Literature of the world : an introductory study . form a connected seriesand move to a common think of the epicasbeingalso frequently national incharacter, narrating eventswhich a people may deemmost worthy of remem-brance in its history. The Iliad and the Odys-sey existed in practicallytheir present form by theend of the ninth They seem to have beenlost sight of for a consider-able period and then to havereappeared. Public recita-tions made Homeric poetrygenerally known. There is in one of the Platonic dialogues a striking picture of Ion, the rhap-sodist, who went from plac
Literature of the world : an introductory study . form a connected seriesand move to a common think of the epicasbeingalso frequently national incharacter, narrating eventswhich a people may deemmost worthy of remem-brance in its history. The Iliad and the Odys-sey existed in practicallytheir present form by theend of the ninth They seem to have beenlost sight of for a consider-able period and then to havereappeared. Public recita-tions made Homeric poetrygenerally known. There is in one of the Platonic dialogues a striking picture of Ion, the rhap-sodist, who went from place to place and, in embroidered dress andwreath, addressed as many as twenty thousand persons at a was carried out of himself in the recitation of some strikingpassage, such as the apparition of Odysseus leaping forth on thefloor, recognized by the suitors and casting his arrows at his feet,or the description of Achilles rushing at Hector, or the sorrows ofAndromache, Hecuba or Priam.^ At the tale of pity his eyes1 Translation by HOMER 62 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD were filled with tears, and when he spoke of horrors his hair stoodon end and his heart throbbed. From Platos ? Protagoras we learnof the large place occupied by the writings of Homer in the educa-tion of Greek youth during the great Attic period. The Greeksregarded him as their earliest historian and as an authority. Herod-otus and the later biographers accepted early traditions of an ac-tual Homer (who had lived about 850 ), the author of bothIliad and Odyssey. Modern literary criticism has been much con-cerned for a century or more with the Homeric question. Fascinat-ing as the subject is, we cannot enter into it in this place. Theidentity of Homer cannot be determined. While it is not certainthat one poet produced both Iliad and Odyssey, there has been inrecent years a strong movement in the direction of accepting asingle authorship.^ Scholarship and archaeology seem to prove theexistence of the
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