To judge by the analogy of other literatures, it is safe to say that as verse always precedes prose (just as man feels before he reasons), so the epic everywhere precedes the lyric form, with the possible exception of hymns. The _Poema del Cid_, for instance, shows no trace of lyrical descent; and it is far likelier that the many surviving _romances_ or ballads on the Cid are detached fragments of an epic, than that the epic should be a _pastiche_ of ballads put together nobody knows why, when, where, how, or by whom. But in any case the _cantilena_ theory is idle; for, since no _cantilenas_ exist, no evidence is—or can be—forthcoming to eke out an attractive but unconvincing thesis. In default of testimony and of intrinsic probability, the theory depends solely on bold assertion, and it suffices to say that the _cantilena_ hypothesis is now abandoned by all save a knot of fanatical partisans. The exploits of the battle-field would, in all likelihood, be the first subjects of song; and the earliest singers of these deeds—_gesta_—would appear in the chieftain's household. They sang to cheer the freebooters on the line of march, and a successful foray was commemorated in some war-song like Dinas Vawr's: "_Ednyfed, King of Dyfed, His head was borne before us; His wine and beasts supplied our feasts, And his overthrow our chorus._" Soon the separation between combatants and singers became absolute: the division has been effected in the interval which divides the _Iliad_ from the _Odyssey_. Achilles himself sings the heroes' glories; in the _Odyssey_ the _ἀοιδός_ or professional singer appears, to be succeeded by the rhapsode. Slowly there evolve in Spain, as elsewhere, two classes of artists known as _trovadores_ and _juglares_. The _trovadores_ are generally authors; the _juglares_ are mere executants—singers, declaimers, mimes, or simple mountebanks. Of these lowlier performers one type has been immortalised in M. Anatole France's _Le Jongleur de Notre Dame_, a beautiful re-setting of the old story of _El Tumbeor_. But between _trovadores_ and _juglares_ it is not possible to draw a hard-and-fast line: their functions intermingled. Some few _trovadores_ anticipated Wagner by eight or nine centuries, composing their own music-drama on a lesser scale. In cases of special endowment, the composer of words and music delivered them to the audience.