A story-teller is more concerned to please his hearers than to guard against inconsistencies which they would never detect as listeners, and which even close readers did not detect for about thirty centuries. A work of art is not to be judged as a mass of machinery is, nor is a poem to be scrutinized with dictionary and grammar as you would a schoolboy’s exercise. This is the statue of Phidias over again. A stage scene will differ somewhat from a miniature, and an epic takes liberties with walls and rivers and even mountains and oceans, liberties which would not be tolerated in a quatrain. These principles are as obvious as daylight, but apostles of the obvious are needed in abundance in the harvest fields of higher criticism. What is needed for Homer is a study of his art in a broad but not shallow way, comprehensive and fundamental like Aristotle’s brief discussion. For the wonderfully analytical mind of Aristotle Homer’s _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ were models of unity, because he looked upon them as works of art, not scrap-heaps of philology and archeology. Put the poems of Homer on the pedestals for which he made them, for listeners who had to be entertained and clamored for variety. “It is a trait of Homer,” says a writer, “constantly to shift the scene. The motive may be weak, but the eye of the poet was not on the motive, but on the scene; so he not only shifts the scene but varies the description of the events.” The poet’s eye, it might be added, is also like the orator’s, fixed steadily on his audience, and the audience must be relieved even if masonry or geography suffer. The paramount principles of variety and growth of interest which govern every good story hold sway in Homer. Take a staple action of the _Iliad_, the battles. Homer’s audience wanted fighting, yet jaded listeners and the artistic poet knew there must be in the fighting variety and growth of interest. Even in the matter of killing men, which seems to us unimportant but which would not be to an audience of fighters, Homer has shown a wonderful variety. A German professor has diagnosed the Homeric surgery with all the thoroughness of his class. The conclusions may be found in Seymour’s _Life in the Homeric Age_. The number and variety of the wounds, the weapons used, the percentages of fatalities, are all given in full detail. “Hardly could the poet have covered more completely the possibilities of wounds for the human body if he had proceeded systematically and mechanically.” Some will have it that Homer was a surgeon and an army doctor. Certainly the history of anatomy has its first chapter in the _Iliad_.