But all four poems offer unforgettable scenes of fighting, sailing, and farming—the three activities central to the archaic economy and to the archaic Greek male experience of life. They were performed at festivals where self-governing Greeks, from diverse communities, met as equals in shared sacred spaces to worship their shared gods and, in doing so, invented the competitive athletics festivals of which we possess a descendant in the Olympics. The poems recited at these gatherings were the collective cultural property of the independent-minded Greek warrior peasants wherever they sailed and
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