remains of it are concerned, it began as
the sun begins its daily career in the heavens, with a lustre not
surpassed in any part of its course. For the oldest of Greek writings
which we possess are among the most brilliant, comprising the poems of
Homer, the model of all later works in the epic field, and which light
up and illustrate a broad period of human history as no works in
different vein could do. They shine out in a realm of darkness, and
show us what men were doing and thinking and how they were living and
striving at a time which but for them would be buried in impenetrable
darkness.

This was the epoch of the wandering minstrel, when the bard sang his
stirring lays of warlike scenes and heroic deeds in castle and court.
But the mind of Greece was then awakening in other fields, and it is of
great interest to find that Homer was quickly followed by an epic writer
of markedly different vein, Hesiod, the poet of peace and rural labors,
of the home and the field. While Homer paints for us the warlike life of
his day, Hesiod paints the peaceful labors of the husbandman, the
holiness of domestic life, the duty of economy, the education of youth,
and the details of commerce and politics. He also collects the flying
threads of mythological legend and lays down for us the story of the
gods in a work of great value as the earliest exposition of this
picturesque phase of religious belief. The veil is lifted from the face
of youthful Greece by these two famous writers, and we are shown the
land and its people in full detail at a period of whose conditions we
otherwise would be in total ignorance.

Such was the earliest phase of Greek literature, so far as any remains
of it exist. It took on a different form when Athens rose to political
supremacy and became a capital of art and the chief centre of Hellenic
thought, its productions being received with admiration throughout
Greece, while the ripened judgment and taste of its citizens became the
arbiters of literary excellence for many centuries to follow. The
earliest notable literature, however, came from the Ionians of Asia
Minor and the adjacent islands. In the soft and mild climate and
productive valleys of this region and under the warm suns and beside the
limpid seas of the smiling islands, the mobile Ionic spirit found
inspiration and blossomed into song while yet the rocky Attic soil was
barren of literary growth. But with the conquering inroads of the
Persians