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Updated: June 24, 2025
Greek Literature and its Divisions. 2. The Language. 3. The Religion. Ante-Homeric Songs and Bards. 2. Poems of Homer; the Iliad; the Odyssey. 3. The Cyclic Poets and the Homeric Hymns. 4. Poems of Hesiod; the Works and Days; the Theogony. 5. Elegy and Epigram; Tyrtaeus; Archilochus; Simonides. 6. Iambic Poetry, the Fable, and Parody; Aesop. 7. Greek Music and Lyric Poetry; Terpander. 8.
Was it last week we were talking of the endless need of the ages: a stronghold of the Gods to be established in this world, whence they might conduct their cyclic raidings? What had Pythagoras tried to do in his day? Found a Center of Learning in the West, in which the Laws of Life, physical, mental, moral, and spiritual, should be taught.
By his theory these poems were being added to and altered, even in their oldest portions, at the very period when strange fresh, or old and newly revived fancies were flourishing. If so, how were the Iliad and Odyssey, unlike the Cyclic poems, kept uncontaminated, as they confessedly were, by the new romantic ideas? Here is the real difficulty.
The dynasty, as thus re-established by Kwang-wuti, is known as that of the Eastern Hans; for this reason: just as late in the days of the Roman empire, Diocletian was stirred by cyclic flowing east-ward to move his capital from Rome to Nicomedia, Constantine changed it afterwards to Byzantium, so was Han Kwang-wuti to move his from Changan in Shensi, in the west, eastward to Loyang or Honanfu, the old Chow capital, in Honan.
In an uncritical age poets could not discern that their genre of romance and religion was alien from that of Homer. To return to the puzzle about the careful and precise continuators of the Iliad, as contrasted with their heedless contemporaries, the authors of the Cyclic poems.
As for form, you must not expect it from a man who declares: "I decide my form during composition only through feeling." Every chord is the outcome of an emotion, the emotion aroused by the poem or idea which gives birth to the composition. Such antique things as the cyclic form or community of themes are not to be expected in Schoenberg's bright lexicon of anarchy.
Certainly there were Buddhists in India long after this time: even a great Buddhist king in the seventh century: but it seems more than probably that the spirit of intolerance went east with the eastward cyclic flow we have noted this evening: from Christianity to Zoroastrianism: from Zoroastrianism under the Sassanids to Brahminism under the Guptas.
The cyclic forces, outworn and old, produced after that no order that you can go upon: events followed each other higgledipiggledy and inertly; but it was the Illyrian legions that put him on the throne.
The social conditions are the same; the legendary materials are of identical character; the method of publication by recitation is identical; the cyclic decadence occurs in both cases, the monomanie cyclique. In the Greece of Homer we have the four necessary conditions of the epic, as found by M. Leon Gautier in mediaeval France. We have: An uncritical age confusing history by legend.
This cyclic movement seems to be almost a natural law of the development of great social groups. It was apparently well marked in the very stable and orderly growth of Babylonia.
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