tradition, and there is little hope that we shall ever be able to find out
whether it is true or not.

Homer's great poem, the Iliad, is the account of the Trojan War. His
Odyssey relates the adventures of the hero Ulysses, or Odysseus, as the
Greeks called him, in many years of wandering at the close of the war
before his enemies among the Gods would permit him to return to his home.
There were Trojan heroes, however, as well as Greek, and Æneas was one of
them. Virgil, the Latin poet, has told in the Æneid the story of his
troubles and adventures. Æneas, too, was driven over the waters, for the
Gods had told him it was the will of Jupiter, or Zeus, as it is in Greek,
for him to seek Italy and there found a city. Part of his journey is the
same as that of Ulysses. He, too, stops at the country of the one-eyed
giants and has to row as fast as he can to escape the rocks that they
throw at his vessel. He, too, hears the thunders of Mount Ætna and sees
the flashing of the fires of the volcano. His sailors point to it in fear
and whisper to one another, "That is the giant Enceladus. He rebelled
against the Gods and they piled the mountain on top of him. The fires of
Jupiter burn him, and he breathes out glowing flames. When he tosses from
one side to the other, the whole island of Sicily is shaken with a mighty
earthquake."

Virgil was no homeless singer; he was one of the great literary men of
Rome, and he read his poems aloud to the Emperor Augustus. He had a
handsome villa and a troop of friends. He enjoyed everything that was
beautiful and seemed as happy when a friend had written a good poem as if
he had composed it himself. He was never satisfied with his verse till he
had made every line as perfect as possible. When he was ill and knew that
he could not recover, he made a will, and in it he ordered the Æneid to be
burned, because it was not so polished as he wished. "I meant to spend