Homer was the encyclopædia of civilization in his time. He fertilized antiquity to such an overflowing extent, that all the parent geniuses were recognized as his children, and the richest harvests ever garnered, were accredited to the seed he had sown. The epic of his creation, mirrored traditionary history in transparent song. The minute was depicted, the grand illuminated, and all the glorious world of heroic character and romantic scenery moved past the spectator in serene dignity and poetic splendor. The highest utterance was requisite to embody the intensest conceptions, and the Ionic dialect was exactly fitted to both. Language is the individual existence of a national spirit, the external reason, as reason is the internal speech; and the purest of idioms sprang perfected from the lips of Homer, as Minerva came completely armed from the brow of Jove. The hexameter therein assumed the freest and most forcible movement possible within the limits of law, and thenceforth epic composition ever remained Ionic in language, measure, and melody. Looking back upon the succeeding age, and its grateful enthusiasm, we need not wonder that a tyrant lived in the affection, and died under the benediction of Greece, for collecting the works of Homer in a volume, and his ashes in an urn. The epic and cyclic poets were followed by lyrical writers, and the dramatists of Athens, who flourished cotemporaneously with all that is most admirable in the kindred productions of music, painting, sculpture, architecture, philosophy, and the civil forms of democratic life. Orpheus, Linus, Musæus, and others, the earliest poets of Greece, but of whom little is known, indicate the existence of a mass of poetic material extremely antique, which began to be reduced to writing as soon as the Dorians emerged from barbarism and the ignoble pursuits of war. When they awoke to national consciousness, they found themselves surrounded by an enchanted land, teeming everywhere with the fascination of heroic deeds done by heroic men, and the Cadmean Hesiod arose to garner the rich harvest in his immortal songs. Subjected to the outer world, and attracted by all that was novel, beautiful, or sublime, the people listened to tales of deified heroes, whose devotion and wanderings filled a preceding age with renown, and their own bosoms with delight. It was thus that popular legends assumed by degrees an epic dignity, or by more flexile art were perfected into the beauty of festive airs. But into whatever mold the golden current was cast, the narrative remained clear, impassioned, varied, minute, as the taste of the age and eagerness of listening multitudes required. Thus Homer and Hesiod were as truly legislators and founders of national polity, as Moses and Zoroaster had been in their respective spheres.