The early Greek epic—that is, poetry as a natural and popular, and not
(as it became later) an artificial and academic literary form—passed
through the usual three phases, of development, of maturity, and of
decline.
No fragments which can be identified as belonging to the first period
survive to give us even a general idea of the history of the earliest
epic, and we are therefore thrown back upon the evidence of analogy
from other forms of literature and of inference from the two great
epics which have come down to us. So reconstructed, the earliest period
appears to us as a time of slow development in which the characteristic
epic metre, diction, and structure grew up slowly from crude elements
and were improved until the verge of maturity was reached.
The second period, which produced the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, needs
no description here: but it is very important to observe the effect of
these poems on the course of post-Homeric epic. As the supreme
perfection and universality of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ cast into
oblivion whatever pre-Homeric poets had essayed, so these same
qualities exercised a paralysing influence over the successors of
Homer. If they continued to sing like their great predecessor of
romantic themes, they were drawn as by a kind of magnetic attraction
into the Homeric style and manner of treatment, and became mere echoes
of the Homeric voice: in a word, Homer had so completely exhausted the
epic _genre_, that after him further efforts were doomed to be merely
conventional. Only the rare and exceptional genius of Vergil and Milton
could use the Homeric medium without loss of individuality: and this
quality none of the later epic poets seem to have possessed. Freedom
from the domination of the great tradition could only be found by
seeking new subjects, and such freedom was really only illusionary,
since romantic subjects alone are suitable for epic treatment.
In its third period, therefore, epic poetry shows two divergent
tendencies. In Ionia and the islands the epic poets followed the
Homeric tradition, singing of romantic subjects in the now stereotyped
heroic style, and showing originality only in their choice of legends
hitherto neglected or summarily and imperfectly treated. In continental
Greece 1101, on the other hand, but especially in Boeotia, a new form
of epic sprang up, which for the romance and PATHOS of the Ionian
School substituted the practical and matter-of-fact. It dealt in moral
and practical maxims, in information on technical subjects which are of
service in daily life—agriculture, astronomy, augury, and the
calendar—in matters of religion and in tracing the genealogies of men.
Its attitude is summed up in the words of the Muses to the writer of
the _Theogony_: ‘We can tell many a feigned tale to look like truth,
but we can, when we will, utter the truth’ (_Theogony_ 26-27). Such a
poetry could not be permanently successful, because the subjects of
which it treats—if susceptible of poetic treatment at all—were
certainly not suited for epic treatment, where unity of action which
will sustain interest, and to which each part should contribute, is
absolutely necessary. While, therefore, an epic like the _Odyssey_ is
an organism and dramatic in structure, a work such as the _Theogony_ is
a merely artificial collocation of facts, and, at best, a pageant. It
is not surprising, therefore, to find that from the first the Boeotian
school is forced to season its matter with romantic episodes, and that
later it tends more and more to revert (as in the _Shield of Heracles_)
to the Homeric tradition.