stward toward Egypt,
Phoenicia, and the Oriental borderland. The earlier fairy tales of
Ulysses have their scene in the West, while the later romances or
novelettes interwoven in the last 12 Books have their scene in the
East, with one exception possibly.

The main fact, however, of the Trojan cycle is the great separation,
deepest in history, between Orient and Occident, through the
instrumentality of Greece. The civilization of Europe and the West is
the offspring of that separation, which is still going on, is a living
fact, and is the source of the vexed Eastern question of European
politics.

III. We are living to-day in that separation; our art, science,
education, poetic forms, our secular life largely come from ancient
Greece. Oriental art, customs, domestic life, government, we do not as
a rule fraternize with; the Greek diremption is in us still; only in
one way, in our religious life, do we keep a connection with an
Oriental people. But is this separation never to be overcome? Is there
to be no return to the East and completion of the world's cycle?

_The Cycle._ We have often used this word, and some may think that we
have abused it; still our object is to restore the Greek conception of
these poems, as they were looked at and spoken of by Hellas herself.
The idea of the cycle was fundamental in grasping the epics which
related to the Trojan War, and this War itself was regarded as a cycle
of events and deeds, which the poets sang and put into their poetic
cycle. Let us briefly trace this thought of the cycle as developed in
old Greece.

I. In two different passages of his _Organon_, Aristotle calls the epic
a cycle and the poetry of Homer a cycle. Now both passages are employed
by him to illustrate a defective syllogism, hence are purely
incidental. But no instance could better show the prevalence of the
idea of a cycle as applied to Homer and epic poetry, for the
philosopher evidently draws his illustration from something familiar to
everybody. It had become a Greek common-place 350 B.C., and probably
long before, that an epic poem, such as the Iliad or Odyssey, is
cyclical, and that both together make a cycle.

II. But this idea develops, and expands beyond the Iliad and Odyssey,
which are found to leave out many events of the Trojan Cycle. Indeed
the myth-making spirit of Greece unfolds new incidents, deeds, and
characters. The result is that many poets, after Homer had completed
his cycle, began