Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/183

 The Age of the Nobles and the Tyrants in Gi'eece 143 in the Iliad, but they were, moreover, the earliest Greeks to put into permanent literary form their thoughts regarding the world of gods and men. At that time the Greeks had no other sacred books, and the Homeric songs became the veritable Bible of Greece. They gave to the disunited Greeks a common litera- ture and the inspiring belief that they had once all taken part in a common war against Asia. But the heroic world of glori- ous achievement in which the vision of these -early singers moved, passed away, and with it passed their art. The Homeric singers never refer to themselves ; they never Hesiod and speak of their own lives, but retire behind the stirring pictures ^^, f^^ soda of heroic adventure which absorb their thought and completely g^^^opg" occupy them with the lives of their heroes who had died long, long before. But now the problems of iQ- present begin to press hard upon the minds of men ; the peasant farmer's dis- tressing struggle for existence (see p. 132) makes men conscious of very present needs. Their oiun lives become a great and living theme. The voices that once chanted' the hero songs die away, and now we hear the first voice raised in Europe on be- half of the poor and humble. Hesiod, an obscure farmer under the shadow of Mount Helicon in Bceotia, sings of the dreary and hopeless life of the peasant — of his 07vn life as he struggles on under a burden too heavy for his shoulders. We even hear how his brother Persis seized the lands left by their father, and then bribed the judges to confirm him in their possession. It is not a little interesting to observe that this earliest pro- Social forces IT • • J u ^"^^ literature test against the tyrannies of wealthy town life is raised at the very moment when across the corner of the Mediterranean the once nomad Hebrews are passing through the same experience (see p. 104). The voice of Hesiod raising the cry for social justice in Greece sounds like an echo from Palestine. We should notice also that in Palestine the cry for social justice resulted finally in a religion of brotherly kindness, whereas in Greece it re- sulted in democratic institutions, the rule of the people who refused longer to submit to the oppressions of the few and powerful.