In the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ the personal opinions or sympathies of the poet may sometimes be conjectured, but they are not declared or even hinted. Hesiod, indeed, sometimes gives us a glimpse of his own troubles or views. Yet Hesiod is, on the whole, essentially a prophet. The message which he delivers is not from himself; the truths which he imparts have not been discovered by his own search. He is the mouthpiece of the Delphian Apollo. Personal opinion and feeling may tinge his utterance, but they do not determine its general complexion. The egotism is a single thread; it is not the basis of the texture. Epic poetry was in Greece the foundation of all other poetry; for many centuries no other kind was generally cultivated, no other could speak to the whole people. Politically, the age was monarchical or aristocratic; intellectually, it was too simple for the analysis of thought or emotion. Kings and princes loved to hear of the great deeds of their ancestors; common men loved to hear of them too, for they had no other interest. The mind of Greece found no subject of contemplation so attractive as the warlike past of the race, or so useful as that lore which experience and tradition had bequeathed. But in the course of the 8th century B.C. the rule of hereditary princes began to disappear. Monarchy gave place to oligarchy, and this--often after the intermediate phase of a tyrannis--to democracy. Such a change was necessarily favourable to the growth of reflection. The private citizen is no longer a mere cipher, the Homeric [Greek: tis], a unit in the dim multitude of the king-ruled folk; he gains more power of independent action, his mental horizon is widened, his life becomes fuller and more interesting. He begins to feel the need of expressing the thoughts and feelings that are stirred in him. But as yet a prose literature does not exist; the new thoughts, like the old heroic stories, must still be told in verse. The forms of verse created by this need were the Elegiac and the Iambic. Elegy.