The argument from structure is so conclusive that we can afford to leave unnoticed many other evidences of a common authorship, such as the facts that each poem begins with an invocation to the Muse, and that at least two thousand lines of the "Iliad" are found also in the "Odyssey." We need only mention some of the objections to the view that one poet composed both poems. Minstrels appear in the "Odyssey," it is said, but never in the "Iliad"; we reply that minstrels belong to the court and not to the camp. The gods, it is said, are at bitterer warfare with each other in the "Iliad" than in the "Odyssey"; yes, we answer, but in the "Iliad" there are greater strifes among men to call forth their anger.

There are differences of style and spirit between the poems, but these differences are perfectly consistent. with unity of authorship when we remember two things: first, that the "Odyssey" is a sequel to the "Iliad," depicting the subsequent fortunes of the heroes of Ilium, and having its scene in European Greece and the Ionian Isles, as the scene of the "Iliad" was in Asiatic Greece and the Isles of the Ægean; secondly, that the "Iliad" is the work of the author's youth, while the "Odyssey" is the production of his later age. Hence the hero of the first is a youthful warrior, the hero of the second an older wanderer; hence the geographical knowledge of the second is more extended than that of the first; hence the gods, in both poems a medley of vices and virtues, are on the whole more sober and moral in the "Odyssey" than in the "Iliad," as befits the more mature reflection of the author. The differences between the two poems are not greater than those

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between the "Paradise Lost" and the "Paradise Regained" of John Milton, or, to take more modern instances, between the earlier and the later writings of George William Curtis or Thomas Carlyle.

But my learned readers are by this time fancying that I have been choosing an easy controversy with a man of straw, while the real antagonist has been unattacked and unchallenged. I proceed, therefore, to discuss the more important question whether the "Iliad" or the "Odyssey" is in itself a unity. Was either poem the work of a single author, or are both the products of a gradual evolution, remains of a varied collection of hymns on the war of Troy and the after adventures of its heroes? Was there one Homer who composed these great epics, or are the poems we now possess a skillful combination of many ancient heroic lays? Is the present unity, or seeming unity, of each poem due to the genius of one great poet who struck out the plan of the whole at the first, or is it due to critical selection and careful compilation in subsequent ages? For the consideration of these questions I trust that what has been already said has prepared the way and has indicated the method. would still call attention to structure, and would maintain that in the structure of each poem there are evidences of unity so marked and admirable that they point indubitably, not to many authors, but to one.

I

The unity of the "Iliad" has sometimes failed to be perceived for the reason that the critic has mistaken the theme of the epic. That theme is not the fall of Troy nor the fate of Achilles; for neither of these is described in the poem. In the first line of the first book we are forewarned against such misapprehensions, when the

subject announced is Achilles' wrath. The first book, crowded with incident as it is, yet unembellished by a single simile, sets before us the cause of this wrath and the promise of Zeus to avenge the son of Thetis. It is only the death of the Trojan hero at Achilles' hands that sates this wrath, and therefore the climax of the poem is the slaying of Hector. All that follows after this is simply the letting down of the reader's excited feeling, and the poem ends with the line: "Such burial the illustrious Hector found," simply because the reader, without this knowledge, would have been left in painful anxiety. To this death of Hector, the sacrifice that appeases Achilles' wrath, the "Iliad" moves forward and onward from the very start. The reverses of the Greeks and the transient successes of Odysseus and Diomede, both and alike prepare the way for the day of reckoning when the son of Peleus comes to his own

once more.

And yet with this note of triumph there ever mingles a sorrowful minor strain. The hero of the Greeks was the object of sympathy as well as of admiration. An evil fate hung over him. "Whom the gods love die young." Though the death of Achilles does not form the proper subject of the poem, it is yet intimated prophetically. When, in the first book, the hero appeals to Thetis, it is with a reference to his "brief span of life.” In the ninth book again he says: "My returning home is taken from me." In the eighteenth, Thetis, shedding tears, admonishes him: "Straightway, after Hector, death is appointed for thee." In the nineteenth, we hear Achilles yet again: "Well know I that it is appointed me to perish here, far from my father dear and

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mother." In the twenty-first: "Under the wall of Troy I must die by the swift arrows of Apollo." And, finally, in the twenty-second book, Hector, with his dying breath, predicts the death of his fierce enemy: "In the day when Paris and Phoebus Apollo slay thee, for all thy valor, at the Scæan gate." Here in the successive books of the "Iliad" is the gradual unfolding of a prophecy. It reminds us of the far nobler progress in the Old Testament from the protevangelium in Genesis to the clear predictions in Micah and Isaiah. It has been well said that funeral notes mark every appearance of Achilles, and that they grow in intensity with every repetition, like a motif of Wagner's.

Now all this is indicative of an underlying design—a design which belonged to the first conception of the poem. It cannot be an afterthought, for it is part of the very warp and woof of the "Iliad.” As each feature of a great picture must be in the artist's mind before he puts his brush to canvas, so the ideas of Achilles' wrath and of his fateful triumph must have been from the first in the mind of some composer of the "Iliad." In a true sense the whole antedates the parts, not the parts the whole. Each subsequent part presupposes the parts that have gone before and is unintelligible without them.

This is markedly true of that very portion of the poem which has been often held to be a mere episode-the Doloneia, or the episode in which Odysseus and Diomede made their brilliant night foray upon the camp of the Trojans. When we remember that this follows upon Achilles' rejection of Agamemnon's embassy and offer of reconciliation, and especially when we remember that it lifts the Greeks from profound discouragement and

prepares the way for the new onset which brings the whole story to its culmination, it will be plain to us that the development of the plot makes indispensable the Doloneia. And so with every other extended passage which the critics have sought to detach. The whole "Iliad" is an Achilleid, and it is vain to seek within the poem for any nucleus which has unity in itself and to which other short productions were added to make up the present whole. Even Wolf never dared to specify what the precise nucleus is. Try to separate any such part from the rest, and you find such a network of mutual reference that you are compelled to stop; there are multitudinous connections, like bloodvessels, which prevent you from cutting off any single limb without destroying the life of the whole.

If the unity of the "Iliad" is demonstrable, that of the "Odyssey" is much more so. Indeed, I do not propose to enter into the detailed proof of it. I prefer to shorten my discussion by adopting as my own the conclusion of Monro, the latest writer on the subject, when he says: "The unity of the Odyssey,' as a whole, is beyond the reach of existing weapons of criticism." In both poems, besides this matter of structure to which I have adverted, there is a consistent delineation of character, which sets before us the greatest variety of gods and men, yet with never a slip or mistake in the way confounding the traits of one with the traits of another— each character preserves his peculiar identity whenever and under whatever circumstances he appears. There is a composite language-the archaic Ionian is mixed with the later and less flowing speech, leaving it flexible enough for purposes of adaptation, yet like the tongue

of