nature, scope, and interest of the Hellenic myths. The other is the many-sided and frequent aberrations of Mr. Pope from the letter and the spirit of Homer's Iliad. Like other classical teachers, the editor hopes every pupil will have gained his first impressions of ancient epic from a simpler and more faithful version. Some copy of a complete English Iliad should be always accessible, at least upon the teacher's desk; for the mutilation of a masterpiece is always to be regretted, even if unavoidable.

The versions introduced in the notes are, for the most part, attempts to combine the utmost literalness with some approach to the dactylic rhythm. The editor's own acquaintance with the lands of Homer, though now twenty years away, has, it is hoped, given some local color to such notes as those on Book I, vss. 568-569 and XXII, 195.

Criticisms and suggestions will be most cordially received by the editor.

AUGUST 23, 1900.

INTRODUCTION

Homer and the Iliad

THE two great epic poems ascribed by tradition to "Homer," the Iliad and the Odyssey, give us our earliest picture of European life, a picture taken, as it were, by a brilliant flashlight, centuries before the dawn of history. As to the real biography of the poet or poets, we know nothing. In the epics themselves, minstrels are mentioned only as attached to royal courts, and we naturally surmise that the maker of the Iliad was himself such a courtier. The Odyssey is generally felt to be the work of a later, more refined, and thoughtful age, perhaps a century younger. Few scholars, if any, believe that either poem as it now stands was wholly composed by any one man. Yet the Iliad has the true unity of all artistic masterworks, and each important part has been shaped for the place into which it is fitted. Herodotus, father of history, himself living in the fifth century B.C., estimates Homer's time to have been four hundred years earlier. Recent students are inclined to set still farther back the age of the chief artist who gave the Iliad essentially its present shape.

Poetry is much older than prose. That is, man's sense of beauty, his imagination, awakes long before the power, or the desire, to make a sober truthful chronicle of actual events. Homer does not even profess to describe his own days, but only a more heroic foretime, of which he really knows nothing. He appeals to the Muse for inspiration. He must have invented much of the tale. Yet he sees everything most vividly himself, and makes us, even now,

see it no less clearly, so that we forget how much is impossible.

There is a peculiar freshness and charm about Homer's scenes and people, heightened, no doubt, by their remoteness. For though they are unmistakably Greek, as is the language they use, there is a great chasm between them and the later Hellenic folk of authentic history. The rude Dorians, ancestors of the Spartans, descending into the Peloponnesus "three generations after the Trojan war," apparently swept away the decaying Achæan monarchies that the Homeric poets had known. Little save the epic poems themselves was saved from the wreck. The democratic, mercantile, city-loving Greeks of the historical period were quite un-Homeric in many ways.

The old warrior-kings with their submissive peoples, their chariots, and palaces rich in gold, had passed away leaving hardly a trace behind. In modern times, indeed, it was long believed that Homer's men and women, like his quarrelsome gods, were but such "stuff as dreams are made of." But the massive foundation-walls of forts and palaces, the gold plate and jewelry, with numberless other relics, discovered by Dr. Schliemann at Mycenæ, Tiryns, and on the hill of Hissarlik in the centre of the Trojan plain itself, have demonstrated that there was, on both shores of the Ægean, somewhat such a civilization, under Egyptian and Oriental influences, as the Iliad depicts. This civilization is roughly assigned to the second millennium, 2000-1000, B.C.

Whether heroes and heroines quite like Achilles and Hector, Helen and Andromache, even bearing these familiar names, once really lived, we shall never learn. In the ruined prehistoric palaces no inscriptions are found. In the poems there is no certain allusion to writing. (See Note on Book VI. vs. 210.) Even if it was used for brief public notices, it is likely that poetry may have been handed down for generations merely by memory. Certainly the creative imagina