The first of the two great poems commonly ascribed to Homer is
called the Iliad--a title which we may be sure was not given it by
the author. It professes to treat of a quarrel between Agamemnon
and Achilles that broke out while the Greeks were besieging the city
of Troy, and it does, indeed, deal largely with the consequences of
this quarrel; whether, however, the ostensible subject did not
conceal another that was nearer the poet's heart--I mean the last
days, death, and burial of Hector--is a point that I cannot
determine. Nor yet can I determine how much of the Iliad as we now
have it is by Homer, and how much by a later writer or writers.
This is a very vexed question, but I myself believe the Iliad to be
entirely by a single poet.

The second poem commonly ascribed to the same author is called the
Odyssey. It deals with the adventures of Ulysses during his ten
years of wandering after Troy had fallen. These two works have of
late years been believed to be by different authors. The Iliad is
now generally held to be the older work by some one or two hundred
years.

The leading ideas of the Iliad are love, war, and plunder, though
this last is less insisted on than the other two. The key-note is
struck with a woman's charms, and a quarrel among men for their
possession. It is a woman who is at the bottom of the Trojan war
itself. Woman throughout the Iliad is a being to be loved, teased,
laughed at, and if necessary carried off. We are told in one place
of a fine bronze cauldron for heating water which was worth twenty
oxen, whereas a few lines lower down a good serviceable maid-of-all-
work is valued at four oxen. I think there is a spice of malicious