sphere of a court. And, whatever truth is to be found in the Peisistratidean redaction of the Greek epics, it is equally significant that the Peisistratids "were unquestionably the first to introduce the recital of the entire Iliad and Odyssey at the Panathenæa." The heroic songs of the Homeric bards were more in keeping with the tyrant's court than the dramatic spectacle. But the Athenian people had not yet expressed itself in any literary voice, and when that voice should make itself heard it was to be something very different from the personal lyric of the tyrants or the epic of the ancient kings.
Thus, in reply to our question, with what kind of literary stock did the Athenians start on their career of literary production, we have found that, so far as literary form is concerned, the epic, lyric, and iambic forms of poetry were known to them chiefly through their East-Ionic kinsfolk, and that prose in a somewhat poetic dress may be reckoned among the formal elements which their literary capital owed to the same source. East-Ionic prose, prior to the destruction of Miletus at the beginning of the fifth century B.C., was being developed in narrative and philosophical forms which have been contrasted by Mure with the rhetorical prose of Athens in her literary age. The Makâmât of Al Harîri, however, proves that rhetorical prose may be developed where Ekklêsia and law-courts such as those of Athens are unknown. Still, in Miletus we have a municipal centre of Greek intellect widely differing from Athens in its social and physical conditions—a metropolis which, if undestroyed, would in all probability have produced a literature differing widely from that of Athens alike in form and spirit.
But a more important question than that of poetical
