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Next to nothing is known about the bard who compiled the tales of The Iliad and The Odyssey . These poems, which were kept alive by oral tradition, are arguably the greatest and most influential in history.

When the “Father of Tragedy” began writing, theatre was in its infancy. He brought a wealth of characters, powerful narratives, grandeur of language, and a sweeping vision of humans working out a plan of cosmic justice to works such as Prometheus Unbound and the Oresteia .

Only seven of Sophocles’ plays survive, but his reputation rests securely on three: Antigone , Oedipus at Colonus , and Oedipus Rex . The last of these, the story of a king bound hopelessly by fate to murder his father and marry his mother, is the greatest masterpiece of Greek tragedy.

Euripides was the last of the great triumvirate of Greek tragedians. He wrote radical reinterpretations of the ancient myths in which humans bore their suffering without reference to the gods or fates. His most famous plays, The Bacchae and Medea , are about mothers murdering their children.

Though Socrates himself wrote nothing, his teachings, recorded in the writings of historians and especially his pupil Plato, have earned him the title of the forerunner of Western philosophy. At the height of the Golden Age of Athens, the original marketplace philosopher debated the great meanings in the Agora, and was eventually tried and put to death for corrupting the Athenian youth (see Socrates’ Prison).

The greatest comic playwright of Greece was a welcome breath of fresh air after the age of the great tragedians. Aristophanes’ raunchy, hilarious Lysistrata , in which the women of warring Sparta and Athens refuse to sleep with their husbands until they stop fighting, is one of the greatest anti-war messages of all time.

If Socrates was the forerunner of Western philosophy, Plato was the foundation. His works, from his early dialogues reprising Socrates’ teachings, to later masterworks such as the seminal Republic , comprised the backbone of every major intellectual movement to follow.

After studying with Plato, Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great. He later set up the Lyceum, a competitor to Plato’s Academy. His Poetics is still one of the most important works of literary criticism, and his Nichomachean Ethics among the greatest treatises on ethics.

Millions have been drawn to the strange, joyous, bittersweet spirit of modern Greece as depicted in Kazantzakis’ most famous work, Zorba the Greek . Darker in mood is the Last Temptation of Christ and best of all is his audacious continuation of the fundamental Greek tale: The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel .

Greece’s first Nobel Laureate was born in Smyrna, which was later claimed by Turkey, and his lyrical poetry is inspired by history and feelings of exile. His work also relates Greece’s Classical past to its raw present, as in Mythistorema , a series of poems that draw from The Odyssey .