/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13018436]

Are there any surviving pieces of ancient literature that are generally considered to be terrible?

[Anonymous No.13018440]

All

[Anonymous No.13018453]

Euripides

[Anonymous No.13018459]

Cicero’s poetry was notoriously bad, even people in his own time made fun of him:

For when you ruled the state, a consul wise,
You noted, and with victims due approach'd,
Propitiating the rapid stars, and strange
Concurrence of the fiery constellations.

He’s writing about himself lol

[Anonymous No.13018463]

>>13018453
Fake and gay

[Anonymous No.13018483]

>>13018463
>arguing with Aristophanes
There's a reason Plato had to claim Aristophanes was fake and gay and the reason is that Plato is the origin of fakeness and gayness in Western canon. Socrates thought Aristophanes was bro even after The Clouds.

[Anonymous No.13018599]

>>13018483
What’s that to do with Euripides?

[Anonymous No.13018717]

>>13018599
He thinks being "clever" is enough to be great. Basically the DFW of the Greeks. Also his women are shit

[Anonymous No.13019164]

>>13018436
The Aeneid was the world's first fanfiction.

[Anonymous No.13019193]

A lot of the ancient histories are garbage. Only the good stuff like Livy and Tacitus gets printed

[Anonymous No.13020616]

>>13018436
parmenides' poet is considered fucked up even at the ancient point

[Anonymous No.13020903]

Pretty much all of the ancient Greek novels are the equivalent of a Harlequin romance. It's somewhat questionable as to how much we can generalize based on the four or five examples we have, but they are all fairly similar. Therefore modern scholars have suggested that Kallirhoe was clever in that it may have subverted genre expectations. Also one or two of them were apparently regarded by at least some as having beautiful prose even if the content was shit. However, most of them have only their questionable entertainment value going on for them.

Quite many ancient poets have been regarded as shit, although as always, poetry is a highly subjective field. For example, several Silver Age Roman poets have been in a veritable rollercoaster in regards to their posthumous reception. Generally speaking though, after Romanticism it has been a trend in the West to prioritize originality whereas the ancients prioritized technical skill which has completely destroyed the reputation of some poets, like Ausonius. On the other hand some, like Agathias of Myrina and his circle, have correspondingly been seen somewhat more favourably, even if the Victorian pressure to view them as second-rates still persists.

A number of non-fiction type of works are kinda bad. Historia Augusta is so notoriously inaccurate people have speculated it was a parody, although I think modern scholars think that is was just a case of a shit author biting off more than he could chew, but insisting on seeing his work to the end. Dionysius of Halicarnassus is lambasted as being boring and having too many long-winded speeches and Diodorus Siculus and Zosimus are both regarded as shitty copypaste authors whose sole worth is preserving the content of the much better histories of their predecessors. There are some similar copypaste historians who copy works that do survive to us, so they are so completely forgotten. Varro's treatise on agriculture seems to have been written just because he acquired a reputation on having written on every topic under the sun, so he tried to live up to it by writing an uninspired work on agriculture. Procopius' On Buildings is often remarked as giving off the vibe that it remained unfinished because the author himself got bored with it. In general a number of technical and scientific treatises are kinda theoretic in a bad, an-experiment-could-have-proven-this-wrong, kind of way, although that's how they did it back then.

[Anonymous No.13021250]

>>13018436
probably not that many, transcribing books was actually a lot of fucking work back then, nobody was going to waste several weeks of their life copying shitty literature. (Unless it was marketable)

[Anonymous No.13021272]

>>13020903
>Pretty much all of the ancient Greek novels are the equivalent of a Harlequin romance
Isn't True Story the most famous ancient Greek novel? Where are you getting this from?

[Anonymous No.13021305]

>>13019164
And it is awesome

[Anonymous No.13021325]

>>13018436
yes, see plays by Terence

[Anonymous No.13021568]

>>13021272

Well, it comes down to how you define a novel and a lot of hairs have been split over that. Admittedly, yeah, I don't see why Lucian's longer prose works wouldn't count as novels, but I forgot about them as I was taught that the romantic novels are The Ancient Greek Novels. And the criticism is the criticism aimed at those, not at Lucian or whoever else was writing novel-like prose works in Ancient Greece.