H

OMER is the greatest of all the epic poets, and he has left us the earliest pictures of European civilisation. Both as poetry and as history the Iliad and the Odyssey hold a place apart in world-literature, and it is appalling to think of what would have been the consequences if they had not been preserved. They constituted the Bible of the Greeks in historic times; thus the philosophers, Plato among them, are constantly quoting lines from them to illustrate a point of morals or to clinch a spiritual argument just as Christians have been in the habit of using scriptural texts. To the Greeks Homer was the poet, just as to us the Bible is the book; and they, like us, have often found a deeper significance or a more poignant consolation than was originally intended in plain words which have gathered, in the long succession of time, a charm of association and the added beauty that is memorial. Moreover, these truly great poems, temples open to sunshine and sea-breezes, and built of noble numbers, have been models for the epic in every western age that knew them, or the works that perpetuated their pattern (e.g. Virgil's Eneid). It is probable that we should never have had the "artificial epics," as they have been called, of Virgil, Lucan, Dante, Milton, and the rest, if the Homeric poems had been lost. It is even possible that such a loss would have prevented the "grand style" of poetry from being consciously cultivated. But what perhaps

illustrates the enormous influence exerted by those happily preserved masterpieces of man's imagination is this strange fact —that even in the workaday world of to-day plain people know the meaning of the adjective "Homeric," though they may not have read a single line of any translation of Homer. We all know what is meant when a speaker or a writer alludes to "Homeric grandeur" or "Homeric laughter," or observes that "even Homer sometimes nods." Furthermore, the chief Homeric characters are known to us all for their predominant qualities: Achilles for his valour, Helen for her beauty, Ulysses for his resourcefulness, Penelope for her faithfulness. Any orator, even if his pedestal be only a soap-box at a street-corner, can use one of these names to point a moral; they are as familiar on our lips as the names of Hamlet or Pecksniff, Othello or Micawber.

I have spoken, and shall go on speaking, of Homer as a poet, human and indivisible; this is done "without prejudice," as the lawyers say that is, without expressing any present opinion as to the way in which the Homeric poems came into being. He or she who wishes to visit the "wide expanse"

That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne,

and to "breathe its pure serene" (the inspired Keats gets the absolutely just word here!), need know nothing whatever about that controversial labyrinth, the Homeric Problem. Indeed, a childlike ignorance of the whole vast discussion started by Wolf's Prolegomena (published in 1795) is a real advantage, for it puts the new votary in the position, as it were, of a listener to the recital of the poems in the springtide of historic Hellas when nobody had even begun to doubt whether the Iliad and the Odyssey had been created by the same master-poet, the selfsame blind old singer of a later but still beautiful legend, which shows us many cities contending for the honour of being his birthplace. For these poems can be read in verse translations-with joy to