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Homer's Iliad: Odyssey

HOMER IT is the charm of the stories of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" that has allured readers in all ages. As the "Iliad" is the first great romance of high adventure, of deeds of perfect chivalry and wild fighting, of brave men and noble women, so the "Odyssey" is the first great novel of adventure in strange parts, of miscreants thwarted and brought to justice by the hero, who in the end comes to his own and rescues the true wife who bides at home and waits the triumphant return of him who shall free her from the trials that beset her. The Greeks started the modern world going. As with Icarus they thought of the flying-man, with Agamemnon of wireless telegraphy in the message he sent leaping across the sea from Troy to Argos in the flames upon the hilltops, and with Odysseus of the motion-picture in the vision of all past men and women who flitted before his eyes on his trip to the lower world, so, too, they introduced us to practically every form of human expression. The prose-romance came late in their development. The novel and the short story as they knew them for centuries were embodied in the "Iliad" and "Odyssey." Whether one poet wrote the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" has been a question that has busied many thousands of minds. The perfect form in which they have come down to us proves clearly that many centuries contributed to the perfecting of the literary style in which they are written. The discussion over the "Homeric Problem" have laid the basis for literary and biblical criticism in modern scholarship.