As to the personality and history of the poet, he is to us simply Homer, the epic singer, a name only; which has come to us out of the past, without date or history. There are, it is true, many legends concerning him; and, indeed, a detailed life, which has been attributed to the historian Herod'otus. This makes him a native of Asia Minor; a traveler to Egypt, Italy and Spain; losing his sight at Ithaca; and afterward singing his lays, as a wandering minstrel, in the towns of Asia Minor, the islands of the Archipelago, and even the streets of Athens.

With these stories, however, criticism has dealt unsparingly. It is now generally admitted that there is no authentic external evidence of his history, and that we have but the poems themselves, with the internal evidence which they present, from which to glean any trustworthy knowledge of the life and times of the author.

These partly corroborate the traditions which make him a native of Asia Minor, and which point to Smyrna as the city having the greatest claim to his nativity. The dialect. in which they are written was an old form of that used by other great writers of the same region, as Herodotus, the noted historian, and Hippoc' rates, the celebrated physician. The frequent allusions, also, to the vigorous northwest winds blowing from Thrace, indicate the coast of Asia Minor as the home of the poet.

The period in which he lived is as uncertain as are the events of his life. As to the Trojan war, if it had any more real existence than the fabled exploits of the Knights of the Round Table, its epoch is utterly buried in the clouds of the remote past. The poet himself certainly lived considerably before the date of the first Olympiad, 776 B.C. Yet from what we know of the civilization of the Grecian people, at their first appearance within the historic horizon, and their rapid subsequent progress, it does not appear as if we can retire many centuries beyond

this horizon without finding them not yet emerged from barbarism; or, at least, in such a crude social condition as is evidenced in the Pelasgian remains; partially penetrated, no doubt, by the spirit of the active neighboring civilizations, but not yet roused to literary emulation.

It appears, then, as if we have a certain range of time within which to limit the age of Homer. Herodotus estimates his period at 400 years previous to his own, or about 850 B.C. This date, however, is purely conjectural, though it is not improbable that the poet lived at some period within the 200 years succeeding the time of Solomon, 1000 B.C. The polish and richness of the language he uses, and the degree of national culture manifested in his poems, seem inconsistent with an epoch previous to the earlier of these dates, and he certainly did not live much after the later.

In estimating the position of Homer as a writer, we must start with the conception that he was not the epic poet of a literary age,- not a Virgil, Dante or Milton. He belonged, rather, to the minstrel epoch of literature, being the popular bard of a bookless era, instead of the poet of a period in which well stored libraries and literary culture at once enrich and impoverish the writer,-enrich him by the garnered thought of the past, impoverish him by the fact that the field of visible nature, that field so fertile in striking allusions, grand similes, and sublime imagery, has been already gleaned.

To Homer it was virgin soil, and he has wrought it with the free grasp of a master of expression, and of a mind in intimate sympathy with nature. But his poems plainly appertain to the age of minstrelsy, and indeed, in some degree, lack the consecutiveness of a self-originated plot, seeming to some critical writers to be simply a skillful combination of numerous popular ballads extant before his time, and welded by him into a rich epic form.

This is the theory originated by Wolf, the German critic,

and since maintained by many of his countrymen; some of them viewing the Iliad as the patchwork labor of one or more compilers of these floating ballads of the heroic age of Grecian fable.

But the more moderate critics dissent from this view. The Iliad bears too evidently the marks of a single hand, and is, moreover, infiltrated with a rich simplicity and a vigorous genius which reach far beyond the ordinary grasp of the vagrant bards of a half-civilized age.

That Homer owed much of his material to his predecessors, there is no reason to doubt. He availed himself of the legends of his country in the same spirit that Shakespere used the earlier drama, and with as wonderful a result. It was crude ore that he threw into the furnace of his mind: it was refined gold that flowed from the crucible of his genius. The Iliad is one work, filled with one spirit, instinct with one thought, equally pure in its language and elevated in its style, and as fully the culmination of the minstrel epos as Hamlet is of the romantic drama.

It is doubtful if there are any works of an imaginative character extant which possess a double interest to the same degree as the Homeric poems; an interest in themselves as noble works of art, and an equal interest in the graphic picture they give us of a state of society of which we have no other record, but which they so accurately photograph that we seem to live again the life of that prehistoric age. The labors and tools of the husbandman, the life in cities, the modes and instruments of war, the social habits of the people, are drawn with vivid minuteness; while scenes of domestic life, and details of social intercourse, yield us striking glimpses of the home existence of this far removed people.

In their religious features the poems of Homer were an authority with the Greeks. They constantly quote his deistic views and stories with all the deference due to sacred

dogmas, and never seem to recognize the grotesque and ridiculous character of the situations in which he often places their gods and goddesses, accepting these legends in the same spirit of simple faith in which he relates them.

As for the primitive history of the Hellenic race, Homer is as valuable as Herod'otus and Thucyd'ides are for the later periods. In fact, he yields us an important record of the early stages of civilized society which is valuable to all ages, and second in merit, in this respect, only to the books of Moses, and perhaps some of the oldest of the Vedas.

But it is as an epic poet that he should chiefly be considered, and in this field he stands unrivaled. No later epicist has equaled him in the inventive faculty, and in the fire and energy of his verse, while he is equally beyond them in the variety and exactness of his character-drawing. In this respect, indeed, he is a master; his varied sketches of Ulysses, Agamem'non, Achil'les, Hec'tor, A'jax, Nes'tor, etc., rivaling the great dramatic writers of a subsequent age.

He is dramatic, also, in the graphic skill with which he spreads the field of the poem before us, making us rather the excited spectators of its stirring incidents than quiet listeners to a tale of adventure.

If even we are stirred by his concise and graphic descriptions, how must the excitable Greeks of that partly barbarous age have been roused by his tales of battle, so full of the turmoil, rush and terror of actual war, and by the vehement flow of the current of his song, which pours onward impetuously as a mountain torrent, bearing everything forward on its irresistible flood! We can fancy them, with their fervent belief in the reality of the poet's tales, springing excitedly to their feet, adding the clashing chorus of sword and shield to the tones of the singer's harp, and drowning his song in their wild shouts of approbation, till

the hall of minstrelsy seemed itself transformed into the battle-field of the bard's warlike ode.

The Odyssey has a more quiet movement. It is the mountain stream of the Il'iad after it has reached the plain and is spread out into a broad and placid flood. Both are, however, enlivened by the same apt and often very beautiful similes, and display the same simplicity of diction, purity of language, and skill in versification; though it must be admitted that in epic vigor and dignity of tone the Odyssey falls considerably short of the Iliad. This is necessitated, in some measure, by the change in character of the story, and possibly, also, by a difference in the age of the writer. Some authors, at least, perceive in the Iliad the impetuous youth, and in the Odyssey the placid old age, of the poet."

The subject of the Iliad is happily chosen. The traditional ten years' siege of Troy was, doubtless, far the most stirring of the legendary tales concerning the prehistoric Greeks, and included, as actors in its scenes, the most interesting of the early heroes of the Hellenic race. Homer has, with true judgment, limited his poems to a small portion of this long siege, though probably the fifty days of the Iliad include the choicest of these legends.

This treatment has given him the advantage of unity in his subject; of one principal hero, namely Achil'les; and of a single determining theme for the action of the poem, namely, the anger of this invulnerable warrior.

The main cause of the Trojan war, the recovery of the beautiful Helen from her abductor Paris, the son of Priam, becomes but one of the various episodes of the poem. It may be well, however, to give the previous history of Helen, leading up, as it does, to the most tragic climax in the legends of Greece.

This most celebrated of beauties was of godlike extraction, being the daughter of Jupiter by Leda. She had two brothers, Castor and Pollux, who were alternately immor