In the Iliad things are different, and the poem, as we have it now, gives us three distinct pictures of women’s position in life. The original epic, the ‘Wrath of Achilles’ has hardly any place for women at all. It is true that Achilles’ anger has for its cause the woman Briseis; but Achilles is angry, not at the loss of a woman whom he loves, but at the loss of a piece of property which he knows by experience to be of considerable value and service. Briseis is a slave—a thing, not a person. In the whole Iliad she is only mentioned ten times, and nine times out of those ten she is merely catalogued as an article of value, with the slave-dealer’s epithet, ‘fair-cheeked,’ attached. But this is hardly surprising. All the earlier portions of the Iliad are primarily lays of battle. They are anti-social, and woman has no part or lot in them. The Iliad however, is built up of many different strata, and one stratum—by no means the least important—was contributed by a poet who understood and sympathised with women. In thought and language he has many affinities with the author of the Odyssey, and he is probably responsible for the one passage in the poem where Briseis appears as a human being, and makes lament over the dead body of Patroclus: a speech which served Ovid as the groundwork wherefrom—with many embellishments—he expands the letter in ‘the Heroines.’ From the same hand as Briseis’ speech comes the supreme scene of the parting between Hector and Andromache, and all the closing passages of the Iliad: the ransoming of Hector, and the lamentation of the women—his wife, his mother, and Helen—over the corpse. No one can read the Iliad without feeling that the moral spirit of all these passages is of a very different and of a very much higher quality than the brutality of the earliest lays, and the loose cynicism of the last additions to the poem, which we shall have next to consider. II.—THE IONIANS AND HESIOD Between the Homeric poems in their first shape and the next stage of Greek literature there is a gap of centuries, and when the curtain goes up again on Greek history at the end of the eighth century, the centre of civilisation is in Asia Minor, the coast towns and their adjacent islands. The period of fighting, invasions, and tribal migrations is over: there has been a revival of the old Minoan culture, the Greeks have become a nation of traders living in luxurious cities, such as Miletus and Mytilene. Politically they are dependent on the great Eastern land empires, and from the East they have taken ideas which vitally affect the position of women.