Introduction

Patronage of letters, existing as a well-defined system, is not nationally restricted or dependent upon the spirit of any age but is the result rather of a few fairly obvious and universal social and economic conditions. Literature in a wide sense had been pursued for ages before such a social condition was reached and before any individual ownership of literary property had become defined. In Egypt the change from communal to individual appreciation is most marked; until Rameses II and his son Menephthah literature was confined to the temples and was then removed to court and rewarded, while in other lands the communal idea was never really displaced. In ancient India and Persia, literature and religion were closely connected; in Japan honor and prestige might be gained by an author, and in China there was state compensation for learning, economic necessity eventually forcing the poet into the meshes of the bureaucracy.