Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Proceedings, 1908, Vol. 6: With Rules and List of Members
In the dim records of the eighth century we can just trace the outlines of a life which was still pre-hellenic, but which held in it the germ Of Hellenism. The old kingdoms have mostly disappeared. Sybaris and Miletus are the two wealthiest and largest cities in the Greek world. Sparta and Athens are be coming important powers in Greece Proper. The afterglow of the mediaeval world, which had produced the age of the epic, had faded out; and on the eastern horizon appears, pale and clear, the dawn of a new day.
The earliest Of the Greek lyrists, in whom the voice Of Hellas first manifests itself, do not go back much beyond 700 BC Already by that time the memory of the Homeric poems had become faint and dispersed. The Iliad and Odyssey, like two great mountain peaks, had retreated and become hidden behind the foot-hills Of the Cycle. The new poetry, the poetry Of Hellas, rose independently of them, except in so far as it was a distinct reaction from them, and except in so far-as they. Had created a literary language which to a great extent remained that of the whole Greek world. The Greek genius had set itself to the two great creations which it introduced into the world and over which it spent its whole life - the creation Of the state and the creation Of the individual. The epic minstrels dwindled into court poets and became Obsolete. For all the lyrists of the seventh and the earlier half of the sixth century, Homer might not have existed we do not feel Homer in them.
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