This ode, this poem of primitive times, is Genesis.

By slow degrees, however, this youth of the world passes away.  All the spheres progress; the family becomes a tribe, the tribe becomes a nation.  Each of these groups of men camps about a common centre, and kingdoms appear.  The social instinct succeeds the nomadic instinct.  The camp gives place to the city, the tent to the palace, the ark to the temple.  The chiefs of these nascent states are still shepherds, it is true, but shepherds of nations; the pastoral staff has already assumed the shape of a sceptre.  Everything tends to become stationary and fixed.  Religion takes on a definite shape; prayer is governed by rites; dogma sets bounds to worship.  Thus the priest and king share the paternity of the people; thus theocratic society succeeds the patriarchal community.

Meanwhile the nations are beginning to be packed too closely on the earth’s surface.  They annoy and jostle one another; hence the clash of empires—­war.  They overflow upon another; hence, the migrations of nations—­voyages.  Poetry reflects these momentous events; from ideas it proceeds to things.  It sings of ages, of nations, of empires.  It becomes epic, it gives birth to Homer.

Homer, in truth, dominates the society of ancient times.  In that society, all is simple, all is epic.  Poetry is religion, religion is law.  The virginity of the earlier age is succeeded by the chastity of the later.  A sort of solemn gravity is everywhere noticeable, in private manners no less than in public.  The nations have retained nothing of the wandering life of the earlier time, save respect for the stranger and the traveller.  The family has a fatherland; everything is connected therewith; it has the cult of the house and the cult of the tomb.

We say again, such a civilization can find its one expression only in the epic.  The epic will assume diverse forms, but will never lose its specific character.  Pindar is more priestlike than patriarchal, more epic than lyrical.  If the chroniclers, the necessary accompaniments of this second age of the world, set about collecting traditions and begin to reckon by centuries, they labour to no purpose—­chronology cannot expel poesy; history remains an epic.  Herodotus is a Homer.

But it is in the ancient tragedy, above all, that the epic breaks out at every turn.  It mounts the Greek stage without losing aught, so to speak, of its immeasurable, gigantic proportions.  Its characters are still heroes, demigods, gods; its themes are visions, oracles, fatality; its scenes are battles, funeral rites, catalogues.  That which the rhapsodists formerly sang, the actors declaim—­that is the whole difference.

There is something more.  When the whole plot, the whole spectacle of the epic poem have passed to the stage, the Chorus takes all that remains.  The Chorus annotates the tragedy, encourages the heroes, gives descriptions, summons and expels the daylight, rejoices, laments, sometimes furnishes the scenery, explains the moral bearing of the subject, flatters the listening assemblage.  Now, what is the Chorus, this anomalous character standing between the spectacle and the spectator, if it be not the poet completing his epic?