present day would generally spell in -our, such as honour, labour, splendour, are so spelled in the text here; the following are spelled in -or: superior, terror, warrior. In other respects, the earliest editions have been followed, and it is believed that an accurate text is offered.

In the matter of annotation, it has been the aim to avoid the fault of over-editing, in the belief that in general a book well worth reading can speak best for itself. What Pope himself has said in the Preface to his Iliad, though spoken with reference to one who would essay to translate Homer, applies with equal force to the reader of any masterpiece. "What I would further recommend to him," says Pope, "is to study his author rather from his own text than from any commentators, how learned soever, or whatever figure they may make in the estimation of the world." It is not to be presumed that the pupils who use this book can, in every case, study Homer "from his own text"; but they can study Pope. And through Pope they can form at least a slight acquaintance with Homer; for, as Professor Wilson truly expressed it, "That man is not ignorant of Homer who has read, even in translation, the First Book of the Iliad."

W. T.

BOSTON, July 24, 1897.

INTRODUCTION.

HOMER: THE ILIAD.

UNTIL Comparatively recent times, it was almost universally assumed that the Iliad and Odyssey, like the Aeneid or Paradise Lost, were the work of one author. In 1795,

Friedrich August Wolf, a famous German scholar, published his Prolegomena ad Homerum, in which he set forth the claim that neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey was the work of one author; but that each had consisted originally of a number of separate poems or lays, composed at different times by different men, and that these separate poems had at a later period been collected and arranged in such a way as to give them a unity. This Homeric Question has been the subject of a great deal of discussion; but it is one with which only critical scholarship is concerned. While most persons competent to form an opinion on the matter now accept the view of a diversity of authorship, still Homer is the name that has always stood, and doubtless will continue to stand, for the authorship of the two great epics.

The Iliad and Odyssey, which were probably in essentially their present form as early as the eighth century B.C., are the oldest remains of Greek literature, and give us the earliest picture we have of Hellenic life and civilization. Moreover, they have always been regarded as the finest epic poems of the world. The unanimity with which all ages have conceded this place to the Homeric poems seems

to indicate that the experiences and feelings common to the whole race find in them their truest expression. "The capital distinction of Homeric poetry," says Professor Jebb, "is that it has all the freshness and simplicity of a primitive age, —all the charm which we associate with the 'childhood of the world'; while, on the other hand, it has completely surmounted the rudeness of form, the struggle of thought with language, the tendency to grotesque or ignoble modes of speech, the incapacity for equable maintenance of a high level, which belong to the primitive stage in literature." It has much in common with the early ballad, on the one hand, and with the literary epic, such as the Paradise Lost, on the other; but it is quite as distinct from the one as from the other.

It would be idle to expect to find in the Iliad an accurate narrative of historical occurrences; and yet, in a very important-perhaps the most important-sense, the poem has a substantial historical basis. We may not suppose that there lived persons named Priam and Hector, Achilles,1 Agamemnon, and Helen, who performed the deeds ascribed to them. But the excavations of Schliemann and others have aided in showing pretty clearly that there were such cities as Homer describes; and that his pictures of their civilization, their art, their dress, their manners, religion, and government, are remarkably accurate. It is even probable that about the period 1200-1000 B.C. there were frequent conflicts between the people of the Troad2 and those of Hellas; and there is certainly nothing unreasonable in supposing that there may have been, about that time, such an invasion as that which the Iliad represents Agamemnon to have led.

Homer's conception of the world is that of a circular plane bounded by the river Oceanus. The part of this

1 A-chil'-lēs.

2 Trō'-ad.

3 O-çe'-a-nus.