Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/133

 EPIC P02TRY. 117 f creations ascribed to Hephaestus or Daedalus. No statues of the god?, not even of wood, are mentioned in the Homeric poems. All the many varieties, in Grecian music, poetry, and dancing, the former chiefly borrowed from Lydia and Phrygia, date from a period considerably later than the first Olympiad : Ter- pander, the earliest musician whose date is assigned, and the in- ventor of the harp with seven strings instead of that with four strings, does not come until the 26th Olympiad, or 676 B. c. : the poet Archilochus is nearly of the same date. The iambic and elegiac metres the first deviations from the primitive epic strain and subject do not reach up to the year 700 B. c. It is this epic poetry which forms at once both the undoubted prerogative and the solitary jewel of the earliest era of Greece. Of the many epic poems which existed in Greece during the eight century before the Christian era, none have been preserved except the Iliad and Odyssey : the -ZEthiopis of Arktinus, the Ilias Minor of Lesches, the Cyprian Verses, the Capture of CEchalia, the Returns of the Heroes from Troy, the Thebai's and the Epigoni, several of them passing in antiquity under the name of Homer, have all been lost. But the two which re- main are quite sufficient to demonstrate in the primitive Greeks, a mental organization unparalleled in any other people, and pow- ers of invention and expression which prepared, as well as fore- boded, the future eminence of the nation in all the various de- partments to which thought and language can be applied. Great as the power of thought afterwards became among the Greeks, their power of expression was still greater : in the former, other nations have built upon their foundations and surpassed them, in the latter, they still remained unrivalled. It is not too much to say that this flexible, emphatic, and transparent character of the language as an instrument of communication, its perfect aptitude for narrative and discussion, as well as for stirring all the veins of human emotion without ever forfeiting that character of simplicity which adapts it to all men and all times, may be traced mainly to the existence and the wide-spread influence of the Iliad and Odyssey. To us, these compositions are interesting as beautiful poems, depicting life and manners, and unfolding cer- tain types of character with the utmost vivacity and artlessness : to their original hearer, they possessed all these sources of attrac