragments. So Hesiod, Euripides and Plato rub shoulders with folk-songs and neglected historians. Peter Levi's The Pelican History of Greek Literature will find a place on the shelves of scholars, students and general readers alike, for its insight and authority.

Genres: Literary Criticism

512 pages, Paperback

Published June 3, 1986

About the author

Peter Chad Tigar Levi, FSA, FRSL, Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (1984–1989) was a poet, archaeologist, sometime Jesuit priest, travel writer, biographer, academic and prolific reviewer and critic.

Reviews

[Illiterate]

Levi leavens a rudimentary history with his responses to authors. I warmed to him.