Philosophy, History and Oratory Part 3, Philosophy, History, and Oratory

The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, Volume 1 offers a comprehensive survey of Greek literature from Homer to end of the period of stable Graeco-Roman civilation in the third century A.D. It embodies the advances made by recent classical scholarship and pays particular attention to texts that have become known in modern times. After its success in hardcover, this volume is now being issued in four paperback parts, providing individual texts on early Greek poetry, Greek drama, philosophy, history and oratory, and on the literature of the Hellenistic period and the Empire. A chapter on books and readers in the Greek world concludes Part 4. Each part has its own appendix of authors and works, a list of works cited, and an index.

This volume ranges in time over a very long period and covers the Greeks' most original contributions to intellectual history. It begins and ends with philosophy, but it also includes major sections on historiography and oratory. Although each of these areas had functions which in the modern world would not be considered 'literary', the ancients made a less sharp distinction between intellectual and artistic production, and the authors included in this volume are some of Europe's most powerful stylists: Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides and Demosthenses.