Homer

Excerpt from Homer

Minor which faces the islands and the Greek middle sea, about 800 years before the birth of Christ. When or how they were originally com posed, or through what changes they passed before they reached their consummate form, is unknown; the history on which they were based was supposed to have happened at least two centuries earlier than this, and in between there had come one of those great revolutions in hu man affairs which obliterate the ancient land marks, the invasion and conquest of Greece by the Greeks. In some way or another, no doubt, generations of poets may have gone to their making. As it has been well said that the name less architect of Westminster Abbey was not this man or that, but the people of south-east ern England, so the maker of the Iliad and Odyssey was not merely a poet, or even a guild of poets, but awhole nation. But this vast work finally took shape in the hands of one or two great poets.