I. Before concluding this introductory portion of my work, it will be necessary to take a brief survey of the intellectual state of Greece prior to that wonderful era of Athenian greatness which commenced with the laws of Solon. At this period the continental states of Greece had produced little in that literature which is now the heirloom of the world. Whether under her monarchy, or the oligarchical constitution that succeeded it, the depressed and languid genius of Athens had given no earnest of the triumphs she was afterward destined to accomplish. Her literature began, though it cannot be said to have ceased, with her democracy. The solitary and doubtful claim of the birth--but not the song--of Tyrtaeus (fl. B. C. 683), is the highest literary honour to which the earlier age of Attica can pretend; and many of the Dorian states--even Sparta itself--appear to have been more prolific in poets than the city of Aeschylus and Sophocles. But throughout all Greece, from the earliest time, was a general passion for poetry, however fugitive the poets. The poems of Homer are the most ancient of profane writings--but the poems of Homer themselves attest that they had many, nor ignoble, precursors. Not only do they attest it in their very excellence--not only in their reference to other poets--but in the general manner of life attributed to chiefs and heroes. The lyre and the song afford the favourite entertainment at the banquet [161]. And Achilles, in the interval of his indignant repose, exchanges the deadly sword for the “silver harp,” “And sings The immortal deeds of heroes and of kings.” [162] II. Ample tradition and the internal evidence of the Homeric poems prove the Iliad at least to have been the composition of an Asiatic Greek; and though the time in which he flourished is yet warmly debated, the most plausible chronology places him about the time of the Ionic migration, or somewhat less than two hundred years after the Trojan war. The following lines in the speech of Juno in the fourth book of the Iliad are supposed by some [163] to allude to the return of the Heraclidae and the Dorian conquests in the Peloponnesus:-- “Three towns are Juno’s on the Grecian plains, More dear than all th’ extended earth contains-- Mycenae, Argos, and the Spartan Wall-- These mayst thou raze, nor I forbid their fall; ‘Tis not in me the vengeance to remove; The crime’s sufficient that they share my love.” [164]