362 HISTORY OF GREECE. The foremost and most general of all is, the expansive force of Grecian intellect itself, a quality in which this remarkable people stand distinguished from all their neighbors and contempo- raries. Most, if not all nations have had mythes, but no natiou except the Greeks have imparted to them immortal charm and universal interest ; and the same mental capacities, which raised the great men of the poetic age to this exalted level, also pushed forward their successors to outgrow the early faith in which the mythes had been generated and accredited. One great mark, as well as means, of such intellectual expan- sion, was the habit of attending to, recording, and combining, posi- tive and present facts, both domestic and foreign. In the genu- ine Grecian epic, the theme was an unknown and aoristic past ; but even as early as the "Works and Days of Hesiod, the present begins to figure : the man who tills the earth appears in his own solitary nakedness, apart from gods and heroes bound indeed by serious obligations to the gods, but contending against many difficulties which are not to be removed by simple reliance on their help. The poet denounces his age in the strongest terms as miserable, degraded and profligate, and looks back with reveren- tial envy to the extinct heroic races who fought at Troy and Thebes. Yet bad as the present time is, the Muse condescends to look at it along with him, and to prescribe rules for human life with the assurance that if a man be industrious, frugal, provi- dent, just and friendly in his dealings, the gods will recompense him with affluence and security. Nor does the Muse disdain, while holding out such promise, to cast herself into the most homely de- tails of present existence and to give advice thoroughly practical and calculating. Men whose minds were full of the heroes of Homer, called Hesiod in contempt the poet of the Helots ; and the contrast between the two is certainly a remarkable proof of the tendency of Greek poetry towards the present and the positive. Other manifestations of the same tendency become visible in the age of Archilochus (B. c. 680-660). In an age when metri- cal composition and the living voice are the only means whereby the productive minds of a community make themselves felt, the invention of a new metre, new forms of song and recitaticti, or
