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xvi the people, whether in their higher aspirations or in their grosser desires. And just here lies much of the meaning of Greek poetry for the student of humanity. It is the spontaneous and universal expression of the life and character of the Greeks; it is the comprehensive interpretation of the essential qualities of the race; in it is sounded the diapason of the capacities of this people; it is, as Sir Richard Jebb has said, the "index of their capacity." Literature, especially poetry, is national life expressed, not, as to-day, an individual's "criticism of life."

How does this relation show itself? In the first place, in the universality of Greek poetry, and in its infinite variety within certain grand types, which had been developed by the reaction of poets on their environment. Besides the great branches of poetic art, with the scant fragments of which we are familiar, it must be remembered that every class in society had its peculiar form of poetic utterance. The originals are gone, leaving only scant allusions to them in such writers as Athenaeus and Plutarch: there was poetry for each time of life, from cradle songs to dirges for the aged dead; each occupation had its peculiar poetry—watchmen, waterdrawers, shepherds, weavers, harvesters, soldiers. There were choral songs, in part rude and improvised, in part original artistic creations of famous poets, in part re-fashioned by great poets from rude popular originals. In the glad festivals of Dionysus there were choral songs of great variety, from two kinds of which Attic drama, both tragedy and comedy, in an unprecedented development, drew its origin. Plutarch tells of the hymn of invocation to Dionysus, sung by the women of Elis at Olympia; we read of the free and unrestrained songs of guilds