Homer, that king of story-tellers, traveller and well-loved school teacher, is supposed to have lived in Greece about three thousand years ago.

Trained story-tellers or bards, with extraordinary memories, were not rare in that simple age. Many argue that writing for literary purposes was not used by the Greeks at that time, and that Homer recited his tales to groups of friends, to his school children, and at the great yearly festivals. It is amazing what memories people had in the days when there were no books, when there were not a thousand and one things to distract them; yet we have proof that such memories are possible in our time. About fifty years ago, poor, uneducated Blind Jamie was a well-known character in the town of Stirling, in Scotland. He could recite the Bible from beginning to end, without mistake, and could even repeat any verse from any part of the Bible.

From the mass of old folk tales that he gathered on his travels, Homer, the inspired minstrel, wove one continuous story, the greatest epic poems of all time, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Later, one of the Greek chroniclers tells us, Pisistratus edited them with taste and care, “in the order in which we have them.”

Although the world we visit in Homer’s pages is a Greek world, it is singularly like our own in many respects. His men and women face the same problems of war and peace, of triumph and defeat, of pleasure and pain, as we do. His soldiers and sailors in the spirit-stirring war might be men of to-day. And best of all, he makes us see, feel, hope, fear, laugh and cry through these marvellous pages, over which, for hundreds of years, boys and girls of all countries have lingered, entranced.

The Iliad is the account of the Trojan War. The Odyssey tells of the Grecian hero, Ulysses, and of his years of wandering and adventure, after the fall of Troy, before he finally reaches his home and wife and son, in Ithaca.

Later, Virgil, greatest of Roman poets, in his desire to do for the Latin nation what Homer did for the Greeks, wrote the Æneid. In this he describes the adventures of the Trojan hero, Æneas. As you will see, his book is modelled after Homer’s, even in small details.

Homer and Sir Thomas Malory may be said to have each performed for his native country a somewhat similar task, each, of course, in his own way. Each retold the current folk tales in such a superior manner that his became the accepted version, to the practical exclusion of all others, and it is thus in a very real sense that we are indebted to Homer for Ulysses and to Malory for King Arthur.

The old Greek tales at the beginning of the book are from Ovid (43 B. C.), Apollodorus (140 B. C.) and Pindar (522 B. C.), and they have been retold in delightful fashion by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Kingsley and Miss Buckley.

As the stories from Homer and Virgil, in the versions here given, can only be looked upon as introductory to more extended reading, and are, consequently, something with which scholarship can have little if any quarrel, it has seemed desirable to make them as simple and clear as possible. For this reason the Latin names for the gods and goddesses of the Greek mythology have been used throughout. These names have been handed down to us in the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, and many others, and usage has made them familiar. Jupiter, Juno, Mars, Diana and Neptune, are old friends whose attributes are recognized at once, while to many the Grecian Zeus, Hera, Ares, Artemis and Poseidon are strangers whose names might have to be looked up in the classical dictionary. With the exception of a word here and there, there has been no editing of the stories, but occasional passages that delayed the movement of a story have been omitted.

William Patten.