"Who passes thee in artifice well-framed; And in impostures various, need shall find Of all his policy, although a god. Canst thou not cease, inventive as thou art And subtle, from the wiles which thou hast loved Since thou wast infant, and from tricks of speech Delusive, even in thy native land? But come; dismiss we these ingenious shifts From our discourse, in which we both excel; For thou of all men in expedients most Abound'st and eloquence, and I throughout All heaven have praise for wisdom and for art." --COWPER'S Trans. To the foregoing it may be added that "Zeus deceives both gods and men; the other gods deceive Zeus; in fact, the whole Homeric society is full of guile and falsehood. There is still, however, an expectation that if the gods are called to witness a transaction by means of an oath, they will punish deceit. The poets clearly held that the gods, if they were under no restraint or fear of punishment from Zeus, were at liberty to deceive as they liked. One safeguard yet remained--the oath by the Styx, [Footnote: see the index at the end of the volume.] the penalties of violating which are enumerated in Hesiod's Theogony, and consist of nine years' transportation, with solitary confinement and hard labor. As for oaths, the Hymn to Hermes shows that in succeeding generations their solemnity was openly ridiculed. Among the Homeric gods, as well as among the heroes, there were, indeed, old-fashioned characters who adhered to probity. The character of Apollo is unstained by deceit. So is that of Menelaus." The Greeks in the Heroic Age were divided into the three classes --nobles, freemen, and slaves. Of the first we have already spoken. The condition of the freemen it is difficult to fully ascertain; but the majority possessed portions of land which they cultivated. There was another class of freemen who possessed no property, and who worked for hire on the property of others. "Among the freemen," says one writer, "we find certain professional persons whose acquirements and knowledge raised them above their class, and procured for them the respect and society of the nobles. Such were the seer, the bard, the herald, and likewise the smith and the carpenter." The slaves were owned by the nobles alone, and were treated with far more kindness and consideration than were the slaves of republican Greece.