“So Hector said, and sea-like roared his host, Then loosed their sweating horses from the yoke, And each beside his chariot bound his own, And oxen from the city, and goodly sheep In haste they drove, and honey-hearted wine And bread from out their houses brought, and heaped Their firewood, and the winds from off the plain Rolled the rich vapor far into the heaven. And there all night upon the bridge of war Sat glorying, many a fire before them blazed; As when in heaven the stars about the moon Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid, And every height comes out, and jutting peak And valley, and the immeasurable heavens Break open to their highest, and all the stars Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart; So many a fire between the ships and stream Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy. A thousand on the plain; and close by each Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire; And champing golden grain the horses stood Hard by their chariots waiting for the dawn.” These few samples of the similes scattered thick throughout the Iliad show that Homer laid all the appearances of Nature under contribution, and the wildest and grandest not less than those that are home-like. True it is that Homer in the Iliad nowhere stops to paint scenery for its own sake. He does this less than Virgil or most later epic poets. He is so full of business and of human action that he cannot stay for description. But in such passages as the Catalogue of the Grecian Host in the second book, there are brief but fine touches of geographical landscape, as he tells of the many lands whence they came; or again in his fixed but most suggestive epithets of places, as “the windy Ilion,” “many-fountained Ida,” and the deep-whirlpooled Scamander; Lacedæmon in the hollow of the hills; Messe, haunt of wild doves; vine-clad Epidaurus; windy Enerpe; Orchomenus rich in flocks. I would that I could linger over this subject and quote some more passages, such as that where Achilles, long absent, returns to the conflict, and the immortal gods come down to range themselves, some with the Greeks, some on the side of Troy; and heaven and earth, the mountains and the rivers and the sea and the nether world beneath, all are moved to take part in the great issue.