canons

canons, selective lists of Greek authors, dating from ancient times. By the mid-fourth century BC it was recognized at Athens that there were only three outstanding tragic dramatists, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, who comprised the tragic canon, but the first authoritative lists, at least of the poets, seem to have been drawn up by the Hellenistic scholars, Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus, in the third and second centuries BC. These lists can only be reconstructed from later references and there is no unanimous agreement on their contents, but it seems clear that they named as the best iambographers Archilochus, Hipponax, and Semonides; as the best epic poets Homer and Hesiod; as the best writers of Old Comedy Eupolis, Cratinus, and Aristophanes; and of lyric poetry Pindar, Bacchylides, Sappho, Anacreon, Stesichorus, Simonides, Ibycus, Alcman, and Alcaeus. Lists of orators, historians, and philosophers were subsequently compiled, although only that of the Attic orators rivalled in fame the lists of the poets. The ten best Attic orators were deemed to be Antiphon, Lysias, Andocides, Isocrates, Isaeus, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Lycurgus, Hypereides, and Deinarchus. The authors themselves were called in Greek, hoi enkrithentes, ‘those selected’, and in Latin, classici, i.e. ‘of the first class’ (see also CLASSIC), but there was no term for ‘selective list’ until the German-Dutch scholar David Ruhnken in 1768 originated the use of ‘canon’ in the sense (Gk. kanonğs—originally ‘rods’, then carpenters' ‘rules’, hence metaphorically ‘standards of excellence’).