Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/120



§ 28. the subordinate position of the commonalty (dêmus) in the Homeric poems, a position not much superior to that of the serfs as compared with the kings and chiefs, it might not be supposed that song in Greece, as elsewhere, was in its beginnings neither the making of royal minstrels like Demodokus, nor the celebration of princely heroes like Achilles and Ulysses. But the width of sympathy between Greeks of many tribes and cities in the Homeric poems, no less than the common knowledge they imply of heroic and divine myths, and even special tales of epic character, are enough to prove that behind the Iliad and Odyssey existed poetry of local sympathies and songs of local sentiment long before the genius of one master-bard, or of many, built up the Greek epics into the forms in which they have reached us. As has frequently been observed, the picture of social life in the Homeric poems is that of men who have left the barbarous isolation and exclusiveness of clan life far behind them; men who, if they have lost much of the clansmen's equality, are gaining wider sympathies and