These young, light-hearted masters were called Greeks, or Hellenes; they migrated southwards in a series of waves, the first of which contained two tribes known as the Achaians and Danaans. These were followed and overtaken at a later date by the Dorians, and subsequently again by the Attic Greeks. We still make use of some of the experiences undergone by these tribes, and of the characteristics which they developed, in order to express more exactly our own inner experiences. Through the channel of words and myths which have come down to us from that time, the great poet who sang to the Achaians and Danaans of the exploits of their ancestors has given us many metaphors and images—special little reservoirs of feeling which we could not have created for ourselves. Most people, for instance, like to be called _Trojans_; _stentorian_ and _pander_ are from the names of characters in his poems, and _nectar_ and _ambrosial_ from the food and drink consumed by his gods. Speech was a more miraculous and rhythmical thing to the Achaians than it is to us to-day, and whether or no the Gaelic _bard_ is cognate with the Greek ‘phrazein’, to ‘speak’, there is no doubt that ‘epos’, the ‘word’, had its other meaning of ‘poem’. Long afterwards the adjective ‘epikos’ came to be applied especially to lofty compositions such as those of the great poet himself. Accordingly, in the European war the special correspondent could often find no more vivid expression for his sense of the vastness and grandeur of the catastrophe he was recording than to call up by the word _epic_ vague memories of Homer’s gods and heroes. A single timid reference to ‘awful signs’,[6] together with the absence of any ordinary word for ‘writing’, suggests that Homer’s Achaians did not know how to write, and that his two long poems of twenty-four books each had to be memorized from beginning to end by that class of professional reciters from which our word _rhapsody_ is derived. The actual text of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ gives us a vivid and majestic picture of early, but not the earliest, Aryan culture. Of their author, in so far as there was one particular author, we know very little except that he was probably blind. It was the common thing for the bards who were to be found among all the Aryan races, and survived as ‘Minstrels’ into the Middle Ages, to be blind; and Homer’s own blindness, apart from a reference to it, has been deduced by some from a preponderance in his poems of “audile” epithets, such as the _clanging_ arrow and the _loud-sounding_ sea. It may be mentioned that the Slavs once called their bards ‘sliepac’, a word which also meant ‘blind’. The Dorians who followed soon divided into two main groups with their centres in Laconia and Attica respectively. The notorious taciturnity of the inhabitants of Laconia has given us _laconic_, and we are referring to their rigid ideas on infant welfare when we speak of a ‘_spartan_ mother’, for Sparta was the capital of Laconia.