The early epics were as a rule much too long to be recited within the limits of a single evening, and they must therefore have been continued from banquet to banquet. The authors have apparently kept this necessity in mind, and have provided for it by dividing their narratives into clearly defined episodes, at the close of which the reciters could leave their audiences with some such word as that given at the close of a weekly installment in the “penny dreadful”—“to be continued in our next.”
As the practice was introduced of entertaining larger audiences in the open air with the recital of the Homeric and other epics, a class of professional reciters arose, known as Rhapsodists, who declaimed in a theatrical manner, with much gesture and varying inflection of the voice. The term rhapsody is believed by Jevons to be derived from ῥάπτω, to sew or stitch together. He quotes a line from Pindar, Ὁμηρίαι ῥάπτων επέων ἀοιδοί, “sons of Homer, singers of stitched verses.” Words are metaphorically said to be stitched together into verses, and the word ῥαχ-ῳδός Jevons derives from ῥάπτω, to stitch, and ἀοιδός, a singer.[26]
These rhapsodists travelled from place to place to compete for the prizes offered by the different cities, and while the national poems (carried in their memories) were probably common to all, each reciter doubtless had his own special method of declaiming these. This practice helps to account for the transmission and for the diffusion of the earlier epics. The rhapsodists may, therefore, be said to have served in a sense as the publishers of the period. The derivation of the word comedy throws some light on the literary customs of the time. It means literally “a song of the village,” from κώμη, a village, and ἀείδω, I sing.
The purposes of Greek writers were either political or purely ideal. The possibility of earning money by means of authorship seems hardly ever to have occurred to them, and this freedom from any commercial motive for their work was doubtless an important cause for the high respect accorded in Greece to its authors. In the time of Plato, the Sophists, who prepared speeches and gave instruction for gain, were subject to more or less criticism on this account—a criticism which Plato himself seems to have initiated.[27]
At the threshold of Greek literature stands the majestic figure of Homer; and to Pisistratus, the Tyrant of Athens, is to be credited the inestimable service of securing the preservation of the Homeric poems in the form in which they have been handed down to posterity. The task of compiling or of editing the material was confided to four men, whose names, as predecessors of a long list of Homeric editors, deserve to be recorded: Conchylus, Onomacritus, Zopyrus, and Orpheus, and the work was completed about 550 B.C.[28]
Another creditable literary undertaking of Pisistratus was the collection of the poems of Hesiod, which was confided to the Milesian Cecrops. We have the testimony of Plutarch that by these means the Tyrant did not a little towards gaining or regaining the favor of the Athenians, which speaks well for the early interest of the city in literature. There are no details on record as to the means by which these first literary products were placed at the service of the community, but there can be no question that the service rendered by the Tyrant and the editors selected by him, consisted simply in providing an authoritative text, from which any who wished might transcribe such number of copies as they desired. This Pisistratus edition of the Homeric books is said to have served as the standard text for the copyists and for Homeric students not only in Greece but later in Alexandria, and is, therefore, the basis of the Homeric literature that has come down to modern days.
Prof. Mahaffy remarks that the writings of Hesiod differed from those of the other early Greek authors in being addressed, not to “the powers that were,” but to the common people.[29] Referring to the style of Hesiod’s works, Simcox says, rather naïvely, “Hesiod would certainly have written in prose, if prose had then existed.” Works and Days (the only one of Hesiod’s poems which the later Greek commentators accept as certainly genuine) consists of ethical and economic precepts, written in a homely and unimaginative style, and setting forth the indisputable doctrine that labor is the only road to prosperity. Mahaffy is my authority for the statement that Hesiod’s poems came into use “at an early period as a favorite handbook of education.”[30]
I wish this brilliant student of Greek life had given us some clue as to the methods by which copies of this literature were multiplied and brought into the hands of the country people and common people to whom it was more particularly addressed. The difficulty of circulating books among this class of readers must have been very much greater than that of reaching the scholarly circles of the cities.
While it was a long time before authors were to be in a position to secure any compensation from those who derived pleasure from their productions, they began at an early date (as in the case before mentioned of Theognis) to raise questions with each other on the score of plagiarisms, and to be jealous of retaining undisturbed the full literary prestige to which they might be entitled.
Clement remarks that “an enlightened public opinion helped to defend Greek authors against the borrowing of literary thieves, by stigmatizing plagiarism as a crime, and by expressing for a writer detected in appropriating the work of another a well merited contempt instead of the approbation for which he had hoped.”[31] It seems probable, however, that this is too favorable a view to take as to the effectiveness of public opinion in preserving among Greek writers a spirit of exact conscientiousness, as the complaints in the literature of the time concerning unauthorized and uncredited “borrowings” are numerous and bitter.