Page:The Earliest Lives of Dante (Smith 1901).djvu/54

Rh In order that to such a power no silent nor all but mute honor should be paid, it seemed meet for them to propitiate it with words of lofty sound, and so render it favorable to their necessities. And since they deemed that this Being exceeded all else in nobleness, they were anxious to find words far above any plebeian or public style of speaking, whereby they might worthily discourse before the Divinity, and offer it sacred adulation. Furthermore, that these words might appear to have the greater efficacy, they desired that they should be arranged according to laws of rhythm, whereby some sweetness might be heard, and all harshness and tediousness be removed. It was clearly fitting, moreover, that this should be done not in a vulgar or habitual form of speech, but in a manner artistic, exquisite, and new. This form the Greeks termed poetic, whence it came about that whatever was cast in such a mold was called poetry, and that they who created it, or employed this manner of speaking, were given the name of poets. This, then, was the origin of the terms poet and poetry; and though others assign different reasons, perhaps good ones, this explanation pleases me best.

This good and laudable desire of the rude age moved many, in a world growing through knowledge, to various fictions, and, while the first people honored only one deity, their successors represented that there were many, though they said that this one held pre-eminence above all the others. These several deities, they held, were the Sun and Moon, Saturn and Jupiter, and each of the other seven planets, their divinity being inferred from their effects. Later they came to hold that everything useful to man (although it were of the earth) was a deity—like fire, water, earth itself, and such things; and to all of these were ordained verses and honors and sacrifices.

Following on this, various men in various places, some by one fiction, some by another, began to make themselves stronger than the ignorant multitude of their districts, deciding their crude disputes, not by written law, which did not