THK 1,1 FK AND WOliK OF HOME If . 



4:, 



can bo repeatedly used for different matter. In such ;i ease 

 the new has a tendency not only to supersede, but to destroy 

 the old. 



The second great service rendered by Homer was that he 

 provided his countrymen with the beginnings of history. There 

 is no reason for supposing that of the whole mass of heroes 

 found in the two poems any had ever been heard of before he 

 composed. Indeed it is clear that the Athenians, who claimed 

 to be indigenous, learned the names of their ancient heroes 

 from the Iliad, having themselves no traditions about the series 

 of their rulers ; and if this was so in Athens, doubtless the same 

 was the case in less literary areas of Hellas. It would, how- 

 ever, seem to be generally true that just as men acquire wealth 

 and station before they want pedigrees, so a community must 

 have accomplished something great before it feels the need of 

 history. There are cases wherein we find the same man 

 pedigreeless before he has acquired fortune and with a lengthy 

 pedigree at a later period ; thus the father of that Othman who 

 founded the Ottoman empire appears as a modest leader of a 

 Turkish tribe in the chronicle of the Seljukes of Asia Minor, but 

 in that of the Ottoman Sultans he has a pedigree of fifty 

 generations. These ancestors must indeed have existed, but as 

 they achieved nothing of consequence their names were not 

 remembered, and had afterwards to be conjecturally restored. 

 Similarly continuous Hellenic history commences with the 

 Persian Wars ; something had been accomplished which was 

 worthy of commemoration, and history arose. The fictions of 

 Homer then provided a past to which the present could be 

 linked ; when princes required ancestors, these could be found 

 in the Homeric poems. The names of these ancestors ordinarily 

 show that they were created for the romance wherein they play 

 a part ; but just as the real man (to use the phrase of Horace) 

 becomes by death a fable, so the hero of fiction has a tendency 

 to become historical. A recent writer called Spain the land of 

 Don Quixote and Ignatius Loyola, as though both were equally 

 historical or equally, fictitious. The house at Chertsey which 

 Bill Sikes attempted to rob was recently pulled down. 



The third service rendered by Homer was according to 

 Herodotus that he assigned the gods their pedigrees and their 

 functions. This cannot of course be accepted without modifi- 

 cation ; thus w r e learn from the cryptograms that the functions 

 of three deities are assumed, those of Apollo, Aphrodite and 

 Athene. Nevertheless the later theology is so clearly based on 

 what can be found in the Iliad and Odyssey, that Herodotus is 



