Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 45896-h.htm or 45896-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/45896/45896-h/45896-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/45896/45896-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/worldofhomer00languoft THE WORLD OF HOMER by ANDREW LANG With Illustrations Longmans, Green, and Co. 39 Paternoster Row, London New York, Bombay, and Calcutta 1910 [Illustration: Moulded Pithos from Sparta. Illustrates 7th-6th Century Armour, with Thigh-Piece From _British School at Athens_, vol. xii. (_Macmillan Co. Ltd_.)] PREFACE In 1895 I published _Homer and the Epic_ (pp. 424), containing a criticism of Wolf's theory, if theory it can be called, which is the mother of modern Homeric criticism. I analysed, book by book, the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, observing on the modern ideas of interpolation and the modern objections to many scores of passages which, as a rule, I defended from charges of "lateness" and inconsistency. I added chapters on the Lost Epics of Greece, on Archeology, and on the early Epic poetry of other ages and peoples which offers analogies, more or less imperfect, with Homer. On the whole my conclusions were identical with those of Signor Comparetti, in his preface to his learned book on the Finnish _Kalewala_. He says: "The anatomical and conjectural analysis which has been applied so often and so long ... to the Homeric poems and other national epics, proceeds from an universal abstract principle, which is correct, and from a concrete application of that principle, which is imaginary and groundless." The true principle, recognised since the end of the eighteenth century, separates the "personal" and learned Art Epics, like the _Æneid_ and the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, from those which belong to the period of spontaneous epic production, "when Folk-singers fashioned many epic lays of small or moderate compass." (Perhaps Folk-singers is hardly the right term. Such songs of exploits as the Borderers "made themselves," as Bishop Lesley said in 1578, were not "epic lays," but ballads like "Jock o' the Side," and "Archie o' Cafield," and "Johnie Cock," despite its name the most romantic of all.)