Smyrna

Ephesus received the whole book of Revelation.

Smyrna, the whole book of Revelation.

Jesus said, write down what you see in a book and send it to the churches.

They got the whole vision.

perhaps under pressure of the dorian invasion or even earlier and the walled city commanding the hellespont must have been a great barrier to their progress no less than six cities have stood and fallen on the site of troy the siege of such a stronghold may have well become famous in song it is well known that traditions and legends tend to group themselves round famous sites or incidents and in this way we may explain the transference to asia of the thessalian myth of achilles the honor of composing out current lays an epic of outstanding merit on the wrath of achilles is claimed for a nameless poet of asia minor singing in the olian dialect and living perhaps at smyrna some time between one thousand and eight hundred b c the olians were the first greek settlers in asia and the dialect of homer has traces of olic then about two centuries later the real homer an ionian minstrel possibly a native of caius worked up the wrath into a great poem which was substantially our iliad the dialect he changed as far as possible into ionic and modified a few of the descriptions to suit the taste of his own age in weaving together traditional sagas he gave his work enough cohesion to hold the attention of his hearers while he enriched the older epic with episodes of incomparable dignity fire and pathos this homer was the chief of a school or clan of minstrels called homeridae to whom we owe the latest portions of the iliad and other epic poems to be mentioned below the companion poem to the iliad is the odyssey also in twenty-four books odysseus king of ithaca an island of western greece had fought at troy and is setting out for home on the way he incurs the wrath of the sun-god and of poseidon whereby his return is delayed for ten years by adventures in the fabulous regions on the borderland of ancient geography odysseus is a typical ionian hero the patient man of endless resource a good warrior but preferring persuasion to force this steadfast wisdom and the favor of athena finally bring him safely out of his troubles the poet also shows us the state of ithaca in its ruler's absence the young telemachus unable to control his subjects the faithful queen penelope beset by insolent suitors and finally rewarded by the return and triumph of odysseus the personality of the hero gives the odyssey more apparent unity than the iliad the ancients believe it to have been a work of homer's old age but in comparing it with the iliad we find more signs of altered conditions than could be covered by the lifetime of a single poet the gods in the iliad are glorified human beings and take part in the trojan war zeus holds a doubtful sway his consort hera being often in rebellion in the odyssey zeus is supreme and the gods dwell on mount olympus remote from the strife of men land in the iliad is held by the community and farmed in common while in the odyssey private ownership is established these are only a few differences among many which have led scholars to assume a separate authorship for the odyssey indeed it is now generally held since the theory of kirchhoff eighteen fifty nine that our odyssey is itself an expansion of a lay on the return of odysseus into which a short saga about telemachus has been woven this hypothetical kernel is found chiefly in books five through eight we may say then that most of the odyssey is contemporary with the latest books of the iliad inferior to the iliad in pathos and sublimity the odyssey has a unique charm as an adventure story and fairy tale it is less savage than the warlike iliad we leave din of battle for the toil of the oars and touch the dreamy land of the lotus eaters or linger in calypso's enchanted grotto or roam in wonder through the gardens and palace of alcinous the metre of the greek epic is the dactylic hexameter it had perhaps been first used in primitive ritual and was adopted by the delphic oracle for its responses homer's versification is perfect his hexameters are rippling swift and sonorous the greek tongue with its long and short vowels its musical pitch accent and its richness in light terminations flows easily and strongly in this metre virgil's hexameters are mellow and stately perfect in their own way but not homeric no modern language has been able to approach the effect of the greek epic verse the homeric poems were worked up from traditional lays and a striking token of their origin is seen in the recurrence of whole lines and stock epithets applied especially to gods and heroes thus daybreak is regularly announced by the line now when early dawn shone forth the rosy fingered hera is ox-eyed athena grey-eyed zeus cloud-gatherer achilles swift of foot agamemnon shepherd of the host in this we see the simplicity of the early poets who do not yet crave for constant variety in expression and are content to let their characters go about under their crudely explicit labels homer is famed for the beauty of his imagery he usually keeps his similes to adorn the great events in the narrative the similes themselves are taken from all kinds of familiar scenes the sea nature handicraft and daily life the achaean array is compared to tribes of birds that fly hither and thither joying in their plumage and with loud cries settle ever onward and again to flies that hover about a herdsman's steading in the springtime when milk drencheth the pails but the supreme merit of the poems lies in their simple directness their power of swift narration and the whole-hearted absorption of the poet into the story that he tells homer had a profound and lasting influence over greek literature his poems were recited in all greek cities and learned in every school but although writing was known at the time when most of the epics were composed we cannot tell how far an art still unfamiliar and chiefly applied to short inscriptions was used by poets at any rate the rhapsodists or professional reciters were the chief agents in spreading the knowledge of homer great as their services in this way must have been they were liable to mistakes or tempted to interpolate lines to gratify the local patriotism of their hearers solon six hundred b c is said to have passed a law to regulate public recitations at athens and the athenian tyrant pisistratus five fifty to five twenty seven b c is credited with having ordered an official recension of the poems although this recension is now held to be a fiction the fact remains that athens took the epics under a kind of protection which has left traces of attic dialect in homer by the end of the sixth century the poems were current in practically the same form as they have reached us though the work of the alexandrian critics of whom aristarchus one sixty b c was the greatest helped to purify and explain the text the minor epics the iliad and the odyssey only represent a small part of the poetry dealing with the trojan war and the trojan cycle of legends the remaining parts of the story were worked up into epics by the so-called cyclic poets ranging in date from the eighth to the sixth century these poems which finally covered the whole ground of the trojan expedition the fall of troy and the home-coming of the heroes were admittedly far inferior to the true homeric poems and only fragments now survive another group of lost poems clustered round thebes the most famous being the thebeis both cycles supplied endless plots to the greek tragedians from whose work and from the latin thebeis of statius we can infer at any rate the subjects presented the so-called homeric hymns or preludes were composed by the rhapsodists to introduce recitations from the longer epics they are in honor of various gods and may have been intended for the festivals where homer was recited thirty-four of these survive and date from the seventh century b c downwards the most famous are the hymn to the delian apollo which gives an agreeable picture of the festival at delas and that to demeter describing her wanderings in search of persephone the diction of the hymns is so closely copied from homer under whose name they passed in antiquity hesiod from the courts of olian and ionian princes the patrons of epic poems and rhapsods we pass to a barren countryside in boeotia where hesiod's father an olian of syme in asia had reclaimed a strip of waste land near mount helicon on its owner's death the little farm was divided between hesiod and his brother perses but the latter by bribing the lords of the district gained the larger share for himself perses was a shiftless unsuccessful farmer and for him and his like hesiod composed the works and days in the eighth century the peasants lot was hard the nobles held the best land and oppressed the poor trade is growing but the greeks are still terribly afraid of the sea the works and days is the first didactic poem it begins with exhortations to perses and to the unjust judges the text of the sermon being the need for work this is emphasized by the legend of prometheus who stole fire from heaven and of zeus's consequent wrath and his punishment of man by the sending of pandora the type of feminine deception with her jar in which all the ills of the world were stored the five ages of man embodying the greek belief in the fallen state of humanity are also described then follow the precepts of agriculture as it was practised by small peasant farmers next is a series of maxims and proverbs such as all primitive folk have evolved and finally the calendar by the moon of lucky and unlucky days hesiod is a true tiller of the soil shrewd selfish discontented superstitious the greeks respected his ethical teaching such as it was the romans greater lovers of the country valued his agricultural advice which inspired virgil in his georgics but the modern reader is chiefly concerned with the picture of hesiod's times and surroundings and to hear from him a voice not of kings or of heroes but from the heart of the people the theogony is a didactic poem on the birth of the gods and their warfare with the titans which ended in the dominion of zeus it became the great text-book of greek religion a poem called aoe on heroines who had wedded gods is almost wholly lost the epic fragment called the shield of heracles was ascribed to hesiod but is by a later imitator of homer hesiod used the epic hexameter but except for rare flights his style is prosaic the poems have come down to us in a mixture of aeolic and ionic dialect the latter element being perhaps due to ionian recitation and adaptation chapter one

CHAPTER II.

ELEGIAC AND DIAMBIC POETRY we have now passed from the heroic age into historical times by the eighth century the greeks are settled in their lasting abode on the coast of asia minor the gean islands and the mainland of greece colonies are being planted in italy and sicily in the northern gean regions and on the black sea the greeks were a disunited people every city was a political unit whose independence could only be given up under the strongest inducement or necessity racial divisions also existed the olian ionian and dorian folk had their own dialects and tribal cults and developed their own literature The Ionian cities of the middle coast of Asia Minor, Smyrna, Ephesus, and Miletus, with the island of Chios, rose in the 7th and 6th centuries to great splendor.

Monarchy, the Homeric form of government, gives place to oligarchy, and this in turn to tyranny, an unconstitutional kingship resting on force, followed in most cities by complete democracy.

The genius of the Ionians is scientific and methodical.

These poems, which finally covered the whole ground of the Trojan Expedition, the fall of troy and the home-coming of the heroes were admittedly far inferior to the true homeric poems and only fragments now survive another group of lost poems clustered round thebes the most famous being the both cycles supplied endless plots to the greek tragedians from whose work and from the latin thebeius of statius we can infer at any rate the subjects presented the so-called homeric hymns or preludes were composed by the rhapsodists to introduce recitations from the longer epics they are in honor of various gods and may have been intended for the festivals where homer was recited thirty-four of these survive and date from the seventh century b c downwards the most famous are the hymn to the delian apollo which gives an agreeable picture of the festival at delas and that to demeter describing her wanderings in search of persephone the diction of the hymns is so closely copied from homer under whose name they passed in antiquity hesiod from the courts of olian and ionian princes the patrons of epic poems and rhapsods we pass to a barren countryside in boeotia where hesiod's father an olian of syme in asia had reclaimed a strip of waste land near mount helicon on its owner's death the little farm was divided between hesiod and his brother perses but the latter by bribing the lords of the district gained the larger share for himself perses was a shiftless unsuccessful farmer and for him and his like hesiod composed the works and days in the eighth century the peasants lot was hard the nobles held the best land and oppressed the poor trade is growing but the greeks are still terribly afraid of the sea the works and days is the first didactic poem it begins with exhortations to perses and to the unjust judges the text of the sermon being the need for work this is emphasized by the legend of prometheus who stole fire from heaven and of zeus's consequent wrath and his punishment of man by the sending of pandora the type of feminine deception with her jar in which all the ills of the world were stored the five ages of man embodying the greek belief in the fallen state of humanity are also described then follow the precepts of agriculture as it was practised by small peasant farmers next is a series of maxims and proverbs such as all primitive folk have evolved and finally the calendar by the moon of lucky and unlucky days hesiod is a true tiller of the soil shrewd selfish discontented superstitious the greeks respected his ethical teaching such as it was the romans greater lovers of the country valued his agricultural advice which inspired virgil in his georgics but the modern reader is chiefly concerned with the picture of hesiod's times and surroundings and to hear from him a voice not of kings or of heroes but from the heart of the people the theogony is a didactic poem on the birth of the gods and their warfare with the titans which ended in the dominion of zeus it became the great text-book of greek religion a poem called aoe on heroines who had wedded gods is almost wholly lost the epic fragment called the shield of heracles was ascribed to hesiod but is by a later imitator of homer hesiod used the epic hexameter but except for rare flights his style is prosaic the poems have come down to us in a mixture of aolic and ionic dialect the latter element being perhaps due to Ionian recitation and adaptation.

greek literature by henry julius wettenhall tilliard lyric elegiac and iambic poetry we have now passed from the heroic age into historical times by the eighth century the greeks are settled in their lasting abode on the coast of asia minor the aegean islands and the mainland of greece colonies are being planted in italy and sicily in the northern aegean regions and on the black sea the greeks were a disunited people every city was a political unit whose independence could only be given up under the strongest inducement or necessity racial divisions also existed the olian ionian and dorian folk had their own dialects and tribal cults and developed their own literature The Ionian cities of the middle coast of Asia Minor, Smyrna, Ephesus, and Miletus, with the island of Chios, rose in the 7th and 6th centuries to great splendor.

Monarchy, the Homeric form of government, gives place to oligarchy, and this in turn to tyranny, an unconstitutional kingship resting on force, followed in most cities by complete democracy.

The genius of the Ionians is scientific and methodical.

The loveless church of Ephesus, Revelations chapter 2, verses 1 to 7.

The persecuted church of Smyrna, Revelations chapter 2, verses 8 through 11.

The compromising church, that's this one.

but there's weapons or invitations given to overcome those issues.