But it is now the opinion of many scholars that the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, as they stand today, are not, either of them, the creation of a single poet. They are believed to be mosaics; that is, to be built up out of the fragments of an extensive ballad literature that grew up in an age preceding the Homeric. The "Wrath of Achilles," which forms the nucleus of the _Iliad_ as we have it, may, with very great probability, be ascribed to Homer, whom we may believe to have been the most prominent of a brotherhood of bards who flourished about 850 or 750 B.C.
THE HESIODIC POEMS.--Hesiod, who lived a century or more after the age that gave birth to the Homeric poems, was the poet of nature and of real life, especially of peasant life, in the dim transition age of Hellas. The Homeric bards sing of the deeds of heroes, and of a far-away time when gods mingled with men. Hesiod sings of common men, and of every-day, present duties. His greatest poem, a didactic epic, is entitled _Works and Days_. This is, in the main, a sort of farmers' calendar, in which the poet points out to the husbandman the lucky and unlucky days for doing certain kinds of work, eulogizes industry, and intersperses among all his practical lines homely maxims of morality and beautiful descriptive passages of the changing seasons.
LYRIC POETRY: PINDAR.--The Æolian island of Lesbos was the hearth and home of the earlier lyric poets. Among the earliest of the Lesbian singers was the poetess Sappho, whom the Greeks exalted to a place next to Homer. Plato calls her the Tenth Muse. Although her fame endures, her poetry, except some mere fragments, has perished.
Anacreon was a courtier at the time of the Greek tyrannies. He was a native of Ionia, but passed much of his time at the court of Polycrates of Samos. He seems to have enjoyed to the full the gay and easy life of a courtier, and sung so voluptuously of love and wine and festivity that the term "Anacreontic" has come to be used to characterize all poetry over- redolent of these themes.
But the greatest of the Greek lyric poets, and perhaps the greatest of all lyric poets of every age and race, was Pindar (about 522-443 B.C.). He was born at Thebes, but spent most of his time in the cities of Magna Græcia. Such was the reverence in which his memory was held that when Alexander, one hundred years after Pindar's time, levelled the city of Thebes to the ground on account of a revolt, the house of the poet was spared, and left standing amid the general ruin (see p. 161). The greater number of Pindar's poems were inspired by the scenes of the national festivals. They describe in lofty strains the splendors of the Olympian chariot-races, or the glory of the victors at the Isthmian, the Nemean, or the Pythian games.