Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/52

24 from Callimachus, an astronomical poem from Aratus, and pastorals from Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus; and in the next century an epic from Apollonius of Rhodes. In the first century A.D. lived Babrius, the fabulist; in the next, Oppian, the writer of poems on fishing and hunting; and in the fifth century, Nonnus, the author of the huge epic called "Dionysiaca"; Quintus of Smyrna, who wrote a kind of continuation of Homer; and Musaeus, who produced some pretty verse, especially the poem on Hero and Leander. Greek poetry, therefore, which was the earliest form of literature, continued with no radical variation for more than a thousand years.

Prose composition was later in coming into use, for even some of the early philosophers, such as Xenophanes and Parmenides (about B.C. 530–495), enunciated their doctrines in verse. Prose literature began with the Ionic school of historians, Hecataeus of Miletus in the sixth century and Hellanicus in the fifth. Next to them came the first of the prose writers whose work has been preserved, Herodotus of Halicarnassus (B.C. 485–425), followed by Thucydides (B.C. 471–401) and Xenophon (B.C. 431–354), the Athenians. About contemporary with Herodotus was Hippocrates, the famous physician, whose works, or those reputed his, are still extant. Thus begun, Greek prose literature continued almost uninterruptedly till the twelfth century after Christ. In the second century B.C. the historical series is continued by Polybius of Megalopolis (B.C. 203–121), with many others whose works are lost; in the last century B.C. by Diodorus of Sicily and Dionysius of