These rhapsodists travelled from place to place to compete for the prizes offered by the different cities, and while the national poems (carried in their memories) were probably common to all, each reciter doubtless had his own special method of declaiming these. This practice helps to account for the transmission and for the diffusion of the earlier epics. The rhapsodists may, therefore, be said to have served in a sense as the publishers of the period. The derivation of the word comedy throws some light on the literary customs of the time. It means literally “a song of the village,” from κώμη, a village, and ἀείδω, I sing. The purposes of Greek writers were either political or purely ideal. The possibility of earning money by means of authorship seems hardly ever to have occurred to them, and this freedom from any commercial motive for their work was doubtless an important cause for the high respect accorded in Greece to its authors. In the time of Plato, the _Sophists_, who prepared speeches and gave instruction for gain, were subject to more or less criticism on this account--a criticism which Plato himself seems to have initiated.[27] At the threshold of Greek literature stands the majestic figure of Homer; and to Pisistratus, the Tyrant of Athens, is to be credited the inestimable service of securing the preservation of the Homeric poems in the form in which they have been handed down to posterity. The task of compiling or of editing the material was confided to four men, whose names, as predecessors of a long list of Homeric editors, deserve to be recorded: Conchylus, Onomacritus, Zopyrus, and Orpheus, and the work was completed about 550 B.C.[28] Another creditable literary undertaking of Pisistratus was the collection of the poems of Hesiod, which was confided to the Milesian Cecrops. We have the testimony of Plutarch that by these means the Tyrant did not a little towards gaining or regaining the favor of the Athenians, which speaks well for the early interest of the city in literature. There are no details on record as to the means by which these first literary products were placed at the service of the community, but there can be no question that the service rendered by the Tyrant and the editors selected by him, consisted simply in providing an authoritative text, from which any who wished might transcribe such number of copies as they desired. This Pisistratus edition of the Homeric books is said to have served as the standard text for the copyists and for Homeric students not only in Greece but later in Alexandria, and is, therefore, the basis of the Homeric literature that has come down to modern days.