them at drinking parties or other social gatherings. In his opinion, the nature of the poetry of Theognis shows that it was not composed for a reading public. Giving the fullest possible weight to the evidences for the early development of the knowledge of reading and writing, and the possible facilities for the multiplication and distribution of books in manuscript, it is certain that Greek literature between the ninth and the sixth centuries B.C. cannot have been prepared for a reading public. The epics which have come down to posterity from that period must have been transmitted by word of mouth and memory. Mahaffy and Jevons are in accord in pointing out that the effort of memory required for the composition and transmission of long poems without the aid of writing, while implying a power never manifested among people possessing printed books, is not in itself at all incredible. Memory was equal to the task, and the earlier Greek poems, memorized by the authors as composed, were preserved by successive generations of Bards. They were also evidently composed with special reference to the requirements of the reciters whose recitations were in the earlier periods usually given at the banquets of the royal courts or of great houses to which the bards were attached. The practice of reciting before public audiences can hardly have been begun before the year 600 B.C. The early epics were as a rule much too long to be recited within the limits of a single evening, and they must therefore have been continued from banquet to banquet. The authors have apparently kept this necessity in mind, and have provided for it by dividing their narratives into clearly defined episodes, at the close of which the reciters could leave their audiences with some such word as that given at the close of a weekly installment in the “penny dreadful”--“to be continued in our next.” As the practice was introduced of entertaining larger audiences in the open air with the recital of the Homeric and other epics, a class of professional reciters arose, known as _Rhapsodists_, who declaimed in a theatrical manner, with much gesture and varying inflection of the voice. The term rhapsody is believed by Jevons to be derived from ῥάπτω, to sew or stitch together. He quotes a line from Pindar, Ὁμηρίαι ῥάπτων επέων ἀοιδοί, “sons of Homer, singers of stitched verses.” Words are metaphorically said to be stitched together into verses, and the word ῥαχ-ῳδός Jevons derives from ῥάπτω, to stitch, and ἀοιδός, a singer.[26]