it that Greece first obtained a religious code, which, although without external sanction or priestly guardians and interpreters, must have produced the greatest influence on the religious condition of the Greeks. 5. ELEGY AND EPIGRAM.--Until the beginning of the seventh century B.C., the epic was the only kind of poetry cultivated in Greece, with the exception of the early songs and hymns, and the hexameter the only metre used by the poets. This exclusive prevalence of epic poetry was doubtless connected with the political state of the country. The ordinary subjects of these poems must have been highly acceptable to the princes who derived their race from the heroes, as was the case with all the royal families of early times. The republican movements, which deprived these families of their privileges, were favorable to the stronger development of each man's individuality, and the poet, who in the most perfect form of the epos was completely lost in his subject, now came before the people as a man with thoughts and objects of his own, and gave free vent to the emotions of his soul in elegiac and iambic strains. The word _elegeion_ means nothing more than the combination of a hexameter and a pentameter, making together a distich, and an elegy is a poem of such verses. It was usually sung at the Symposia or literary festivals of the Greeks; in most cases its main subject was political; it afterwards assumed a plaintive or amatory tone. The elegy is the first regularly cultivated branch of Greek poetry, in which the flute alone and neither the cithara nor lyre was employed. It was not necessary that lamentations should form the subject of it, but emotion was essential, and excited by events or circumstances of the time or place the poet poured forth his heart in the unreserved expression of his fears and hopes.