Rhetoric in Ancient Greece: A Basic Chronology

This page consists in a chronology of basic political and cultural events pertaining to the development of rhetoric in ancient Greece. Authors and texts from our reading list are marked in bold typeface.

Period Designation

Social & Political Events

Writing/Writers/Texts

Bronze Age

(Mycenaean Period)

c. 1600-1100

c. 1550 Rise of Mycenean Society (see Vernant, Ch. 2*)

c. 1450 Expansion of Mycenean influence

c. 1200 End of Mycenean influence following Dorian invasion (Vernant, Ch. 3)

c. 1300-1150 Fall of Troy (Herodotus, 1250; Eratosthenes, 1184)



c. 1450 Emergence of Linear B (Vernant, Chps. 1-2)

Dark Ages

c. 1100-800


900 Re-emergence of writing (Vernant, Ch. 4)

Archaic Period

c. 800-490


c. 750 Greek colonization of southern Italy & Sicily





594 Solon's democratic reforms in Athens



510 Kleisthenes gives full rights to free men

c. 850 Homer (according to Herodotus)

c. 720 Homer, Iliad

c. 700 Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days

c. 680 Homer, Odyssey

fl. 600 Sappho (lyric poet)

565?-?470 Xenophanes (satiric poet & philosopher)

525-456 Aiskhylos [Aeschylus] (dramatist)

518?-?438 Pindar (lyric poet)

Classical Age

490-323

490-479 Persian Wars





479 Defeat of the Persians / Rise of Athens

461-429 Age of Perikles: popular Assembly initiates legislation




431-404 Peloponnesian Wars


404 Spartan takeover of Athens







338 Philip of Macedonia takes over Greece

335 Death of Philip; Alexander the Great succeeds

323 Alexander the Great dies

c. 490-c. 440 Korax (traditional founder of rhetoric)

483?-?376 Gorgias

c. 481–c. 411 Progtagoras

469-399 Sokrates

c. 450-420 Herodotus composes his Histories

450?-?380 Lysias (see Phaedrus)

448?-380 Aristophanes (dramatist)

436?-?338 Isokrates

c. 428 Sophokles, Oedipus the King

427?-347 Plato

c. 424-400 Thukydides, Peloponnesian War

c. 415 Gorgias, Helen

399 Trial and death of Socrates

c. 387-385 Plato, Gorgias

384-322 Aristotle

c. 370 Isokrates, Helen

c. 370 Plato, Phaedrus

330 Aristotle, Rhetoric



*Jean-Pierre Vernant. The Origins of Greek Thought. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982. Translation of Les origines de la penseé grecque (Paris: PUP, 1962).

Last update: 11-Jan-07

The contents of this page do not reflect any official positions of Middle Tennessee State University. The sole responsibility for these contents lies with the author:

Dr. James N. Comas (jcomas@mtsu.edu)
Middle Tennessee State University
English Dept., Box 70
Murfreesboro, TN 37132
615-898-2606

Creative Commons License
Unless noted otherwise, the work on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Some pages on this site contain material from my classes taught in The Department of English at Middle Tennessee State University.

This document is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict and uses CSS 2.1.