Almost all of the great mass of Hellenistic prose—and later prose, historical, scholarly, and scientific—has perished. Among historians Polybius (c. 200–c. 118 bc), the most outstanding, has survived in a fragmentary condition. Present at Rome when it was succumbing to the first influences of Greek literature, he wrote mainly of events of which he had direct experience, often with great insight; his work covered the period from 264 to 146. Diodorus Siculus’ universal history (1st century bc) is important for the sources quoted there. The most considerable of lost historians was Timaeus (c. 356–c. 260), whose history of the Greeks in the west down to 264 provided Polybius with his starting point. Later historians were Dionysius of Halicarnassus (flourished about 20 bc); Appian of Alexandria (2nd century ad), who wrote on Rome and its conquests; and Arrian (c. ad 96–c. 180) from Bithynia, who is the most valuable source on Alexander the Great.

The most important works of criticism, of which little has survived, were by Dionysius of Halicarnassus and the obscure Longinus. Longinus’ treatise On the Sublime (c. ad 40) is exceptional in its penetrating analysis of creative literature. The Bibliotheca attributed to Apollodorus (c. 180 bc) is a handy compendium of mythology.

Scientific work such as the astronomy and geography of Eratosthenes (c. 276–c. 194) of Alexandria is known mainly from later summaries; but much that was written by the mathematicians, especially Euclid (flourished c. 300 bc) and Archimedes (c. 287–212), has been preserved.

Much survives of the writings of the physician Galen (ad 129–199). His contemporary Sextus Empiricus is an important source for the history of Greek philosophy. The survey of the Mediterranean by Strabo in the time of Augustus preserved much valuable information; and so, in a more limited field, did the description of Greece by Pausanias (2nd century ad). Greek achievement in astronomy and geography was summed up in the work of Ptolemy of Alexandria in the 2nd century ad.

Greek became the language of the large settlement of Jews at Alexandria, and the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament, was completed by about the end of the 2nd century bc. Much of the Apocrypha was composed in Greek, and the New Testament was written in popular Greek (Koine). Of the early Christian writers in Greek the most notable were Clement of Alexandria (c. ad 150–c. 215) and Origen (c. ad 185–c. 254), together with Clement I and Ignatius of Antioch.

The Parallel Lives of famous Greeks and Romans by Plutarch (c. ad 46–c. 119) of Chaeronea in Boeotia was for centuries one of the formative books for educated Europeans. Great figures from an idealized past are presented for the edification of the lesser people of his own day; and the anecdotes with which the Lives abound are of various degrees of credibility. They belong to biography rather than to history, though they are an important source for historians. A number of shorter works on a wide variety of subjects have come down under the Latin title Moralia (Greek Ethica), which show the intellectual tide of Greece on the ebb.

There was much concern over a question that had been argued ever since the days when Athens had ceased to be a free city: to what extent was Attic prose a norm that writers and especially orators were bound to follow? Many had shunned it in favour of a more ornamental Asiatic style. But at the end of the 1st century ad there was a revival of the Attic dialect. Speeches and essays were written for wide circulation. This revival is known as the Second Sophistic movement, and chief among its writers were Dion Chrysostom (1st century ad), Aelius Aristides (2nd century), and Philostratus (early 3rd century). The only writer of consequence, however, was Lucian (c. 120–c. 190). His works are mainly slight and satirical; but his gift of humour, even though repetitive, cannot be denied. Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers was a valuable work of the 3rd century by Diogenes Laërtius, a writer otherwise unknown.

Philosophical activity in the early empire was mainly confined to moralizings based on Stoicism, a philosophy advocating a life in harmony with nature and indifference to pleasure and pain. Epictetus (born about ad 55) influenced especially the philosophic Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180), whose Meditations have taken their place beside works of Christian devotion. Many of Plutarch’s Moralia were Platonic, with vaguely mystical tendencies; but Plotinus (c. 205–260/270) was the last major thinker in the Classical world, giving new direction to Platonic and Pythagorean mysticism.

The latest creation of the Greek genius was the novel, or erotic romance. It may have originated as early as the 1st century bc; but its roots reach back to such plays of triumphant love as the lost Andromeda of Euripides, to the New Comedy, to Xenophon’s daydreams about the education of Cyrus, and to the largely fictitious narratives that were one extreme of what passed for history from the 3rd century bc onward. Of these last, the best known examples are the Alexander romances, a wildly distorted and embroidered version of the exploits of Alexander the Great, which supplied some of the favourite reading of the Middle Ages. Erotic elegy and epigram may have contributed something and so may the lost Milesian Tales of Aristides of Miletus (c. 100 bc), though these last appear to have depended on a pornographic interest that is almost completely absent from the Greek romances. Only fragments survive of the Ninus romance (dealing with the love of Ninus, legendary founder of Nineveh), which was probably of the 1st century bc; but full-length works survive by Chariton (2nd century ad), Achilles Tatius (2nd century ad), Xenophon of Ephesus (2nd or 3rd century ad), and Heliodorus (3rd century ad or later). All deal with true lovers separated by innumerable obstacles of human wickedness and natural catastrophe and then finally united. Daphnis and Chloe by Longus (between 2nd and 3rd century ad) stands apart from the others because of its pastoral, rather than quasi-historical, setting. The works of Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius belong to the same period. They claim to give a pre-Homeric account of the Trojan War. The Greek originals are almost wholly lost, but the Latin version was for the Middle Ages the main source for the story of Troy. (See also Hellenistic romance.)