s in early Greece, a time when no such reading class existed. If
we could discover at what time such a class first began to be formed, we
should be able to make a guess at the time when the old epic poems were
first committed to writing. Now the period which may with the greatest
probability be fixed upon as having first witnessed the formation even of
the narrowest reading class in Greece, is the middle of the seventh
century before the Christian aera (B.C. 660 to B.C. 630), the age of
Terpander, Kallinus, Archilochus, Simonides of Amorgus, &c. I ground this
supposition on the change then operated in the character and tendencies of
Grecian poetry and music--the elegiac and the iambic measures having been
introduced as rivals to the primitive hexameter, and poetical compositions
having been transferred from the epical past to the affairs of present and
real life. Such a change was important at a time when poetry was the only
known mode of publication (to use a modern phrase not altogether suitable,
yet the nearest approaching to the sense). It argued a new way of looking
at the old epical treasures of the people as well as a thirst for new
poetical effect; and the men who stood forward in it, may well be
considered as desirous to study, and competent to criticize, from their
own individual point of view, the written words of the Homeric rhapsodies,
just as we are told that Kallinus both noticed and eulogized the Thebais
as the production of Homer. There seems, therefore, ground for
conjecturing that (for the use of this newly-formed and important, but
very narrow class), manuscripts of the Homeric poems and other old
epics,--the Thebais and the Cypria, as well as the Iliad and the
Odyssey,--began to be compiled towards the middle of the seventh century
(B.C. 1); and the opening of Egypt to Grecian commerce, which took place
about the same period, would furnish increased facilities for obtaining
the requisite papyrus to write upon. A reading class, when once formed,
would doubtless slowly increase, and the number of manuscripts along with
it; so that before the time of Solon, fifty years afterwards, both readers
and manuscripts, though still comparatively few, might have attained a
certain recognized authority, and formed a tribunal of reference against
the carelessness of individual rhapsodes."(26)

But even Peisistratus has not been suffered to remain in possession of the
credit, and we cannot help feeling the force of t