At all these places, as on the site of Troy’s citadel, I loved to recall the Greeks’ love of beauty and the marvelous mythopœic faculty of their poets, and it required no spur to fancy to imagine that I was, for the moment, in actual communion with the thoughts and feelings of the world’s masters of beauty in art and literature. The plain of Troy [it has been said] has been a battlefield not only of heroes, but of scholars and geographers, and the works which have been written on the subject form a literature to themselves.[74] This is true. But, however much students of the _Iliad_ may have disagreed about the location of the city of Priam, about the courses of the Simois and Scamander and certain minor details, all have been compelled to recognize the accuracy of the poet’s topographical descriptions and the appropriateness of the epithets which he applies to the most striking features of the enchanting landscape which he so graphically depicts. He does not, of course, give the numbers and distances, as some of his critics would seem to demand, that a civil engineer would require for a contour-line map. This would violate entirely the most elementary canons of poetical treatment. But he does use numbers and distances so far as they are necessary to give reality to the action of the poem. And though his realities are in the highest degree idealized, nevertheless, so fully do they meet the general exigencies of time and place that they prove almost to demonstration that Homer was thoroughly familiar not only with Troy but also with all the surrounding region.[75] The epithets applied by the poet to the mountains, islands, rivers, and other natural features described in his matchless work show that he must have been intimately acquainted with them, not by hearsay but by personal inspection. Thus when he speaks of the “rapid current” of the Hellespont, of the “broad-flowing” and “eddying” Scamander, of “the peak of lofty Samothrace appearing over the intervening mass of Imbros,” thus enabling Poseidon to look down from its summit on the plain of Troy, we are convinced that the author of the _Iliad_ had carefully examined on the spot the objects he so vividly brings before our view. And so it is in his graphic delineations of “lofty,” “many-fountained” Ida, of “many-crested,” “dazzling” _Olympus, the reputed seat_ _Eternal of the gods, which never storms_ _Disturb, rains drench, or snow invades, but calm._ So graphic and exact indeed are the epithets and descriptions of Homer that they far surpass those of the later poets of Greece. In this respect he constantly reminds one of Dante, that consummate master of epithet and of brief but most exact description, who had the rare faculty of expressing the import of a whole sentence in a single word. I was then more than ever before impressed with the truth of Gœthe’s words: _Wer den Dichter will verstehen_ _Muss in Dichter’s Lande gehen._[76]