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74 ANCIENT GREECE. [CHAP, vr.We find it still more difficult to comprehend how worksof this extent could have been planned and executed withoutthe aid of letters, and preserved, probably for a long time,till they were finally saved from perishing by being committed to writing. We will not here repeat at large, whathas already been said by others that a class of;singers, devoted exclusively to this business, could easily preserve inmemory much more ;that the poems were recited in parts,and therefore needed to be remembered only in parts ;andthat even in a later age, when the Homeric poems had already been intrusted to writing, the rhapsodiststhem so perfectly, (aswe must infer from the Ion of Plato,)that they could readily recite any passage which was desired.still knewBut let us be permitted to call to mind a fact, which hascome to light since the modern inquiries respecting Homer,extent thanand which proves, that poems of even greaterthe Iliad and the Odyssey can live in the memorymouths andof a nation. The Dschangariade of the Calmucks issaid to surpass the poems of Homer in length, as much asit stands beneath them in merit; 1 and yetit exists only inthe memory of a people, which is not unacquainted withwriting. But the songs of a nation are probably the lastthings which are committed to writing, for the very reasonthat they are remembered.But whatever opinions may be entertained on the originof these poems, and whether we ascribe them to one authoror to several, it will hardly be doubted that they all belong,on the whole, to one age, which we call, in a larger sense,'days, at Olympia. The Iliad and Odyssey, which when free from interpolations were perhaps much shorter than they now are, may have been recitedin toe course of several days. And if we may be permitted to indulge inconjecture, why may they not have been designed for such occasions Pthe brreeks were accustomed Thatto intellectual enjoyments, interrupted and afterwards continued, appears from the Tetralogies of the Dramatists in a later atreI his is characteristic of a nation, which even in its pleasures desired something more than pastime, and always aimed at grandeur and beautySee on this subject B. Bergmann, Nomadische, Streifereyen inter denCB* * !% ? % CtC- Calnmck Homer flourished l inTthe lastbut thisS5S V s Said t0 *?? Su^f l hree hundred and 8ixt 7 ca*tos ; but thisSS^fSS 7 exaggerated. 0?the singers, called Dschangartschi, it is noteasy to find one, who knows more than twenty by heart. In the fourth par