THE LIFE AND WORE OF BOMER. 



4:; 



Hellenic ruler is the true heir to the throne, for by the plan of 

 Zeus the older dynasty of the same family had been extinguished. 

 The ancestor of Aeneades who came next in succession was by no 

 means responsible for this ; on the contrary, he had done his 

 utmost to save the house ofPriam. By Divine intervention he 

 had been rescued from the Held wherein his desperate valour 

 was likely to prove fatal to him, and so been able to found a line 

 which duly inherited Priam's throne. On the other hand 

 Aeneades was also a Hellene, whence the prehistoric conquest 

 of Ilios by the Hellenes gave him another claim to the 

 sovereignty. 



To fictions of this sort analogies can easily be found. It seems 

 to furnish wonderful consolation to a conquered people to be 

 told that their conqueror is one of themselves and indeed the 

 legitimate heir to their throne. Hence Alexander the Great in 

 the Egyptian form of his biography is made out an Egyptian. 

 In the Aeneid when Aeneas comes to Italy it turns out that his 

 ancestor was an Italian. In the official chronicle of the Otto- 

 mans, it is shown that although their founder was at first in the 

 service of the Sel jukes of Asia Minor, whose throne his 

 descendants inherited, he had nothing to do with the overthrow 

 of that dynasty ; on the contrary, he was its bravest champion. 

 Only Allah had decreed the fall of the Seljukes and the rise of 

 the Ottomans, who were to last for ever. 



With the Hellenes, we are told, the next best thing to winning 

 a battle was winning a horse-race. Aeneas ex hypothesi cannot 

 win the battle between the invaders and the Trojans ; an oppor- 

 tunity has then to be found wherein he can win a horse-race. In 

 the chariot-race of the Hellenes, as in the modern horse-race, it 

 is the owner who gets the glory. Funeral games are provided 

 wherein the horses of Aeneas win, whence their owner is con- 

 soled for his unavoidable defeat in the field. But a fresh Divine 

 intervention is required to enable these horses to take part in 

 the race. 



For the rest the Poet employs the framework of the familiar 

 love-story, which begins with the parting of lovers, and ends 

 with their re-union. Everything that intervenes has something 

 to do with the result. The parting brings about the re-union 

 by an unforeseen chain of causation. 



The chief features of Homeric composition were skilfully 

 made out by Aristotle. He observed that in these Poems nothing 

 could be omitted or displaced without the whole suffering. In 

 a way then, it may be said that the process of composition com- 

 mences from the end. The last line is thought out before the 



