Defining “literature” or “literary authorship” in the context of ancient Greece is not simple. Classical Greek has no equivalent word. Mousikë, the field of the Muses’ activity, includes music and dance, and may exclude texts that Greeks treated in ways that moderns would consider literary. The closest is probably paideia, “education” or “culture,” although it is broader than our “literature.” Greeks themselves did not agree about boundaries. Aristotle’s Poetics excludes philosophy composed in verse from poetry,1 but if we think of literature as texts or performances that seek to provide aesthetic pleasure and are evaluated for verbal artistry, the range of Greek literature was very wide. In general, Greeks would have regarded as open to aesthetic judgment any text that was not purely technical.