The _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ show to what a high degree of civilisation and culture the Hellenic race had attained not much later than 1000 B.C. In the freeness of their spirit, combined with reverence for law, and in their vivid portraiture of the different members of the Pantheon, seen through the medium of a rich and sympathetic humanity, the poems present a pleasing contrast to all other heathen pictures of things human and divine. Their language is as admirable as the thought,--so rich and flexible, entirely free from the crudities that might have been expected in such primitive literature. Matthew Arnold sums up Homer’s characteristics from a literary point of view, as rapidity, plainness of thought, plainness of style, and nobleness. These qualities give the poet as strong a hold on the sympathies of his readers as he assigns to the minstrel in the _Odyssey_, when he makes Eumæus say of his old master, now returned, but still in disguise: “Even as when a man gazes on a minstrel whom the gods have taught to sing words of yearning joy to mortals, and they have a ceaseless desire to hear him as long as he will sing, even so he charmed me, sitting by me in the halls.” The controversy which has been going on for more than a hundred years regarding the authorship of the poems does not much affect their interest for the general reader. Similar questions were raised more than two thousand years ago. Even before Plato’s time there had been a sifting process by which a number of hymns and minor poems formerly attributed to Homer (as the whole book of Psalms used to be to David) were found to be the work of unknown authors of a later date. A century or two later there were Alexandrian critics who denied that the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ could have come from the same author. But modern critics have assailed the integrity of the two great poems themselves. They have based their theories partly on the improbability of such long poems being composed and transmitted before writing had come into general use (an argument which has lost its force owing to recent discoveries of early writing), and partly on the apparent repetitions, interpolations, and discrepancies, which are supposed to have been [Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF ATHENA AT SUNIUM (CAPE COLONNA) Distant view over the hills.]