THE SUBDIVISIONS OF THE RACE.

9

Peloponnesus where they gradually established themselves and acquired new power. The Dorians possessed sturdy, energetic, conservative traits which preserved and extended a certain rugged virtue, but paid for it the usual price of harshness and a latent hostility to high civilization. The Ionians, on the other hand, who settled on the coast of Asia Minor, soon ripened into

an accomplished and brilliant race, whose charm and flexibility stand in marked contrast with the severity of the Dorians. They founded colonies and disseminated their curiosity about life by their early attention to literature, and not to the poetical side alone but also to history and geography, as well as to philosophy and science. The Athenians were most closely allied with the Ionians, and they carried out most fully what these had begun. In all that they did they left the mark of grace and that highest art which is simplicity. Their glories will become sufficiently clear in the progress of this book, and it will be seen how much splendor they threw on the whole country. For, after all, distinct as were the various qualities of the different Greek races, they all combined to form a national character which stands in sharp contrast with that of other peoples. They shared, though in unequal measure, certain common properties, the love of freedom, keen interest in public affairs, poetical fancy, and a disposition for eloquence; they all possessed a sensitiveness to beauty and a delicacy of perception, which made them a unit in the face of foreign nations, although they were alive to their several family differences. Similar differences in what yet formed a separate entity, were those of the various dialects of the one Greek language, which belonged to the different branches

DORIAN GIRL.-(Victor in the races.)

of the nation. And just as the Attic division became the most important, the language as they spoke it became the most authoritative and finally the only prevalent one. The wealth of the Greek tongue in its earliest traces proves that it was the product of a long prehistoric development. What the language was in the Homeric poems it substantially remained throughout the whole period in which Greek literature flourished: a rich, copious means of expression, abounding in words that readily lent themselves to the formation of compounds, and with a flexible syntax that well represented the Greek subtlety and ingenuity. Of course it was not a mere chance that gave this

ATHENIAN COSTUMES.

race so marvelous an instrument; they created it rather by the need which they felt for expressing their own thoughts. As has been said, its ripe form indicated a long past; a language like the Greek does not grow in a day, and other proofs of its antiquity are not lacking. In their earliest work that has come down to us in a state of completion, that is to say in the Homeric poems, we find a degree of poetic excellence that bears indubitable evidence of a long line of predecessors. Every successful work implies a host of failures; the opinion that the facility and grace of the Homeric hexameter were a special creation out of nothing by a gifted man, is one that has long held sway over men's minds, fostering mistaken views concerning the miraculous qualities of genius; yet the examination of every case can but confirm the opposite view. Wherever we have all the testimony,

THEIR GENIUS NOT MIRACULOUS.

II

we see failures preceding the final success, and the slow growth of victory, as inevitably as we see the growth of all phenomena. What has at first seemed to be the product of some one half-inspired person has, when closely studied, turned out to be only the full development of a crude past. Such is uniformly the case in modern literatures, in which alone we have all the evidence, while of the classic literatures we have in general scarcely any thing but the best performance. Only their most famous work remains in sight above the flood of oblivion, and from the existence of two literatures, consisting mainly of masterpieces, it was easy to imagine that the ancients possessed the art, since lost, of producing great work without an apprenticeship. The indiscriminating fervor, too, of praise poured out on Greek literature has at times given to the difficult task of examining its growth the appearance of irreverence and iconoclasticism. To be sure, this evil spirit of analysis has met no more formidable opposition than the assertion that the great writers, being creative, are hence superior to moleeyed criticism, but this assertion is itself open to doubt, and within the last hundred years the whole point of view has been in process of change.

BOOK I.—THE EPICS.

CHAPTER I.—THE HOMERIC QUESTION.

I.-The Beginnings of Literature-The Influence of Religious Feeling-The Traces of Early Song. II.-The Hexameter, and its Possible Growth. III.-The Homeric Poems-The References to an Earlier Period-The Ionic Origin of the PoemsThe Existence of Homer. IV. -The Long Discussion of this Subject: Bentley, Wolf, etc. Possible Date of the Compositions of these Poems-Archæological Illustrations.

I.

N time the notion of what literature is, has undergone serious modification, and it has been gradually becoming plain that it is unwise to speak of it as a separate concrete thing which may be detached from life and, as it were, be put on a shelf to be taken down at odd moments for examination like a bundle of dry bones. Yet so readily. are unknown coins used as counters, and words employed as a substitute for thought, that literature and art have been, and for that matter still are, spoken of as if they were separate and remote exercises in composition rather than the utterances of human beings, the representation of men's thoughts and feelings, the fixed shadows of generations of men. Of no people is it truer than of the Greeks, that their literature is not an artificial product, but the race speaking. The most important thing to remember in studying their writings is that these are the direct expression of a free people, leading its own life, untrammeled by inherited rules or authoritative convention. This is the keynote to the comprehension of Greek literature, and one that it is not perfectly easy for us to understand, trained as we are to look at life not directly, but through the eyes of some one else, and accustomed to learn methods rather than to exercise direct vision. Only within the last hundred years, and in some part under the inspiration of the Greeks, have we begun again to see that life itself is something greater, vaster, and more solemn than any literary method.

While the Iliad and the Odyssey are the earliest Greek poems that have come down to us, it has become plain that they mark, as all the best work does, the end rather than the beginning of a great movement. Yet everywhere the earliest songs are those of a religious nature, and

THE GREEK GODS.

13

before men begin to draw pictures of society, indeed before there is any society for them to draw, their attention is called to their relations with the world about and above them with all its mysteries and terrors. From the earliest times men grope for some religious explanation of the various phenomena that they observe, and their first utterances are the expression of their ready wonder and equally ready explanations. From fancied or observed coincidences, through thousands of imagined explanations, there grows up a mass of myths about the impressive order and apparent willfulness of nature, such as we find to have been the common property of the whole Aryan family, which developed into the adoration and personification of natural forces and phenomena. This underlies the Greek religion, but yet it is not a sufficient explanation to call this simply a nature worship. Zeus did not rule as a mere vast natural force; Poseidon was more than the mighty spirit of the deep; the gods were, rather, exalted beings who retained as their appurtenances these qualities of the forces. of nature, but they had developed in the clear sunlight of the Greek mind. into something like civilized human beings, devoid of cruel and monstrous qualities, and subject to the higher rule of ethical law. Inasmuch as the first thing that strikes us in examining the Greek mythology is the absence of what we may call municipal law in Olympus, and the social laxity of the divine beings, the mention of their subjection seems. absurd. Their frequent infractions of the moral law seem to contradict the notion of their subordination to ethical control, and since it. is man and not nature that is moral, it has been held that the Greek religion was purely a worship of nature. But other testimony destroys the absolute sway of this theory. In the Homeric poems we find the gods but little removed from the condition of extraordinary people. Even before Homer the deities seem to have met more than half way the men who were promoted to their company; the relics of nature-worship survived, but as attributes of a worshiped deity, not as themselves objects of adoration. Thus Apollo

OLYMPIAN ZEUS.