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Indeed we are even told that "Many men must have served as authors and improvers." The mob of reciters improved the great epic of Homer! Scarcely less brilliant is the suggestion of another higher critic that, "Homer's Iliad was not composed by Homer, but by another man of the same name"!
Transmitted for hundreds of years by trained schools of reciters, it was during a synod that occurred in the first quarter of the first century before Christ that, finally, they were written. In them it is recited that Mâyâ, the mother of Gotama, was immaculate. According to St. Matthew, Maria, the mother of Jesus, was also. Previously, in each instance, the coming of a Messiah had been foretold.
It has been included in the programmes of reciters from the Murrumbidgee to the Vaal, from John O'Groat's to Land's End, and is now being published as a separate volume in England and America. It has been dramatised several times, and is more alive to-day than it was when it was published nearly twenty years ago. Almost the same may be said of The Three Commandments in the Vulgar Tongue.
For beholding him who had gone through the rite of initiation for the observance of his great vow, there came to that place Narada and Parvata, and the Island-born Krishna, and Dhaumya, that foremost of silent reciters, and Devala, and Kasyapa, and Hastikasyapa.
Sandip's face flushed instantly. "I have heard," I continued, "that our professional reciters keep a book full of all kinds of ready-made discourses, which can be fitted into any subject. Have you also a book?" Sandip ground out his reply through his teeth.
I also concluded that the ballad had never been printed, otherwise I would most probably have found it; but some copies in writing had evidently been made and it had become a favourite composition with the reciters at festive gatherings, but had now gone out and was hopelessly lost.
If, on the other hand, reciters had books of the words, they could interpolate at pleasure into them, and such books may have been among the materials used in the construction of a text for the Athenian book market.
One couplet alone shall be here quoted, portraying as it does in graphic phrase the national suspense during those weeks of prolonged crisis when telegram after telegram continued to pour monotonous negation on the hopes of an expectant people "Swift o'er the wires the electric message came, He is no better: he is much the same!" Even amateur reciters could make an effect out of lines like that.
The Iliad and the Odyssey were not read by individuals in private, but were sung or recited at festivals or to assembled companies. The bard originally sung his own lays to the accompaniment of his lyre. He was succeeded by a body of professional reciters, called Rhapsodists, who rehearsed the poems of others, and who appear at early times to have had exclusive possession of the Homeric poems.
Those Brahmanas that are, by profession, vocalists, or dancers or players or instrumental musicians, or reciters of sacred books, or warriors and athletes, do not, O king, deserve to be invited. Those Brahmanas who pour libations on the sacred fire for Sudras, or who are preceptors of Sudras, or who are servants of Sudra masters, do not deserve to be invited.
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