put my finger with even a passing idea that he may be the author.
Still, if under some severe penalty I were compelled to find him, I
should say it was just possible that he might consider his own lot
to have been more or less like that which he forecasts for Astyanax,
the infant son of Hector. At any rate his intimate acquaintance
with the topography of Troy, which is now well ascertained, and
still more his obvious attempt to excuse the non-existence of a
great wall which, according to his story, ought to be there and
which he knew had never existed, so that no trace could remain,
while there were abundant traces of all the other features he
describes--these facts convince me that he was in all probability a
native of the Troad, or country round Troy. His plausibly concealed
Trojan sympathies, and more particularly the aggravated exaggeration
with which the flight of Hector is described, suggest to me, coming
as they do from an astute and humorous writer, that he may have been
a Trojan, at any rate by the mother's side, made captive, enslaved,
compelled to sing the glories of his captors, and determined so to
overdo them that if his masters cannot see through the irony others
sooner or later shall. This, however, is highly speculative, and
there are other views that are perhaps more true, but which I cannot
now consider.

I will now ask you to form your own opinions as to whether Homer is
or is not a shrewd and humorous writer.

Achilles, whose quarrel with Agamemnon is the ostensible subject of
the poem, is son to a marine goddess named Thetis, who had rendered
Jove an important service at a time when he was in great
difficulties. Achilles, therefore, begs his mother Thetis to go up
to Jove and ask him to let the Trojans discomfit the Greeks for a