LITERATURE OP ANCIENT GREECE. 39 memoiy alone, will always gladly avail itself. The Greek epic, like heroic poems of other nations which were preserved by oral tradition, as well as our own popular songs, furnishes us with many instances, where, by the mere repetition of former passages or a few customary flowing phrases, the mind is allowed an interval of repose, which it gladly makes use of in order to recal the verses which immediately follow. These epic expletives have the same convenience as the constantly- recurring burdens of the stanzas in the popular poetry of other nations, and contribute essentially towards rendering comprehensible the marvel (which, however, could only be accounted as such in times when the powers of memory have been weakened by the use of writing) involved in the composition and preservation of such poems by the means of memorv alone*. § 6. In this chapter our inquiries have hitherto been directed to the delivery, form, and character of the ancient epic, as we must suppose it to have existed before the age of Homer. With regard, however, to any particular production of this ante- Homeric poetry, no historical testimony of any is extant, much less any fragment or account of the subject of the poem. And yet it is in general quite certain that at the period when Homer and Hesiod arose, a large number of songs must have existed respecting the actions both of gods and heroes. The compositions of these poets, if taken by themselves, do not bear the character of a com- plete and all-suflicient body, but rest on a broad foundation of other poems, by means of which their entire scope and application was deve- loped to a contemporary audience. In the Theogony, Hesiod only aims at bringing the families of gods and heroes into an unbroken genealo- gical connexion ; the gods and heroes themselves he always supposes to be well known. Homer speaks of Achilles, Nestor, Diomed, even the first time their names are introduced, as persons with whose race, family, preceding history, and actions, every person was acquainted, and which require to be only occasionally touched upon so far as may be connected with the actual subject. Besides this, we find a crowd of secondary personages, who, as if well known from particular traditions, are very slightly alluded to ; persons whose existence was doubtless a matter of notoriety to the poet, and who were interesting from a variety of circumstances, but who are altogether unknown to us, as they were to the Greeks of later days. That the Olympian council of the gods, as represented in Homer, must have been previously arranged by earlier poets, has been already remarked ; and poetry of a similar nature to one part of Hesiod's Theogony, though in some respects essentially different,
- The author has here given a summary of all the arguments which contratlict
the opinion that the ancient epics of the Greeks were originally reduced to writing ; principally because, in the course of the critical examination to which Wolfs in- quiries have been recently submitted in Germany, this point has been differently handled by several persons, and it has been again maintained that these poems were preserved in writing from the beginning.
