Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/59

LITERATURE OP ANCIENT GREECE. 37 assemblies, sacrifices, banquets, &c. — the proverbial expressions and sentences derived from an earlier age, to which class may be referred most of the verses which belong in common to Homer and Hesiod — and, finally, the uniform construction of the sentences, and their connexion with each other, are also attributable to the same origin. This, too, is another proof of the happy tact and natural genius of the Greeks of that period ; since no style can be conceived which would be better suited than this to epic narrative and description. In general, short phrases, consisting of two or three hexameters, and usually termi- nating with the end of a verse ; periods of greater length, occurring chiefly in impassioned speeches and elaborate similes ; the phrases care- fully joined and strung together with conjunctions ; the collocation simple and uniform, without any of the words being torn from their connexion, and placed in a prominent position by a rhetorical artifice ; all this appears the natural language of a mind which contemplates the actions of heroic life with an energetic but tranquil feeling, and passey them successively in review with conscious delight and complacency. § 5. The tone and style of epic poetry is also evidently connected with the manner in which these poems were perpetuated. After the researches of various scholars, especially of Wood and Wolf, no one can doubt that it was universally preserved by the memory alone, and handed down from one rhapsodist to another by oral tradition. The Greeks (who, in poetry, laid an astonishing stress on the manner of delivery, the observance of the rhythm, and the proper intonation and inflection of the voice) always, even in later times, considered it necessary that per- sons, who were publicly to deliver poetical compositions, should previ- ously practise and rehearse their part. The oral instruction of the chorus was the chief employment of the lyric and tragic poets, who were hence called chorodidascali. Amongst the rhapsodists also, to whom the cor- rectness and grace of delivery was of much importance, this method of tradition was the most natural, and at the same time the only one pos- sible, at a time in which the art of writing was either not known at all to the Greeks or used only by a few, and by them to a very slight extent. The correctness of this supposition is proved, in the first place, by the silence of Homer, which has great weight in matters which he had so frequently occasion to describe; but particularly by the "fatal tokens" (at'ifiara Xvyoa), commanding the destruction of Bellerophon, which Proetus sends to lobates : these being clearly a species of symbolical figures, which must have speedily disappeared from use when alpha- betical writing was once generally introduced. Besides this we have no credible account of written memorials of that period ; and it is distinctly stated that the laws of Zaleucus (about Olymp. 30) were the first committed to writing: those of Lycurgus, of earlier date, having been at first preserved only by oral tradition. Additional confirmation is afforded by the rarity and icorlhlessncss of any historical