is the child of nature; yes,
Her darling child in whom we trace
The features of the mother's face,
Her aspect and her attitude.

--LONGFELLOW

HOMER

By WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE

(ABOUT 1000 B.C.)

[Illustration: Homer.]

The poems of Homer differ from all other known poetry in this, that
they constitute in themselves an encyclopaedia of life and knowledge at
a time when knowledge, indeed, such as lies beyond the bounds of
actual experience, was extremely limited, but when life was singularly
fresh, vivid, and expansive. The only poems of Homer we possess are
the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," for the Homeric hymns and other
productions lose all title to stand in line with these wonderful
works, by reason of conflict in a multitude of particulars with the
witness of the text, as well as of their poetical inferiority. They
evidently belong to the period that follows the great migration into
Asia Minor, brought about by the Dorian conquest.

The dictum of Herodotus, which places the date of Homer four hundred
years before his own, therefore in the ninth century B.C., was little
better than mere conjecture. Common opinion has certainly presumed him
to be posterior to the Dorian conquest. The "Hymn to Apollo," however,
which was the main prop of this opinion, is assuredly not his. In a
work which attempts to turn recent discovery to account, I have
contended that the fall of Troy cannot properly be brought lower than
about 1250 B.C., and that Homer may probably have lived within fifty
years of it.

The entire presentation of life and character in the two poems is
distinct from, and manifestly anterior to, anything made known to us
in Greece under and after that conquest. The study of Homer has been
darkened and enfeebled by thrusting backward into it a vast mass of
matter belonging to these later periods, and even to the Roman
civilization, which was different in spirit and which entirely lost
sight of the true position of Greeks and Trojans and inverted their
moral as well as their martial relations. The name of Greeks is a
Roman name; the people to whom Homer has given immortal fame are
Achaians, both in designation and in manners. The poet paints them at
a time when the spirit of national life was rising within their
borders. Its first efforts had been seen in the expeditions of Achaian
natives to conquer the Asiatic or Egyptian immigrants who had, under
the name of Cadmeians (etymologically, "for