of the coasts, lasted as long as the ancient world. The Greek comedy, and after it Roman comedy, made of this carrying off the most ordinary source of their intrigues. But if servitude was already rooted in Greek civilisation, it was at least then singularly softened by the simplicity of the customs, and above all by the rural and agricultural life, which brought together in common works master and slave. Poetry was already a fashion in these rising societies, and in the middle of these hard wars the pleasures of the mind had their place. The warriors, seated in circles, listened with an eagerness, full of patience, to the interminable recitals of the _ædes_ or singers. Competitions of music and religious poetry are already instituted in the small towns, which call the rising art to their ceremonies. These poetries were sung with the accompaniment of the lyre, and there was no king who had not his singer. Agamemnon treated his with honour, and in leaving, entrusted to him his wife and his treasures. This religious and heroic poetry preceded Homer, who found established rules and fixed types. As to the beauty of this primitive poetry, it must be judged by the immortal creations of its most illustrious representative. Certainly there were not many Homers, but he was not the only poet, and the imposing simplicity of his poetry could not be a unique fact in this age of chanted legends. Art and sciences were in infancy, but the curiosity and admiration that the poets testify for the still imperfect work of the artists, and for the fabulous tales of travellers, remind us that we see at its beginning the most industrious and the most inventive race of antiquity.[i] FOOTNOTES [6] [This estimate must not be taken too literally. The “Heroic Age” is more a racial memory than a chronological epoch.] [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER IV. THE TRANSITION TO SECURE HISTORY BELOCH’S VIEW OF THE CONVENTIONAL PRIMITIVE HISTORY[7] [Sidenote: [_ca._ 1200-800 B.C.]] The singers of the epic poems as well as their hearers were as yet wholly unconscious of the gap separating mythology from history. To them the Trojan War, the march of the Seven against Thebes, the wanderings of Ulysses and Menelaus, were historical realities and they believed just as firmly that Achilles, Diomedes, Agamemnon, and all the other heroes once really lived, as the Swiss until recently believed in the reality of their Tell and Winkelried. Indeed until the fourth century hardly any one in Greece dared to question the truth of these things. Even so critical a person as Thucydides is still wholly under the influence of epic tradition, so much so that he gives a statistical report of the strength of Agamemnon’s army and tries to answer the question as to how such masses of people could have been supported during the ten years’ siege of Troy.