Such war-ballads were the materials from which the earliest epic poetry of Greece was constructed. By an "epic" poem the Greeks meant a narrative of heroic action in hexameter verse. The term [Greek: epe] meant at first simply "verses"; it acquired its special meaning only when [Greek: mele], lyric songs set to music, came to be distinguished from [Greek: epe] verses not set to music, but merely recited. Epic poetry is the only kind of extant Greek poetry which is older than about 700 B.C. The early epos of Greece is represented by the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, Hesiod and the Homeric hymns; also by some fragments of the "Cyclic" poets. The "Iliad" and the "Odyssey." After the Dorian conquest of the Peloponnesus, the Aeolian emigrants who settled in the north-west of Asia Minor brought with them the warlike legends of their chiefs, the Achaean princes of old. These legends lived in the ballads of the Aeolic minstrels, and from them passed southward into Ionia, where the Ionian poets gradually shaped them into higher artistic forms. Among the seven places which claimed to be the birthplace of Homer, that which has the best title is Smyrna. Homer himself is called "son of Meles"--the stream which flowed through old Smyrna, on the border between Aeolia and Ionia. The tradition is significant in regard to the origin and character of the _Iliad_, for in the _Iliad_ we have Achaean ballads worked up by Ionian art. A preponderance of evidence is in favour of the view that the _Odyssey_ also, at least in its earliest form, was composed on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor. According to the Spartan account, Lycurgus was the first to bring to Greece a complete copy of the Homeric poems, which he had obtained from the Creophylidae, a clan or gild of poets in Samos. A better authenticated tradition connects Athens with early attempts to preserve the chief poetical treasure of the nation. Peisistratus is said to have charged some learned men with the task of collecting all "the poems of Homer"; but it is difficult to decide how much was comprehended under this last phrase, or whether the province of the commission went beyond the mere task of collecting. Nor can it be determined what exactly it was that Solon and Hipparchus respectively did for the Homeric poems. Solon, it has been thought, enacted that the poems should be recited from an authorized text ([Greek: ex hypoboles]); Hipparchus, that they should be recited in a regular order ([Greek: ex hypolepseos]). At any rate, we know that in the 6th century B.C. a recitation of the poems of Homer was one of the established competitions at the Panathenaea, held once in four years. The reciter was called a _rhapsodist_--properly one who weaves a long, smoothly-flowing chant, then an epic poet who chants his own or another's poem. The rhapsodist did not, like the early minstrel, use the accompaniment of the harp; he gave the verses in a flowing recitative, bearing in his hand a branch of