THE WRITTEN WORD 279 



of the heroes. In this way the tales were handed 

 down from father to son. 



When the Phoenician traders came with their neat 

 httle letters arranged into written words, you can 

 imagine how eagerly the Greeks seized the idea, 

 and how quickly they adapted those letters to suit 

 their own sounds and words, by dropping some and 

 adding others, as their spoken language demanded. 



With their alphabet arranged to represent all the 

 sounds that they made, and grouped to represent the 

 spoken words, the Greeks wrote down their stories and 

 their poems. They became great writers and thinkers, 

 and also great artists. Everything they made and 

 wrote they tried to make beautiful and noble. ' ' Noth- 

 ing too much" was the motto they went by, and 

 they tried to do everything in a symmetrical way, 

 without exaggeration and without excess. 



From telling the stories about the gods who, they 

 thought, represented everything in nature, they 

 learned to love nature itself. They studied the 

 forms in the world about them and tried to represent 

 truly the beauty of what they saw. They thought 

 about the beauty and wonder of the world and how 

 it was made; how it could be helped by good and 

 lovely thoughts and deeds, and how marred by bad 

 and unlovely ones. Their statues are the most 

 beautiful that have ever been made, their temples the 

 finest type of architecture, and their writings some 

 of the best things we have in all literature. 



Because of the high endeavor of these Greeks they 

 have become the teachers of all the rest of Europe. 

 Their alphabet it was that the Romans took, and, 



