In the beginning of their written record we find the Greeks just emerging from the family stage. The old men ruled; they were the wise and the rich, and no one disputed their authority. They formed alliances and led expeditions for the plundering of other states; then, returning to their ancestral halls, they hired musicians to entertain them by chanting the story of their exploits. So we have the Homeric poems, ruling-class propaganda, written to glorify the ancestors of powerful chieftains and fighting men, and to inculcate the spirit of obedience and martial pride in the new generations. Every device of the poet’s art is employed to lend prominence and splendor to the Homeric heroes. They are frequently demigods, the result of some mood of dalliance on the part of one of the high gods of Olympus, who came down to earth and encountered a lovely Greek maiden wandering in a meadow. This divine illegitimacy entitles the heroes to the center of the stage, and they take it. They are a set of extremely greedy, jealous, vain and capricious school-boys; and, what is still more significant, their gods, the highest ideal they could conceive, are exactly as greedy, jealous, vain and capricious. The only beautiful emotion in the poems is when some of the mothers and fathers, the wives and children of those heroes express for them an affection of which they are unworthy. We are accustomed to use the words “Homeric” and “epic” to signify something vast, elemental, portentous. How is it that Homer secures to his characters this “heroic” effect? By causing all the rest of the world to bow to their pretensions, by interesting the gods in their fate--and, above all else, by portraying them as unrestrained in their emotions and limitless in their desires. These are the familiar devices whereby aristocracy signifies itself. And that explains why such men as Matthew Arnold and Gladstone write volumes of rhapsody over Homer. There is in England a class which has invented ways of setting forth to the world the fact that it does not have to work for a living. There are things this class can do which the vulgar herd cannot do; and one of these things is to read and appreciate Latin and Greek literature. Homer is to the British world of culture what the top-hat is to the British world sartorial.