National Epics

ace reciting his poems, until he died in los. Seven cities, Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Ithaca, Pylos, Argos, and Athens, claimed to be his birthplace. In 1795, Wolf, a German scholar, published his " Prolegomena," which set forth his theory that Homer was a fictitious character, and that the Iliad was made up of originally unconnected poems, collected and combined by Pisistratus. Though for a time the Wolfian theory had many advocates, it is now generally conceded that although the stories of the fall of Troy were current long before Homer, they were collected and recast into one poem by some great poet. That the Iliad is the work of one man is clearly shown by its unity, its sustained simplicity of style, and the centralization of interest in the character of Achilles. The destruction of Troy, for a time regarded as a poetic fiction, is now believed by many scholars to be an actual historical event which took place about the time of the ./Eolian migration. The whole story of the fall of Troy is not related in the Iliad, the poem opening nine years after the beginning of the war, and closing with the death of Hector. The Iliad is divided into twenty-four books, and contains nineteen thousand four hundred and sixty-five lines. As a work of art the Iliad has never been excelled; moreover, it possesses what all works of art do not, ? " thetouches of things human " that make it ours, although the centuries lie between us and its unknown author, who told h...