File:A general history for colleges and high schools (1889) (14577980740).jpg

Identifier: generalhistoryfo01myer (find matches)
Title: A general history for colleges and high schools
Year: 1889 (1880s)
Authors: Myers, Philip Van Ness, 1846- (from old catalog)
Subjects: World history
Publisher: Boston, Ginn & company
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: Sloan Foundation

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ieved), lost his sight, andthen, as a wandering minstrel,sang his immortal versesto admiring listeners in thedifferent cities of Hellas. But it is now the opinion of many scholars that the Iliad andthe Odyssey, as they stand to-day, are not, either of them, thecreation of a single poet. They are believed to be mosaics; thatis, to be built up out of the fragments of an extensive ballad litera-ture that grew up in an age preceding the Homeric. The Wrathof Achilles, which forms the nucleus of the Iliad as we have it,may, with very great probability, be ascribed to Homer, whom wemay believe to have been the most prominent of a brotherhood ofbards who flourished about 850 or 750 B.C. The Hesiodic Poems. — Hesiod, who lived a century or moreafter the age that gave birth to the Homeric poems, was the poetof nature and of real life, especially of peasant life, in the dimtransition age of Hellas. The Homeric bards sing of the deedsof heroes, and of a far-away time when gods mingled with men.
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HOMER. 192 GREEK LITERATURE. Hesiod sings of common men, and of every-day, present duties.His greatest poem, a didactic epic, is entitled Works and Days.This is, in the main, a sort of farmers calendar, in which the poetpoints out to the husbandman the lucky and unlucky days fordoing certain kinds of work, eulogizes industry, and interspersesamong all his practical lines homely maxims of morality and beauti-ful descriptive passages of the changing seasons. Lyric Poetry: Pindar. — The ^olian island of Lesbos was thehearth and home of the earlier lyric poets. Among the earliest ofthe Lesbian singers was the poetess Sappho, whom the Greeksexalted to a place next to Homer. Plato calls her the Tenth Muse.Although her fame endures, her poetry, except some mere frag-ments, has perished. Anacreon was a courtier at the time of the Greek tyrannies.He was a native of Ionia, but passed much of his time at the courtof Polycrates of Samos. He seems to have enjoyed to the fullthe gay and easy life

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