Ancient Classics for English Readers: Homer: The Iliad; The Odyssey

It is quite unnecessary here to discuss the question, on which the learned are very far from being agreed, wheth-er Homer-the "Prince of Poets"-had any real existence; whether he was really the author of the two great poems which bear his name, or whether they are the collected works of various hands, dovetailed into each other by some clever editor of ancient times. Homer will still re-tain his personality for the uncritical reader, however a sceptical criticism may question it. The blind old bard, wandering from land to land, singing his lays of the old heroic times to a throng of admiring listeners, must al-ways continue to be the familiar notion of the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Such was the universal creed of the world of readers until a comparatively recent date; and the speculations of modern scholars, in this as in oth-er cases, have been much more successful in shaking the popular belief than in replacing it by any constructive theory of their own which is nearly so credible. "Homer" is quite as likely to have been really Homer, as a mere name under whose shadow the poems of various un-known writers have been grouped.