To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

by Steven Weinberg

There is a narrow sense of poetry, as language that uses verbal devices like meter, rhyme, or alliteration. Even in this narrow sense, Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles all wrote in poetry. After the Dorian invasions and the breakup of the Bronze Age Mycenaean civilization in the twelfth century BC, the Greeks had become largely illiterate. Without writing, poetry is almost the only way that people can communicate to later generations, because poetry can be remembered in a way that prose cannot. Literacy revived among the Greeks sometime around 700 BC, but the new alphabet borrowed from the Phoenicians was first used by Homer and Hesiod to write poetry, some of it the long-remembered poetry of the Greek dark ages. Prose came later.