training-book of educated Greeks—constituted a treasury of direct and animated expression, full of concrete forms, and rare in the use of abstractions, and thence better suited to the workings of oratory. The subsequent critics had no difficulty in selecting from the Iliad and Odyssey, samples of eloquence in all its phases and varieties. On the whole, then, the society depicted in the old Greek poems is loose and unsettled, presenting very little of legal restraint, and still less of legal protection,—but concentrating such political power as does exist in the hands of a legitimate hereditary king, whose ascendency over the other chiefs is more or less complete according to his personal force and character. Whether that ascendency be greater or less, however, the mass of the people is in either case politically passive and of little account. Though the Grecian freeman of the heroic age is above the degraded level of the Gallic _plebs_, as described by Cæsar,[127] he is far from rivalling the fierce independence and sense of dignity, combined with individual force, which characterize the Germanic tribes before their establishment in the Roman empire. Still less does his condition, or the society in which he moves, correspond to those pleasing dreams of spontaneous rectitude and innocence, in which Tacitus and Seneca indulge with regard to primitive man.[128] [127] Cæsar, Bell. Gallic. vi. 12. [128] Seneca, Epist. xc.; Tacitus. Annal. iii. 26. “Vetustissimi mortalium (says the latter), nullâ adhuc malâ libidine, sine probro, scelere, eoque sine pœnâ aut coërcitione, agebant: neque præmiis opus erat, cum honesta suopte ingenio peterentur; et ubi nihil contra morem cuperent, nihil per metum vetabantur. At postquam exui æqualitas, et pro modestiâ et pudore ambitio et vis incedebat, provenêre dominationes, multosque apud populos æternum mansere,” etc. Compare Strabo, vii. p. 301. These are the same fancies so eloquently set forth by Rousseau, in the last century. A far more sagacious criticism pervades the preface of Thucydidês.