the early period of her history, was distinguished for martial ardour and military prowess; and that in the latter ages, elegance, politeness, and refinement were her predominant characteristics. This passion of the Greeks for shows and games, extremely laudable, and even beneficial, when confined within due bounds, was carried, at length, to a most blameable and pernicious excess. The victor, in the Olympic games, who had gained the first prize at running, wrestling, or driving a chariot, was crowned with higher honours than the general who had gained a decisive battle. His praises were sung by the poets; he had statues, and even temples, dedicated to his name. Cicero remarks, that among the Greeks it was accounted more glorious to carry off the palm at the Olympic games, than among the Romans to have obtained the honours of a triumph.* Of these nations, it was easy to foretel which was doomed to be the master, and which the slave. The games of Greece were not exclusively appropriated to gymnastic and athletic exercises. Those immense assemblies were the resort, likewise, of the poets, the historians, the rhapsodists, and even the philosophers. It is a singular fact, that in all nations there have been poets before there were writers in prose. The most ancient prose writers among the Greeks, of whom we have any mention, Pherecydes of Scyros, and Cadmus of Miletus, were posterior above 350 years to Homer. Of those poets who preceded Homer, some of whom are supposed to have been anterior to the Trojan war, as Linus and Orpheus, we have no remains.† *Propè majus et gloriosius quam Romæ triumphasse.-Ac. Orat. pro Flacco. + Linus is feigned to have been the son of Apollo, and is said to have been the first lyric poet. Stobæus gives some verses under the name of Linus; but they are believed not to be authentic. The fragments published under the name of Homer, of whose birth both the place and the era are very uncertain, is, according to the most probable opinion, believed to have been a native of Ionia, and to have flourished 277 years after the taking of Troy; that is, 970 years before the birth of Christ. This illustrious man, the father of poetry, was, probably, a wandering minstrel, who earned his subsistence by strolling from one city to another, and frequenting public festivals and the tables of the great, where his music and verses procured him a welcome reception. Lycurgus, the Spartan lawgiver, is said to have been the first who brought from Ionia into Greece complete copies of the Iliad and Odyssey; which, however, were not arranged in the order in which we now see them, till 250 years afterward, by Peisistratus, tyrant of Athens. The method which he took to collect those poems, by offering rewards to all who could recite, or produce in writing, any of the compositions of Homer, renders it probable that those poems had originally been composed in detached ballads, or rhapsodies.* From these various recitations, which were carefully transcribed, Peisistratus caused certain learned men of his court to prepare what they considered the most perfect copies, and to methodize the whole into regular poems, as we now find the Iliad and Odyssey. The division of each poem into twentyfour books is supposed to have been a later operation, as none of the classic authors quote Homer by books. The poems of the Iliad and Odyssey were again revised by Callisthenes and Anaxarchus, at the command Orpheus, in the Poeta minores Græci, (the minor Greek poets) and other collections, are plainly supposititious, and have not seen the air of remote antiquity. The poem of the Argonauts, which is attributed to him, is, on the authority of Stobæus and Suidas, the work of Onomacritus, who lived in the time of Peisistratus. See Suidae Lex. sub voce Orpheus. A passage of Athenæus confirms this notion. He tells us that the rehearsers of detached ballads, or Rapsodoi, were called Omersistai. Ath. Deip. I. xiv. 3 of Alexander the Great, who, it is well known, held them in the highest esteem. They were finally revised by the celebrated grammarian and critic, Aristarchus, by order of Ptolemy Philometor, and this last corrected copy is supposed to be the exemplar of all the subsequent editions. But the genuine merits of Homer are independent of all artificial arrangement. His profound knowledge of human nature-his masterly skill in the delineation of character-his extensive acquaintance with the manners, the arts, and attainments of those early ages-his command of the passions-his genius for the sublime, and the melody of his poetical numbers, have deservedly established his reputation as the greatest poet of antiquity. It has been justly remarked, that from the poems of Homer, as from the fountain of knowledge, the principal authors among the ancients have derived useful information in almost every department, moral, political, and scientific.* Although the subjects of the Iliad and Odyssey appear of great amplitude and extent, the action of both poems is, in reality, comprehended within a very short space of time. The action of the Iliad does not occupy many days. The indignation of Achilles upon the insult received from Agamemnon forms the subject of the poem. Achilles retires to his tent in deep resentment. His absence dispirits the Greeks, and gives fresh courage to the Trojans, who gain some considerable advantages, and are occupied in burning the Grecian fleet, when Patroclus comes forth, in the armour of his friend Achilles, to stimulate the valour of his countrymen. He is slain by the hand of Hector; an event which rouses Achilles from his sullen repose, who signally revenges the fate of his friend * Adjice Mæonidem; a quo ceu fonte perenni, "Add Mæonides; from whom, as from a perennial fountain, the lips of the poets have been wet with Pierean waters." And not only the poets, but, as Longinus informs us, histotians and philosophers drew largely from his copious source. by the death of the magnanimous Hector. He then celebrates the obsequies of Patroclus, and delivers up to Priam for a ransom the body of his brave son. This is in brief the whole action of the Iliad. The structure of the Odyssey, of which the principal action is included in a period of time equally short, is more various and artful than that of the Iliad. Ulysses had been absent many years from his country after the taking of Troy. His death was supposed certain, and Penelope, harassed by the importunate addresses of many suiters, could no longer invent plausible pretexts for delaying her choice of a second husband. At this crisis, the action of the Odyssey commences. Telemachus, the son of Ulysses, goes to Greece to interrogate Nestor regarding the fate of his father; and, during his absence, Ulysses, having left the island of Calypso, is thrown by a tempest on the island of the Pheæcians in the neighbourhood of Ithaca. Here he recites his various adventures, and obtains assistance from the prince of the country, for the recovery of his native possessions, now occupied and pillaged by the insolent suiters of his queen. He arrives in Ithaca, discovers himself to his son, and takes jointly with him effectual measures to accomplish his revenge, and extirpate these presumptuous ravagers. The whole action of the poem is comprised in forty days. The moral of the Iliad is, that dissension among the chiefs of a country is generally fatal to the people; and that of the Odyssey, that prudence joined to courage and perseverance are sufficient to surmount the most powerful obstacles. The authenticity of the historical facts recorded by Homer has been much controverted. Even the war of the Greeks against Troy, and its ultimate issue in the destruction of that eity, have been altogether doubted; and there are writers, of some name, who deny that Troy was ever taken by the Greeks; nay, that any such city as Troy ever had an existence. To this notion some countenance is derived from the cir cumstance that no vestige of a city is now to be found in the place of its supposed situation. But the universal belief of antiquity, and constant reference of the best-informed of the ancient writers to the general events of the Trojan war, and the facts connected with that belief in the authentic history of ancient Greece and Rome, seem to afford, at least, a much stronger presumption of veracity to the general opinion than to its contrary. Were it to be an established rule, that everything should be retrenched from the annals of nations for which we have not the most complete and irrefragable evidence, the body of ancient history would suffer indeed a great abridgment. As the Ionic was the native dialect of Homer, so it is that which he has chiefly employed, though not exclusively, availing himself occasionally of the Attic, the Doric, and the Eolic, as well as of the general license of the poetic. Hence that variety in the rhythm and melody of his composition, which never palls upon the ear; and hence, likewise, the happy coincidence of sound and sense, which seems in him to have been less the result of study and artifice than of a musical ear, which instinctively prompted the most appropriate expression, to give the greatest possible effect to the thought or idea to be conveyed. Besides the great works of the Iliad and Odyssey, the ludicrous poem of the Batrachomyomachia, or Battle of the Frogs and Mice, has been generally ascribed to Homer; and likewise a pretty numerous collection of hymns in honour of Apollo, Mercury, Venus, and the other divinities of his country. Of all these, however, the authenticity is questionable; though they have been cited as genuine by Thucydides, Lucian, Pausanias, and others among the ancient writers, and are in themselves of sufficient merit to give no dis countenance to the common belief. The Margites, an undoubted work of Homer, of a comic nature, of which no remnant is preserved, is likewise cited by |