The mother of the Lap'ithae.
Thus each to Homer has assigned
The birthplace just which suits his mind.

But if I read the volume right,
By Phoebus to his followers given,
I'd say they're all mistaken quite,
And that his real country's heaven;
While, for his mother, she can be
No other than Calliope.
--Trans. by MERIVALE.

The principal works of Homer, and, in fact, the only ones that
have not been declared spurious, are the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The former, as we have seen, relates some of the circumstances
of the closing year of the Trojan war; and the latter tells the
story of the wanderings of the Grecian prince Ulysses after the
fall of Troy. The ancients, to whom the writings of Homer were
so familiar, fully believed that he was the author of the two
great epics attributed to him. It was left to modern critics to
maintain the contrary. In 1795 Professor F. A. Wolf, of Germany,
published his Prolegomena, or prefatory essay to the Iliad, in
which he advanced the hypothesis that both the Iliad and the
Odyssey were a collection of separate lays by different authors,
for the first time reduced to writing and formed into the two
great poems by the despot Pisis'tratus, of Athens, and his
friends. [Footnote: Nearly all the modern German writers follow
the views of Wolf against the Homeric authorship of this poem,
but among the English critics there is more diversity of opinion.
Colonel Mure, Mr. Gladstone, and others oppose the German view,