At that time there was no writing, and when first the art of writing crept into Europe, as we shall tell later, it must have seemed far too slow, clumsy, and lifeless a method of record for men to trouble very much about writing down these glowing and beautiful treasures of the memory. Writing was at first kept for accounts and matters of fact. The bards and rhapsodists flourished for long after the introduction of writing. They survived, indeed, in Europe as the minstrels into the Middle Ages. Unhappily their tradition had not the fixity of a written record. They amended and reconstructed, they had their fashions and their phases of negligence. Accordingly we have now only the very much altered and revised vestiges of that spoken literature of prehistoric times. One of the most interesting and informing of these prehistoric compositions of the Aryans survives in the Greek _Iliad_. An early form of _Iliad_ was probably recited by 1000 B.C., but it was not written down until perhaps 700 or 600 B.C. Many men must have had to do with it as authors and improvers, but later Greek tradition attributed it to a blind bard named Homer, to whom also is ascribed the _Odyssey_, a composition of a very different spirit and outlook. To be a bard was naturally a blind man’s occupation.[94] The Slavs called all bards _sliepac_, which was also their word for a blind man. The original recited version of the _Iliad_ was older than that of the _Odyssey_. “The _Iliad_ as a complete poem is older than the _Odyssey_, though the material of the _Odyssey_, being largely undatable folk-lore, is older than any of the historical material in the _Iliad_.”[95] Both epics were probably written over and rewritten by some poet of a later date, in much the same manner that Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate of Queen Victoria, in his _Idylls of the King_, wrote over the _Morte d’Arthur_ (which was itself a writing over by Sir Thomas Malory, _circ._ 1450, of pre-existing legends), making the speeches and sentiments and the characters more in accordance with those of his own time. But the events of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, the way of living they describe, the spirit of the acts recorded, belong to the closing centuries of the prehistoric age. These sagas, epics, and vedas do supply, in addition to archæology and philology, a third source of information about those vanished times. Here, for example, is the concluding passage of the _Iliad_, describing very exactly the making of a prehistoric barrow. (We have taken here Chapman’s rhymed translation, correcting certain words with the help of the prose version of Lang, Leaf, and Myers.)