GREEK LITERATURE.--The chief types, both of poetry and of prose, originated with the Greeks. Their writings are the fountainhead of the literature of Europe. They prized simplicity: they always had an intense disrelish for obscurity and bombast. The earliest poetry of the Greeks consisted of _hymns_ to the gods. It was _lyrical_, an outpouring of personal feeling. The lyrical type was followed by the _epic_, where heroic deeds, or other events of thrilling interest, are the theme of song, and the personal emotion of the bard is out of sight through his absorption in the subject. Description flows on, the narrator himself being in the background. This epic poetry culminates in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ (900-700 B.C.). Their verse is the hexameter. These poems move on in a swift current, yet without abruptness or monotony. They are marked by a simplicity and a nobleness, a refinement and a pathos, which have charmed all subsequent ages. _Homer_, far more than any other author, was the educator of the Greeks. There was a class called _Homeridae_, in _Chios_; but whether they were themselves poets, or reciters of Homer, or what else may have been their peculiar work, is not ascertained. There was, however, a class of _Cyclic_ poets, who took up the legends of Troy, and carried out farther the Homeric tales. _Hesiod_ was the founder of a more didactic sort of poetry. He is about a century later than the Iliad. Besides the _Theogony_, which treats of the origin of the gods and of nature, his _Works and Days_ relates to the works which a farmer has to do, and the lucky or unlucky days for doing them. It contains doctrines and precepts relative to agriculture, navigation, civil and family life. Hesiod was the first of a Boeotian school of poets. He lacks the poetic genius of Homer, and the vivacity and cheerfulness which pervade the Iliad and the Odyssey. CHAPTER II. THE FORMATION OF THE PRINCIPAL STATES.