of a great cycle,
which cycle again suggests a still greater cycle, which last is the
movement of the World's History. Recall, then, that the Odyssey by
itself is a complete cycle as far as the experience of its hero is
concerned; but as belonging to an epoch, it is but half of the total
cycle of the Trojan War. Then again this Trojan War is but a fragment
of a movement which is the total World's History. Now can this be set
forth in a summary which will suggest the movement not of the Odyssey
alone, but also the movement underlying and overlying the poem? Let us
make the trial, for a world-poem must take its place in the World's
History, which fact gives the final judgment of its worth.

I. In the prehistoric time before Homer, there was an Orient, but no
Occident; the spiritual day of the latter had not yet dawned. Very
early began the movement toward separation, which had one of its
greatest epochs in the Trojan War.

1. Greece in those old ages was full of the throes of birth, but was
not yet born. It was still essentially Oriental, it had no independent
development of its own, though it was moving toward independence. The
earliest objects dug out of the long buried cities of Greece show an
Oriental connection; the famous sculptured lions over the gate of
Mycenae last to this day as a reminder of the early Hellenic connection
of European Greece with the Orient, not to speak of Cyprus, Crete, and
the lesser islands of the AEgean.

2. Then came the great separation of Greece from the Orient, which is
the fundamental fact of the Trojan War, and of which the Homeric poems
are the mighty announcement to the future. Troy, an Orientalizing
Hellenic city in Asia, seizes and keeps Greek Helen, who is of Europe;
it tears her away from home and country, and through its deed destroys
Family and State. Greek Europe restores her, must restore her, if its
people be true to their institutional principles; hence their great
word is restoration, first of their ideal Helen, and secondly of
themselves.

So all the Greeks, in order to make the separation from the Orient and
restore Helen, have to march forth to war and thus be separated
themselves from home and country, till they bring back Helen to home
and country. The deed done to Helen strikes every Greek man till he
undoes it. The stages of this movement may be set down separately.

(_a_) The leaving home for Troy--Achilles, Agamemnon, Ulysses; all
the heroes had thei