regions, going even into fairyland and to Hades.

The plot of the Iliad is loosely joined, so loosely that there are many books which contribute little or nothing towards the advancement of the story. The sixth, ninth, and twenty-third books are three of the greatest of the poem, yet had they been lost from the manuscripts and never been quoted, one could hardly have suspected their existence. This does not mean that they were additions by later poets, since if most of the soliloquies of Hamlet had been lost it would have been hard to detect the gaps. The important eleventh book is only vaguely connected with the books immediately preceding.

In the Odyssey the structure is just the reverse, for in it there is such a mutual interchange of cause and effect that each book can be understood only in the light of earlier books. Athena in the first book came from Olympus to arouse Telemachus to go in search of his father; in the second an assembly is called and this search is announced as well as prepared. In this the poet had a double purpose, he showed us the wife, the son, the suitors, the faithful Euryclia, and the conditions in Ithaca,

and we are made to realize the great importance of the hero himself.

In the next two books the young man made the trip to Pylos and to Sparta as ordered and planned, and we learn the heroic stature of Odysseus from his own companions and associates at Troy.

Just such an introduction as is given in these books is needed to make the hearer feel that the Odysseus he had known in the Iliad is fitted for the great part he was destined to assume. Had the Odyssey opened at book five the poet could not have created the impression that the Odysseus he had left at the games of the Iliad had become sufficiently important to warrant his holding the center of the stage, and holding it throughout the entire poem. This journey of Telemachus had another purpose and that was the furnishing of an opportunity for the immature youth to develop under new influences into the hero he proved to be in the great struggle with the suitors.

The long story of Odysseus' wanderings could have found no ready and eager audience without the songs of Demodocus and the exploits at the games. Even the mysterious movements through fairyland have a necessary

sequence, since the crews who manned the twelve ships with which he sailed from Troy were far too numerous to be entertained by Circe, hence the destruction of the eleven ships at the hands of the Laestrygones must precede the story of the sojourn in the Aeaean isle. Even one shipload was too many men for the seven years with Calypso, hence the slaughter of the cattle of the sun and the shipwreck, but the adventures with Charybdis and Scylla demanded a ship and its crew, hence they came earlier than the storm which brought the loss of all his companions.

It is doubtful if the skill with which the poet of the Odyssey weaves the individual strands of poetry into a great epic plot has ever been equalled. This is the second great difference between the two poems, since the Iliad is a succession of loosely joined scenes, a series of pearls strung on the thread of the anger of Achilles, and so strung that many of them might have been removed without detection, while the Odyssey is a complicated chain of poetry, a cable in which each strand strengthens and is strengthened by all the rest.

Professor Sheppard wisely suggests that the Iliad is to be compared to a pattern or a com

plicated drawing, where the seemingly isolated books really serve as decorative panels, and that each individual scene somehow adds to the beauty and the completeness of the whole.18

Not a single hero of the Iliad who appears in the first book is on the scene at the close, even the setting is changed from the shore and the camp of the Greeks to the city and the assembly of the Trojans; while the Odyssey which has shifted so much and has moved to so many and such remote regions closes in Ithaca, on the estate of Odysseus, and among the actors with which the poem began; even Athena who set in motion the forces which started the poem and brought the hero to his home is the last to act and to speak.

In setting and in structure these two poems are quite different, however similar they may be in style, in meter, and in language. The Odyssey never repeats or imitates the Iliad but always assumes a knowledge of the events of that earlier poem as a background.

The ancients regarded the Odyssey as a later poem than the Iliad, but the evidence is surprisingly slight. The words of Proteus to Menelaus, "and you were present at the battle," were intended as a reason for not re

peating things told in the Iliad and warrant the inference that the narratives of that poem were already known.

The Odyssey constantly assumes a knowledge of the story of the Iliad, while the Iliad never makes any assumption of a knowledge of the Odyssey.

The Iliad apparently took over but little foreign material; perhaps the Catalogue of the Ships, and the story of Meleager, as told by Phoenix, were such foreign material. The Odyssey unites the adventures of the hero with a mass of stories and myths, some of which may be traced to other lands and to remote antiquity. Sir Arthur Evans thinks he has found in the ruins of early Crete representations of the myth of Scylla,19 while tales resembling the story of the Cyclops have been found in many lands. However, the wanderings of Odysseus have been so cleverly united with the blinding of Polyphemus that we can scarcely imagine an Odyssey without that adventure.

The Lotus-Eaters, Aeolus, Circe, Calypso, Scylla, and Charybdis may all be older than Homer, but they are so fitted into the story, SO interwoven with the exploits of Odysseus that