Literature and history

come. Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 2, Before the Flood.

This program covers two Bronze Age Mesopotamian epics, the Enuma Elish and the Atra Hossis, the earliest fragments of which are dated around 1700 BCE.

In an essay called What is a Classic, the Great Modernist Poet and Scholar T.S. Elliot defines

what makes a work of literature endure. This essay, published in

1944, attests that a culture must have reached a point of maturity in order to produce a work of literature that lasts

for generations and generations.

T.S. Elliot's favorite classical writer possessed, in Elliot's words, quote, a refined a refinement This poet, Virgil, produced the Aniad, which Elliot calls, quote,

Our Classic, the Classic of all Europe, close quote.

And Elliot adds significantly that, that, quote,

the bloodstream of European literature is Latin and Greek,

not as two systems of circulation, but one,

for it is through Rome that our parentage in Greece must be

traced."

This is a common idea in the history of European culture, this notion that the artistic heritage of Europe can be traced back to ancient Greece, more specifically the Renaissance of Athenian culture that soared over the course of the 400s

b.C. E.

producing Escales, Sophocles, Eurypides, Aristophanes,

Protagoras, Socrates, and a little later on, Plato.

Looking backward into the heights of classical Greece, T.S. Elliot attested that the main line of

European culture had its genesis in the splendor of the Aegean world sometime

around 500 BC.

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