The Chinese collection is called the _King_ (which means “books” or “bible”), and it includes what are known as the Chinese classics. These are five books written by Kung-fu-tse (Confucius) and his disciples in the sixth century B. C. They are included, with the Persian and Hindu books, in the collection of translations known as _The Sacred Books of the East_. A good deal of early Buddhist literature also is included. But the chief interest of all these works is historical and religious, not literary, and we must pass on to Greece for the earliest works which live because of their splendid literary qualities. §1. GREEK LITERATURE The works of ancient Greece which we have are only a tithe of the works written even by the greater Greek writers, yet almost every surviving play or poem is treasured as a classic. If you draw up a list of the fifty greatest writers from the dawn of civilization to the nineteenth century, you will find that at least ten of them are Greeks. However, it was only certain parts of Greece which produced these wonderful artists, and these regions, taken together, never had a population as large as that of Chicago. But we cannot here go into the historical reasons for their brilliance. It is enough for my purpose to say that the _earliest_ Greeks were semi-barbarians who filtered down into what we call Greece from the north between 2000 and 1000 B. C. When they reached the Mediterranean they came into touch with the old civilizations and were refined. Large numbers of them crossed to Asia Minor, where they mingled with the polished Cretans and Persians, and it is here that the first great Greek poets and thinkers wrote. Homer, their first poet, was regarded by the Greeks themselves in their most learned days as their greatest poet, a unique classic; and he is still one of the greatest poets of all time. Whether there ever was an individual named Homer is disputed. Most modern scholars have held for a long time that the poems to which his name is attached were slow growths contributed to by different poets of the tenth century B. C. But this is not at all settled, and many again think that Homer was an individual Greek of wonderful poetical power in or about the tenth century B. C. His immortal works are the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_. These are two long “epic” poems; that is to say long poems to be recited, not sung to music, telling of glorious deeds and romantic adventures. The first deals with the closing days of the ten-year siege of the city of Troy (or Ilium) in Asia Minor by the early Greeks. The hero is Achilles, the Greek prince, who sulks in his tent after a quarrel about a beautiful girl-captive, and is at last stung into action by the reverses of the Greeks and leads them on to the final destruction of Troy. Another of the chief Greek princes was Ulysses, and the _Odyssey_ describes his wanderings over the ancient world after the fall of Troy.