these poems,
and at last asserted that they were not the work of a single poet, but
a collection of fragments from several different poets. This theory
has been attacked and supported with great energy: for a half century
men have flown into a passion for or against the existence of Homer.
Today we begin to think the problem insoluble. What is certain is that
these poems are very old, probably of the ninth century. The Iliad was
composed in Asia Minor and is perhaps the result of the union of two
poems--one dedicated to the combats of the Trojans, and the other to
the adventures of Achilles. The Odyssey appears to be the work of one
author; but it cannot be affirmed that it is of the same author as the
Iliad.

=The Greeks at the Time of Homer.=--We are not able to go back very
far in the history of the Greeks; the Homeric poems are their oldest
historical document. When these were composed, about the ninth century
B.C., there was not yet any general name to designate all the
inhabitants of Greece: Homer mentions them under the names of their
principal tribes. From his description it appears that they have made
some progress since their departure from Asia. They know how to till
the ground, how to construct strong cities and to organize themselves
into little peoples. They obey kings; they have a council of old men
and an assembly of the people. They are proud of their institutions,
they despise their less advanced neighbors, the Barbarians, as they
call them. Odysseus, to show how rude the Cyclops were, says, "They
have no rules of justice nor places where they deliberate; each one
governs himself, his wife, and children, and has no association with
others." But these Greeks themselves are half barbarians; they do not
know how to write, to coin money, nor the art of working in iron. They
hardly dare to trust themselves on the sea and they imagine that
Sicily is peopled with monsters.

=The Dorians.=--Dorians was the name given to those sons of the
mountaineers who had come from the north and had expelled or subjected
those dwelling in the plains and on the shore of the Peloponnesus;
the latter, crowded into too narrow limits, sent colonies into Asia.
Of these mountain bands the most renowned came from a little canton
called Doris and preserved the name Dorians. These invaders told how
certain kings of Sparta, the posterity of Herakles, having been thrust
out by their subjects, had come to seek the Dorians in their
m