Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/394

364 rulest all things aright, that so being honoured, we may requite thee with honour, hymning thy works for ever, as beseemeth a mortal man: for to none on earth is there nobler task, nor to those in heaven, than rightfully to hymn the Universal Law!”

The earliest literature which formed the staple of the education described above consisted of the Homeric poems and the Epic cycle, which not only served later poets as an inexhaustible store-house of legend and myth, but was regarded by the Greeks generally as the source of their knowledge of the antiquities and early history of their country, and the most authoritative exposition of religion. Of the great mass of this ballad literature there have survived only the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Hymns. The rest—the Cypria, the Aethiopica, the Sack of Troy, the Little Iliad, the Returns, the Thebais and Epigoni (the two last not connected with Troy, but Thebes)—were known rather to the literary class than to the people generally from the sixth century B.C. It was the Iliad and Odyssey, as collected and edited under Peisistratus for the Athenians, and by others for other states, which formed the Bible of Greece : quoted to settle questions of state boundaries and other historical claims, and examined for teaching in morals and theology. It is true that in the fifth and fourth centuries Socrates and Plato, and perhaps other philosophers, objected to the attribution of human passions, disputes, and violent quarrels to the gods which is found in Homer, and wished to forbid these poems and others like them being used in the education of the young. But this was not the view