seem in an age like the present, there is in all early societies, and

there was 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

The Iliad of Homer