view, is the small island of Ithaca (about 37 square miles in extent), where the poet locates the home of his wandering hero and his wife Penelope, the one the early Greek ideal of practical sagacity, as Achilles is of martial impetuosity, and the other the model of conjugal devotion, as Nausicaa is of maidenly grace. The identity of the island has recently been called in question by an eminent archæologist (Dörpfeld), who regards Leucas as the island referred to in the Odyssey. But it would require strong evidence to overcome the presumption in favour of the island which now bears the name of Ithaca, and which corresponds to the poet’s description as well as we have any right to expect, considering the want of maps and guide-books at the time that he wrote. Perhaps its claim may yet receive fuller confirmation as the result of excavations; but in the meantime it is interesting to know that a terrace wall built of rough-hewn blocks has been discovered on the west coast, in the neighbourhood of a port to which the name Polis (City) is still applied, though there is no modern town to justify the name.
In this connection some interest also attaches to Cephallenia, the largest island of the group. There is a little village on its east coast, called Samos, from which the boat sails to Ithaca, and as an island called Samé is often mentioned in the Odyssey in connection with Ithaca, and the subjects of Odysseus are sometimes called Cephallenians, we are evidently not far from the scenes depicted by the great poet.
It would scarcely be possible to exaggerate the influence which the Homeric poetry has exercised on the intellect and imagination of the Greeks, and it is impossible for any one to enter into the spirit of Greek history and literature without some acquaintance with it. Homer has often been called the “Bible of the Greeks,” and there is truth in the saying both from a religious and a literary point of view. Herodotus was mistaken when he said that Homer and Hesiod had created the religion of the Greeks, but they certainly did much to systematise it, and, by giving Jupiter a place of supremacy among the gods, they paved the way for the triumph of monotheism.
In course of time Homer came to be regarded by his countrymen as their chief authority, not only on religious subjects but in almost all matters of interest to a thoughtful and inquiring mind. The reading and hearing of his poetry was the chief means of education. It was no uncommon thing for a boy to be able to recite both the Iliad and the Odyssey from memory. Classical writers speak of Homer in terms not only of admiration but of reverence. Æschylus said that he had gathered up the crumbs from Homer’s table; and Sophocles was so much in sympathy with the Odyssey that he was spoken of as “the tragic Homer.” There was, therefore, nothing strange in the sentiment which led Alexander the Great to carry about with him in his eastern campaigns a copy of Homer, said to have been edited for him by his old tutor Aristotle, and kept in a precious Persian casket. About a third of the recently discovered Egyptian papyri are inscribed with passages from the Iliad and the Odyssey.
While the oldest poetry of Greece, as of other countries, was probably of a lyric character, called forth by the joys and sorrows of common life or by the festive celebration of the seasons, the more stately epic, dealing with grander themes, and chanted rather than sung, with occasional accompaniment on the harp, found more favour with princes and their nobles, and attracted the most gifted authors to its service, till it reached the high stage of development which we find in the writings of Homer. These poems may be described as the oldest literature in existence, but they were doubtless the result of many previous efforts of a more archaic character, traces of which may be found in the older bards and legendary themes that are mentioned by Homer himself.
The Iliad and Odyssey show to what a high degree of civilisation and culture the Hellenic race had attained not much later than 1000 B.C. In the freeness of their spirit, combined with reverence for law, and in their vivid portraiture of the different members of the Pantheon, seen through the medium of a rich and sympathetic humanity, the poems present a pleasing contrast to all other heathen pictures of things human and divine. Their language is as admirable as the thought,—so rich and flexible, entirely free from the crudities that might have been expected in such primitive literature. Matthew Arnold sums up Homer’s characteristics from a literary point of view, as rapidity, plainness of thought, plainness of style, and nobleness. These qualities give the poet as strong a hold on the sympathies of his readers as he assigns to the minstrel in the Odyssey, when he makes Eumæus say of his old master, now returned, but still in disguise: “Even as when a man gazes on a minstrel whom the gods have taught to sing words of yearning joy to mortals, and they have a ceaseless desire to hear him as long as he will sing, even so he charmed me, sitting by me in the halls.”
The controversy which has been going on for more than a hundred years regarding the authorship of the poems does not much affect their interest for the general reader. Similar questions were raised more than two thousand years ago. Even before Plato’s time there had been a sifting process by which a number of hymns and minor poems formerly attributed to Homer (as the whole book of Psalms used to be to David) were found to be the work of unknown authors of a later date. A century or two later there were Alexandrian critics who denied that the Iliad and the Odyssey could have come from the same author. But modern critics have assailed the integrity of the two great poems themselves. They have based their theories partly on the improbability of such long poems being composed and transmitted before writing had come into general use (an argument which has lost its force owing to recent discoveries of early writing), and partly on the apparent repetitions, interpolations, and discrepancies, which are supposed to have been