The most obvious quality of Greek literature is its form, the high level of its technique. There are exceptions: the earlier plays of Aeschylus are crude in conception, the prose of Gorgias is as fantastic as that of Lyly, the sentences of Thucydides are often awkward and ungrammatical; Aeschylus stands at the origin of drama, Gorgias and Thucydides are the creators of periodic prose, and they have the weaknesses of pioneers. But in general, Greek work in poetry and prose is highly wrought and finely finished; and so rapidly did their art find itself, that within the lifetime of Aeschylus Sophocles reached the highest level of dramatic and literary technique, and within a generation from Thucydides Plato evolved his unequalled style. An artistic instinct was in the blood of the Greeks, and betrays itself throughout their literature, in the choric odes with their complicated respondencies and subtle variations; in Plato arranging and rearranging the first eight words of his _Republic_; in the interest which the Greeks took in the theory of literary art, seeking here as elsewhere λογον διδοναι {logon didonai}, to give an account of their practice. How much more they reflected on it than we do, the _Rhetoric_ of Aristotle, the _De Compositione_ of Dionysius and the endless writings of the rhetoricians show. This is universally admitted, but justice is more rarely done to even clearer evidence of the Greek gift for technique. Other nations have understood the art of writing, and left those monuments in words which are as unsubstantial and fleeting as air, yet more imperishable than brass or stone; but no nation has created literary art in the sense in which the Greeks created it, or developed, as they did, the various literary _genres_ out of nothing. They had no models or guides or external help. Rome had Greek literature to follow and herself gave patterns to her successors; but the Greeks made what they made out of nothing, and are thus creators in the true sense of the word, and as no other people have been. Two instances, Homer and the Greek Drama, will serve to show this. In the dawn of a literature at least, we expect roughness and crudity, an uncertain judgement and a faltering hand; but the first known Greek poem, like Athena in the myth, is born full grown and mature. Yet its makers made the story and the rich language and the elaborate and unrivalled metre for themselves. It does not lessen this achievement that the Homeric poems may have been the fine flower of a period of poetic growth; the work that went to form them was done by Greeks. But it needs imagination to appreciate the difficulty of the task which they undertook unconsciously and performed without theory or deliberate purpose by the mere light of nature. It is hard to create even a primitive poetic vocabulary, where one does not exist, and there is nothing primitive about ὁι δ' ὡς τ' αιγυπιοι γαμψωνυχες αγκυλοχειλαι πετρη εφ' ὑψηλη μεγαλα κλαζοντε μαχωνται,