Page:Plato (IA platocollins00colliala).pdf/32

 all subsequent thought. Homer, indeed, has been called "the Greek Bible;" and every Athenian gentleman is said to have known the Iliad and Odyssey by heart. Their morality, it is true, was of a rough and ready character, suited to the high spirit of heroic times, when war and piracy were the hero's proper profession; but there are everywhere traces of a strict code of honour and a keen sense of rights and duties. The oath and the marriage tie, the claims of age and weakness, the guest and the suppliant, are all respected; and though all stratagems are held to be fair in war, Achilles, the poet's model hero, tells us that his soul detests the liar "like the gates of hell."

Hesiod looks back with regret to the heroes of this golden time, long since departed to the islands of the blest. His own lot has fallen upon evil days; the earth has lost its bloom; the present race of men are sadly degenerate; and Shame and Retribution, the two last remaining virtues, have gone for ever.

Simonides and Theognis complete this gloomy picture; they and the other "Gnomic" poets, fragments of whose writings have come down to us, preach for the most part a prudential morality, unlike the chivalrous naïveté of Homer, and expressed in mournful sentences which read like verses from Ecclesiastes. The uncertainty of fortune, the inconstancy of friends, the miseries of poverty and sickness—these are the phases of life which strike them most.

Then come the "Seven Wise Men," of whom Solon was one, who stand on the border-land of romance and history, like the Seven Champions of