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The Shuttle: Greeks

For a few months Nigel lingered, stricken with paralysis, and then the kindly Weaver of the Shuttle slipped out his black thread, leaving Rosy contented with her father and mother, while the golden threads of love of Betty for her man wove themselves in and out, forming the perfect web of happiness. HOMER THE Greeks were princes of story-telling, and Homer was their king. Who he was and where he lived is one of the unanswered questions of history. Seven cities and more claimed him as their greatest source of pride. The most we can be sure of is that to us have come down two of the many poems that bear his name, the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey."

Like the Hebrew Bible, they have become part of the heritage of universal humanity. We call them epic poems; they are rather great historical romances. Each has a story of its own; in the "Iliad" it is the wrath of Achilles against King Agamemnon; in the "Odyssey" it is the wanderings of Odysseus on his way back from the wars at Troy. Back of them both as remoter cause is the tale of the fatal beauty of Helen. In each are innumerable short stories, which have been storehouses of romance for writers ever since first they became known.

It is one of the marvels of the Greeks that they step out of the mist of unrecorded history with a highly developed civilization, portrayed in two of the world's masterpieces of literature. The Greeks in later years wrote "lives" of Homer with great exactness and minute detail. They knew no more about the "blind bard" than do we. Indeed they were not even sure that one poet wrote both tales. But that the stories were the work of supreme genius they were as sure as have been all men since their day who have read them. Homer was the Greeks' "best seller"; they thronged in thousands to hear him recited; their religion, their thought, their education were all based on him under whose name is told the great story of their heroes.