derived
from that confederacy which had made the last struggle for its
political existence.

CHAPTER XXII.

SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO
THE REIGN OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT.

The Greeks possessed two large collections of epic poetry. The one
comprised poems relating to the great events and enterprises of the
Heroic age, and characterised by a certain poetical unity; the other
included works tamer in character and more desultory in their mode of
treatment, containing the genealogies of men and gods, narratives of
the exploits of separate heroes, and descriptions of the ordinary
pursuits of life. The poems of the former class passed under the name
of Homer; while those of the latter were in the same general way
ascribed to Hesiod. The former were the productions of the Ionic and
AEolic minstrels in Asia Minor, among whom Homer stood pre-eminent and
eclipsed the brightness of the rest: the latter were the compositions
of a school of bards in the neighbourhood of Mount Helicon in Boeotia,
among whom in like manner Hesiod enjoyed the greatest celebrity. The
poems of both schools were composed in the hexameter metre and in a
similar dialect; but they differed widely in almost every other feature.

Of the Homeric poems the Iliad and the Odyssey were the most
distinguished and have alone come down to us. The subject of the Iliad
was the exploits of Achilles and of the other Grecian heroes before
Ilium or Troy; that of the Odyssey was the wanderings and adventures of
Odysseus or Ulysses after the capture of Troy on his return to his
native island. Throughout the flourishing period of Greek literature
these unrivalled works were universally regarded as the productions of
a single mind; but there was very little agreement respecting the place
of the poet's birth the details of his life, or the time in which he
lived. Seven cities laid claim to Homer's birth, and most of them had
legends to tell respecting his romantic parentage, his alleged
blindness, and his life of an itinerant bard acquainted with poverty
and sorrow. It cannot be disputed that he was an Asiatic Greek; but
this is the only fact in his life which can be regarded as certain.
Several of the best writers of antiquity supposed him to have been a
native of the island of Chios; but most modern scholars believe Smyrna
to have been his birthplace. His most probable date is about B.C. 850.

The mode in which these poe