had no
books to study, and no more advanced predecessors to imitate.

We may remark, first, that their position made them at once mountaineers
and mariners, thus supplying them with great variety of objects,
sensations, and adventures; next, that each petty community, nestled
apart amidst its own rocks, was sufficiently severed from the rest to
possess an individual life and attributes of its own, yet not so far as
to subtract it from the sympathies of the remainder; so that an
observant Greek, commercing with a great diversity of half-countrymen,
whose language he understood, and whose idiosyncrasies he could
appreciate, had access to a larger mass of social and political
experience than any other man in so unadvanced an age could personally
obtain. The Phoenician, superior to the Greek on shipboard, traversed
wider distances and saw a greater number of strangers, but had not the
same means of intimate communion with a multiplicity of fellows in blood
and language. His relations, confined to purchase and sale, did not
comprise that mutuality of action and reaction which pervaded the crowd
at a Grecian festival. The scene which here presented itself was a
mixture of uniformity and variety highly stimulating to the observant
faculties of a man of genius--who at the same time, if he sought to
communicate his own impressions, or to act upon this mingled and diverse
audience, was forced to shake off what was peculiar to his own town or
community, and to put forth matter in harmony with the feelings of all.
It is thus that we may explain, in part, that penetrating apprehension
of human life and character, and that power of touching sympathies
common to all ages and nations, which surprises us so much in the
unlettered authors of the old epic. Such periodical intercommunion of
brethren habitually isolated from each other was the only means then
open of procuring for the bard a diversified range of experience and a
many-colored audience; and it was to a great degree the result of
geographical causes. Perhaps among other nations such facilitating
causes might have been found, yet without producing any results
comparable to the Iliad and Odyssey. But Homer was nevertheless
dependent upon the conditions of his age, and we can at least point out
those peculiarities in early Grecian society without which Homeric
excellence would never have existed--the geographical position is one,
the language another.

3. Isolation as an Expl