Ancient literature and literary genres
What the exam tests
You need to place a work in its genre, name its conventions, and connect author, period, and language. Questions often ask you to identify a genre from a short description or to distinguish Greek from Roman practice.
Genres and landmarks
- Epic: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; Virgil's Aeneid; dactylic hexameter, invocation, in medias res, epithets, extended similes, katabasis.
- Didactic: Hesiod's Works and Days; Lucretius' De rerum natura; Virgil's Georgics.
- Lyric: Sappho, Alcaeus, Pindar; Catullus, Horace's Odes; varied meters and occasional address.
- Elegy: Callimachus; Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid; love elegy uses the elegiac couplet and a servitium amoris motif.
- Drama: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides; Aristophanes; Plautus and Terence; Seneca's tragedies. Chorus, masks, and agon are Greek conventions.
- Historiography: Herodotus and Thucydides; Livy and Tacitus, with invented speeches and moral purpose.
- Oratory: Demosthenes and Cicero; judicial, deliberative, epideictic; exordium, narratio, argumentatio, peroratio.
- Satire: Horace and Juvenal; novel: Petronius and Apuleius; fable: Phaedrus; epigram: Martial.
Worked example
'Arma virumque cano' opens the Aeneid.
- arma and virum are programmatic themes: war and the hero.
- cano is first-person singer language; the Muse is invoked shortly after.
- The meter is dactylic hexameter, the epic meter. Conclusion: Roman epic, not historiography or elegy; it engages Homeric models.
Traps
- Calling Ovid's Metamorphoses an elegiac work: it is hexameter epic.
- Mixing up Plautus and Terence: both comic, but Terence is smoother and more Hellenizing.
- Treating Seneca's tragedies as if they followed the same civic staging as Athenian tragedy.
- Forgetting that genre labels are ancient and sometimes overlap.