Incredible as the statement may seem in an age like the present, there is in all early societies, and there was in early Greece, a time when no such reading class existed.

If we could discover at what time such a class first began to be formed, we should be able to make a guess at the time when the old epic poems were first committed to writing.

Now the period which may with the greatest probability be fixed upon as having first witnessed the formation even of the narrowest reading class in Greece, is the middle of the seventh century before the Christian aera (B.C.660 to B.C.

630), the age of Terpander, Kallinus, Archilochus, Simonides of Amorgus, &c.

I ground this supposition on the change then operated in the character and tendencies of Grecian poetry and music--the elegiac and the iambic measures having been introduced as rivals to the primitive hexameter, and poetical compositions having been transferred from the epical past to the affairs of present and real life.