s between
the Iliad and Odyssey, Ulysses will become the chief hero. After the
death of Achilles, there will be a contest for the latter's arms
between him and Ajax; Ulysses wins. That is, Brain not Brawn is to
control henceforth. Under the lead of Intelligence, which is that of
Ulysses, Troy falls.

The Odyssey, then, deals with the return of Ulysses from the Trojan
War, and lasts ten years, as the account runs. But the poet is not
writing a history, not even a biography, in the ordinary sense; he does
not follow step by step the hero's wanderings, or state the events in
chronological order; we shall see how the poem turns back upon itself
and begins only some forty days before its close. Still the Odyssey
will give not merely the entire return from Troy, but will suggest the
whole cycle of its hero's development.

The first half of the cycle, the going to Troy and the stay there,
lasted ten years, though some accounts have made it longer. The Iliad,
though its action is compressed to a few days, treats generally of the
first half of the cycle and hence it is the grand presupposition of the
Odyssey, which takes it for granted everywhere. The Iliad, however, is
a unity and has its own center of action, which is the wrath of
Achilles and his reconciliation also; it is in itself a complete cycle
of individual experience in the Trojan War.

We now begin to get an outline of the Unity of Homer. In the first
place the Iliad is a unity from the stand-point of its hero Achilles,
who has a completely rounded period of his life portrayed therein,
which portrayal, however, gives also a vivid picture of the Trojan War
up to date. As an individual experience it is a whole, and this is what
makes it a poem and gives to it special unity. But it is only a
fragment of the Trojan cycle--a half or less than a half; it leaves
important problems unsolved: Troy is not taken, Achilles is still
alive, the new order under the new hero Ulysses has not yet set in, and
chiefly there is no return to Greece, which is even more difficult than
the taking of Troy. Hence the field of the second poem, the Odyssey,
which is also an individual experience--has to be so in order to be a
poem--embraces the rest of the Trojan cycle after the Iliad.

Thus we may well hold to these unities in Homer: the unity of the
Iliad, the unity of the Odyssey, and the unity of the Iliad and the
Odyssey. Both together make one grand cycle of human history and of
human