Note 1062 — Chapter VII · THE EARLIEST DIFFERENTIATIONS OF POETRY

The claim of Usener may be noted (“Der Stoff des griechischen Epos,” Sitzungsber. d. Kais. Acad. d. Wiss. zu Wien, Bd. 137, pp. 18 ff.), where he puts the ceremonies at the hearthstone, primitive ancestor-worship, as the real beginning of epic song. The offering to an ancestor must have been made “with music, prayer, and song.” Hence the epos. It is true that a lyric of this sort is older than any epic,—the epic which Hegel pushed forward as earliest form of poetry, just as the renaissance had put it above the drama in dignity,—and may well have helped the later epic process. But the evidence of ethnology shows that rude songs at the tribal dance, which refer to tribal doings, must be far older than any ceremonies of the primitive hausvater at his family altar.