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introduction of vowels. The stage was thus set for the beginnings of literature, and promptly on cue, probably around 750 BC , Homer made his appearance. Had he been born any earlier, his two great epics might never have existed; the language would not have been ready for him and he himself would almost certainly have been illiterate. (Several scholars have indeed argued that he was; both works betray signs of oral composition and transmission, and both contain occasional inconsistencies where the poet seems to contradict himself. 8 ) Even if they were originally written, we know for a fact that it was only under the rule of Peisistratus, around 540 BC , that they were first transcribed in what must pass for an authentic edition.
    However his work was composed, Homer sang of a golden age, an age of gods and heroes that had absolutely nothing in common with the humdrum world of his own day. But to him that age, however different, would not have seemed so very distant. He was, after all, writing only some five hundred years after the events he described, a period rather less than that which separates us from the Wars of the Roses. And if, as is now generally agreed, he was an Ionian–born probably in either Smyrna (now Izmir) or Chios–Troy itself was not impossibly far away.
    We know of only one other major poet who seems to have been a rough contemporary of Homer. Hesiod tells us that his family, too, was of Ionian stock, though his father had settled in Boeotia shortly before he was born. His most celebrated work is probably the
Theogony
, or the ‘Birth of the Gods’. In it he tells of the events that led to the birth and kingship of Zeus: the castration of Uranus by Cronus, and the overthrow of Cronus and the Titans by the gods of Olympus. He left several other long poems which we possess in whole or in part, of which the most important is his
Works and Days
–a work as unlike the
Theogony
as can possibly be imagined. It is more like a sermon than anything else, written perhaps by a slightly cantankerous upper-class English vicar in the late seventeenth century, extolling the virtues of honest toil and denouncing dishonesty and idleness; there is also practical advice on such subjects as agriculture, religious observance and good behaviour. Not many people read Hesiod today, and that is hardly surprising. His poems are not without interest, and it is remarkable that at that date they should have been written at all; but he has none of Homer’s drive, none of his raciness, none of his wild imagination. Hesiod is a pale, silver moon; Homer is the sun in all its golden splendour.
             
     
    It was probably only some ten or fifteen years after the Trojan War–though it may have been earlier–that there occurred one of the most important migrations in all history: that of the Hebrews under Moses, who led his people out of Egypt and into the land of Canaan, known to us more familiarly as Palestine. Whether the relatively short distance they travelled–some 400 miles at the most–really took them forty years as the Bible tells us, is open to doubt; a good deal more certain is the fact that their presence was resented by the Philistines and others who already inhabited what the people of Israel regarded as their promised land. Their original twelve tribes were therefore compelled to unite, and to elect sovereigns around whose thrones they could lead a more coherent national life. The first of these kings was Saul, who reigned from 1025 to 1010 BC , but it was under his successor, David, and David’s son Solomon that the kingdom rose to its apogee. David it was who annihilated the Philistines and subdued all the other neighbouring tribes, choosing the little hill town of Jerusalem as his capital. There Solomon built a splendid palace and–still more magnificent–the first Temple. He also developed the port of Ezion-Geber on the Red Sea, giving the kingdom a new and direct link with Africa.
    But it was all