[TO THE CHILDREN]
The greater part of this book is made up of stories from the poems of Homer and Virgil. Homer is thought to have lived in Greece about three thousand years ago, and yet his poems never seem old-fashioned and people do not tire of reading them. Boys and girls almost always like them, because they are so full of stories. If you want to read about giants or mermaids or shipwrecks or athletic contests or enchanters or furious battles or the capture of cities or voyages to strange countries, all you have to do is to open the Iliad and the Odyssey, and you will find stories on all of these subjects. Homer can describe a foot-race or the throwing of a discus so that you hold your breath to see who will win; and he can picture a battle so vividly that you almost try to dodge the arrows and spears. He can make the tears come into your eyes by telling you of the grief of the warrior’s wife when he leaves her and their baby son to go to battle; and he can almost make you shout, “Hurrah for the brave champion!” when he tells you what wonderful deeds of prowess have been done. He can describe a shield so minutely that you could make one like it; and he can paint a scene of feasting so perfectly that you feel as if you had been in the very room.
How is it that Homer makes his stories seem so real? There are several reasons, but one of the strongest is because he tells the little things that writers often forget to put in. When he describes the welcome given to two strangers at the house of the lost Ulysses, by Telemachus, son of the wanderer, he begins, “When they were come within the lofty hall, he carried the spear to a tall pillar and set it in a well-worn rack.” That one word, “well-worn,” gives us the feeling that Homer is not making up a story, but that he has really seen the rack and noticed how it looked. The same sentence shows why it is that people do not tire of reading Homer. It ends, “where also stood many a spear of hardy Ulysses.” This reminds the reader that in spite of the hero’s long years of absence, no one has been allowed to remove his weapons from their old place. From this one phrase, then, we can realize how much his wife and son love him, and how they have mourned for him. Telemachus welcomes the strangers, but we can feel how eager he is for them to be made comfortable as soon as possible so he can talk of his father and learn whether they have chanced to meet him in their wanderings. Homer’s poems are full of such sentences as these; and, no matter how many times one reads them, some thought, unnoticed before, is ever coming to light. That is why they are always fresh and new and interesting.
There is a tradition that Homer was blind, and that he wandered about from one place to another, singing or reciting his poems; but this is only tradition, and there is little hope that we shall ever be able to find out whether it is true or not.
Homer’s great poem, the Iliad, is the account of the Trojan War. His Odyssey relates the adventures of the hero Ulysses, or Odysseus, as the Greeks called him, in many years of wandering at the close of the war before his enemies among the Gods would permit him to return to his home. There were Trojan heroes, however, as well as Greek, and Æneas was one of them. Virgil, the Latin poet, has told in the Æneid the story of his troubles and adventures. Æneas, too, was driven over the waters, for the Gods had told him it was the will of Jupiter, or Zeus, as it is in Greek, for him to seek Italy and there found a city. Part of his journey is the same as that of Ulysses. He, too, stops at the country of the one-eyed giants and has to row as fast as he can to escape the rocks that they throw at his vessel. He, too, hears the thunders of Mount Ætna and sees the flashing of the fires of the volcano. His sailors point to it in fear and whisper to one another, “That is the giant Enceladus. He rebelled against the Gods and they piled the mountain on top of him. The fires of Jupiter burn him, and he breathes out glowing flames. When he tosses from one side to the other, the whole island of Sicily is shaken with a mighty earthquake.”
Virgil was no homeless singer; he was one of the great literary men of Rome, and he read his poems aloud to the Emperor Augustus. He had a handsome villa and a troop of friends. He enjoyed everything that was beautiful and seemed as happy when a friend had written a good poem as if he had composed it himself. He was never satisfied with his verse till he had made every line as perfect as possible. When he was ill and knew that he could not recover, he made a will, and in it he ordered the Æneid to be burned, because it was not so polished as he wished. “I meant to spend three years more on it,” he said. Fortunately for all the people who enjoy a great poem, the Emperor forbade that this part of the will should be carried out. He gave the manuscript to three friends of Virgil, all of them poets, with orders to strike out every phrase that they believed Virgil would have struck out on revision, but not to add one word. This is the way that the Æneid was saved for us. If it had been destroyed, we should have lost the work of one of the best storytellers that have ever lived.
Livy, too, was a friend of the Emperor Augustus, He lived in Rome, enjoying his companions, the libraries of the city, and, most of all, his independence. Even Virgil was ready to insert a few lines here and there in a poem to gratify his friends, or to choose a subject that he knew would please the Emperor; but Livy wrote on the subject that pleased him and treated it just as he believed to be best. His great work was his history, and this he begins with a little preface, as independent as it is graceful. “Whether I shall gain any share of glory,” he says, “by writing a history of the Roman people, I do not know. The work, however, will be a pleasure to me; and even if any fame that might otherwise be mine should be hidden by the success of other writers, I shall console myself by thinking of their excellence and greatness.” No such thing happened, however, for the kindly historian was so praised and his work so fully appreciated that he said he had all the fame he could wish.
Herodotus was a Greek who liked to travel. The world was very small in his day, for little of it was known except some of the lands bordering on the Mediterranean. To visit Tyre, Babylon, Egypt, Palestine, and the islands of the eastern Mediterranean, as he did, made a man a great traveler five centuries before Christ. Herodotus enjoyed all these wanderings, but they also “meant business” to him. Whenever he came to a place of historical interest, he stayed awhile. He explored the country thereabouts, he measured the important buildings, he talked with the people who knew most about the place. Then, when he came to write of its history, he did not write like a man who had read an article or two in an encyclopædia and was trying to recite what he had learned, but like one who knew the place which he was describing and liked to talk about it, and about what had happened there. It is no wonder that his history has always been a favorite; and to be a favorite author for twenty centuries is no small glory.
Ovid was a Latin poet who knew how to tell a story. He could not only invent a tale, but he could tell it so well that the reader feels as if it must be true. His most interesting stories, however, he did not invent, for they are a rewriting of the old mythological tales. In one respect he is like Homer; he never forgets the little things, and he tells so many details that we can hardly believe he is imagining them. In his story of Baucis and Philemon, for instance, Ovid does not forget to say that the cottage door was so low that the two gods had to stoop to pass through it; that Baucis hurried to brighten the fire with dry leaves and bits of bark; that one leg of the table was too short and had to be propped up with a piece of tile. He tells us that the kindhearted couple tried to catch their one goose so as to cook it for the supper of their guests; but that they were so old, and the goose so nimble of wing, that he escaped them and flew to the Gods for refuge. We are so accustomed to think of Latin as a grave, dignified language that almost every line of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” is a pleasant surprise. The stories that he tells, [“The Miraculous Pitcher”], [“The Golden Touch”], [“The Pomegranate Seeds”], and others, retold by Hawthorne, are favorites among the boys and girls of to-day, and they must have been liked just as well by the Roman children. In Rome the children read the great poets in school, and I fancy that they were always glad when the hour came to read the “Metamorphoses.”