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.
Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and Dithyrambic: poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation.
People do, indeed, add the word 'maker' or 'poet' to the name of the metre, and speak of elegiac poets, or epic (that is, hexameter) poets, as if it were not the imitation that makes the poet, but the verse that entitles them all indiscriminately to the name.
Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her?
Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion.
Twenty years before the thought had come to him that he would write a grand
epic. We have scarcely spoken of an
epic since that first of all our
epics, the Story of Beowulf.
It follows from all this that the ultimate, aggregate, or absolute effect of even the best epic under the sun, is a nullity: -- and this is precisely the fact.
In regard to the Iliad, we have, if not positive proof, at least very good reason for believing it intended as a series of lyrics; but, granting the epic intention, I can say only that the work is based in an imperfect sense of art.
Out of the popular ballads, or, chiefly, of the minstrel poetry which is partly based on them, regularly develops epic poetry.
By far the most important remaining example is the epic 'Beowulf,' of about three thousand lines.
The British Constitution was to Montesquieu what Homer has been to the didactic writers on
epic poetry.