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HOMEU, THE EPIC POETS. 77other,; and this appears to have been the first change, whichwas effected, though without design, by Homer. But wemay find, in the gradual progress of the cities, and the modesof living in them, a chief cause of a change in the rhapsodists,which could not be very advantageous for them. Inthese cities, there may have been houses of the opulent, andpublic halls, 1 in which they could recite ;but they foundno longer the dwellings of heroes and kings.Little confidence as we may place in the life of Homer attributed toHerodotus, and several other writingsit is still ;remarkable,that all unite in describing the fortunes of the poet duringhis lifetime, as by no means splendid. But his songs continued to live, and, probably in the very first century afterthe poet, were carried by Lycurgus into the Peloponnesus ;and from the same school, other epic poets also started up,whose works have been overwhelmed by the stream of time. 2A happy accident has preserved for us the general contentsof a few of them; 3but, though these accounts are meagre,we maystillinfer from them, that even among the ancients,they were chiefly of interest to the professed student of literature, and that they never gained any claim to be callednational poems. But the works of these, and somanyothers, of whom we know only the names, show how gener-1The Xfio^m.We are almost involuntarily reminded of similar appearances,which marked the decline of the poetry of chivalry, in the age of those whomwe commonly call onr master singers. The inquiry might be made, whetherthe relations of city life had an equal influence on the school or fraternity ofrhapsodists, who separated themselves still more observably from the rest ofsociety ?2The Cyclic poets, as they are called, who treated subjects of mythologicaltradition, or the cyclus of traditions the respecting Trojan expedition. Seeon this subject, Excurs. i.ad JSneicl. L. ii. ed. Heynii.8 In the selections of Proclus, in Bibl. d. alten Litt. und Kunst St. 1 Inedita,p. 1, etc. These are,-!. The Cyprian poem, probably by Stasinus ofCyprus. It contained, in eleven books, the earlier events of the Trojan warbefore the action of the Iliad. 2. The .ZEthiopis of Arctinus the Melesian; containing, in five books, the expedition and death of Memnon. 3. The smallIliad of Lesches of Mitylene ; embracing, in four books, the contention ofAjax and Ulysses, till the preparation of the Trojan horse. 4. The destruction of Troy ('iXlou mpfftQ) of Arctinus, in two books. 5. The return of theheroes (VOOTQI) of Augias, in five books, 6. The Telegoniad, or fates ofUlysses after his return, by Eugammon,in two books. The contents of thesepoems, as here given, show, that no one of them can be compared, in point ofplan, with the epopees of Homer. But these poems must also for a long timehave been preserved by song alone j for their authors, although somewhatyounger than Homer, still lived in times, when, according to all that weknow, letters were but litte used, or perhaps entirely unknown,