The age of recitations from a text in princely halls was ending or ended; the age of a reading public was begun. The earlier condition of the _jongleur_ who was his own poet, and carefully guarded his copyright in spite of all temptations to permit the copying of his MS., is regarded by Sir Richard Jebb as quite a possible feature of early Greece. He thinks that there was "no wide circulation of writings by numerous copies for a reading public" before the end of the fifth century B.C. As Greek mercenaries could write, and write well, in the seventh to sixth centuries, I incline to think that there may then, and earlier, have been a reading public. However, long before that a man might commit his poems to writing. "Wolf allows that some men did, as early at least as 776 B.C. The verses might never be read by anybody except himself" (the author) "or those to whom he privately bequeathed them" (as Jendeus de Brie bequeathed his poem to his son), "but his end would have been gained." [Footnote: _Homer_, p. 113.] Recent discoveries as to the very early date of linear non-Phoenician writing in Crete of course increase the probability of this opinion, which is corroborated by the story of the _Cypria_, given as a dowry with the author's daughter. Thus "the particular conditions under which the Homeric poems appeared" "been reproduced with sufficient closeness" in every respect, with surprising closeness, in the France of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. The social conditions are the same; the legendary materials are of identical character; the method of publication by recitation is identical; the cyclic decadence occurs in both cases, the _monomanie cyclique_. In the Greece of Homer we have the four necessary conditions of the epic, as found by M. Leon Gautier in mediaeval France. We have:-- (1) An uncritical age confusing history by legend. (2) We have a national _milieu_ with religious uniformity. (3) We have poems dealing with-- "Old unhappy far-off things And battles long ago." (4) We have representative heroes, the Over-Lord, and his peers or paladins. [Footnote: _Epopees Francaises_, Leon Gautier, vol. i. pp. 6-9] It may be added that in Greece, as in France, some poets adapt into the adventures of their heroes world-old _Maerchen_, as in the Odyssey, and in the cycle of the parents of Charles. In the French, as in the Greek epics, we have such early traits of poetry as the textual repetition of speeches, and the recurring epithets, "swift-footed Achilles," "Charles of the white beard," "blameless heroes" (however blamable). Ladies, however old, are always "of the clear face." Thus the technical manners of the French and Greek epics are closely parallel; they only differ in the exquisite art of Homer, to which no approach is made by the French poets.