Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/134

 HISTORY OF GREECE. I tion, together with others more powerful still, to which we are now strangers. Upon him, they bore with the full weight and solemnity of history and religion combined, while the charm of the poetry was only secondary and instrumental. The poet was i',hen the teacher and preacher of the community, not simply the amuser of their leisure hours : they looked to him for revelations
 * f the unknown past and for expositions of the attributes and

dispensations of the gods, just as they consulted the prophet for his privileged insight into the future. The ancient epic com- prised many different poets and poetical compositions, which ful- filled this purpose with more or less completeness : but it is the exclusive prerogative of the Iliad and Odyssey, that, after the minds of men had ceased to be in full harmony with their original design, they yet retained their empire by the mere force of secon- dary excellences : while the remaining epics though serving as food for the curious, and as storehouses for logographers, tragedians, and artists never seem to have acquired veiy wide popularity even among intellectual Greeks. I shall, in the succeeding chapter, give some account of the epic cycle, of its relation to the Homeric poems, and of the general evidences respecting tho lst*-er, both as to antiquity and authorshin. CHAPTER GRECIAN EPIC. -HOMERIC POF-AfS. AT the head of the once abundant epical compositions of Greece, most of them unfortunately lost, stand the Iliad and Odyssey, with the immortal name of Homer attAched to each of them, embracing separate portions of the comprehensive legend of Troy. They form the type of what may be called the heroic epic of the Greeks, as distinguished from the gene- alogical, in which latter species some of the Hesiodic poems the Catalogue of AY omen, the Eoiai, and the