Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/395

Rh of the ordinary man. They were widely known and received with simple acquiescence. Though written copies were few, yet professional reciters, or Rhapsodes, travelled from town to town, and in the halls of princes or on village greens charmed their hearers with the familiar tale, set out in the stately hexameter, than which no metre ever devised is more musical and simple. Most of the listeners had learnt long portions of it at school and knew the characters of the chief heroes and their fortunes, had been stirred to terror or pity by the wrath of Achilles and his passionate sorrow for Patroclus, by the parting of Hector and Andromache, or the pathetic courage of the aged Priam venturing into the Greek camp to ransom the body of his heroic son from the hand that had slain him. They learnt, as they listened, how an overmastering Fate bound the gods themselves, how Zeus ruled with Justice as his assessor, and how all that sustained or concerned mortals was divine or divinely directed—the air they breathed, the ocean that surrounded the world, the fire that ministered to their needs, the sun, moon, and stars that gave them light, the earth that nurtured and fed them, the wisdom that guided their steps aright, and the folly that bred presumption and involved men in ruin. In the Iliad they found the first elements of ordered government, the necessity of approaching the gods by prayer and sacrifice, the discipline of a camp, the earliest form of those athletic contests which played so large a part in their own lives, and the funeral rites due to the gallant dead. The Odyssey is different. It is a tale