Lying was traditionally a Greek vice.  The Greek lied as naturally as the Persian told the truth.  Homer wishes to set forth Ulysses, one of his heroes, adorned with all heroic perfections.  He was so far Greek as not to think of lying as a quality to detract; he proudly makes Ulysses a “lord of lies.”  Perhaps nothing in Crete itself would have taught him better; if we may believe Epimenides and Saint Paul.  On the other hand, he was a great-hearted and compassionate man; compassionate as Shakespeare was.  Now the position of women in historical Greece was very low indeed; the position of women in Egypt, as we know, was very high indeed.  This was a question to touch such a man to the quick; the position he gives women is very high:  very much higher than it was in Periclean Athens, with all the advance that had been made by that time in general culture.  Andromache, in Homer, is the worthy companion and helpmeet of Hector; not a Greek, but Egyptian idea.

Homer’s contemporary, Hesiod, tells in his Works and Days of the plebeian and peasant life of his time.  Hesiod had not the grace of mind or imagination to idealize anything; he sets down the life of the lower orders with a realism comparable to that of the English Crabbe.  It is an ugly and piteous picture he gives.  Homer, confining himself in the main to the patrician side of things, does indeed give hints that the lot of the peasant and slave was miserable; he does not quite escape some touches from the background of his own day.  Nor did Shakespeare, trying to paint the life of ancient Athens, escape an English Elizabethan Background; Bully Bottom and his colleagues are straight from the wilds of Warwickshire; the Roman mob is made up of London prentices, cobblers and the like.  Learned Ben, on the other hand, contrives in his Sejanus and his Catiline, by dint and sheer intellect and erudition, to give us correct waxwork and clockwork Romans; there are no anachronisms in Ben Johnson; never a pterodactyl walks down his Piccadilly.  But Shakespeare rather liked to have them in his; with his small Latin and less Greek, he had to create his human beings—­draw them from the life, and from the life he saw about him.  The deeper you see into life, the less the costumes and academic exactitudes matter; you keep your imagination for the great things, and let the externals worry about themselves.  Now Homer was a deal more like Shakespeare than Ben; but there was this difference:  he was trying to create Greeks of a nobler order than his contemporaries.  Men in those days, he says, were of huger stature than they are now.  And yet, when his imagination is not actually at work to heighten and ennoble the portrait of a hero, real Greek life of his own times does not fail sometimes—­to obtrude on him.  So he lets in bits now and again that belong to the state of things Hesiod describes, and confirm the truth of Hesiod’s dismal picture.