Yet even the city in which these episodes took place has vanished from the face of the earth.
In the case of the studies of peasant life, there is also value of another kind.

Here we have not only studies of human nature, but studies of particular social conditions.

The quarrels of peasants, half good natured and nearly always happily ending; their account of their sorrows; their gossip about their work in the fields--all this might happen almost anywhere and at almost any time.

But the song contest, the prize given for the best composition upon a chosen subject, this is particularly Greek, and has never perhaps existed outside of some place among the peasant folk.

It was the poetical side of this Greek life of the peasants, as recorded by Theocritus, which so much influenced the literatures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France and in England.