of reading Homer.  It ends, “where also stood many a spear of hardy Ulysses.”  This reminds the reader that in spite of the hero’s long years of absence, no one has been allowed to remove his weapons from their old place.  From this one phrase, then, we can realize how much his wife and son love him, and how they have mourned for him.  Telemachus welcomes the strangers, but we can feel how eager he is for them to be made comfortable as soon as possible so he can talk of his father and learn whether they have chanced to meet him in their wanderings.  Homer’s poems are full of such sentences as these; and, no matter how many times one reads them, some thought, unnoticed before, is ever coming to light.  That is why they are always fresh and new and interesting.

There is a tradition that Homer was blind, and that he wandered about from one place to another, singing or reciting his poems; but this is only tradition, and there is little hope that we shall ever be able to find out whether it is true or not.

Homer’s great poem, the Iliad, is the account of the Trojan War.  His Odyssey relates the adventures of the hero Ulysses, or Odysseus, as the Greeks called him, in many years of wandering at the close of the war before his enemies among the Gods would permit him to return to his home.  There were Trojan heroes, however, as well as Greek, and AEneas was one of them.  Virgil, the Latin poet, has told in the AEneid the story of his troubles and adventures.  AEneas, too, was driven over the waters, for the Gods had told him it was the will of Jupiter, or Zeus, as it is in Greek, for him to seek Italy and there found a city.  Part of his journey is the same as that of Ulysses.  He, too, stops at the country of the one-eyed giants and has to row as fast as he can to escape the rocks that they throw at his vessel.  He, too, hears the thunders of Mount AEtna and sees the flashing of the fires of the volcano.  His sailors point to it in fear and whisper to one another, “That is the giant Enceladus.  He rebelled against the Gods and they piled the mountain on top of him.  The fires of Jupiter burn him, and he breathes out glowing flames.  When he tosses from one side to the other, the whole island of Sicily is shaken with a mighty earthquake.”

Virgil was no homeless singer; he was one of the great literary men of Rome, and he read his poems aloud to the Emperor Augustus.  He had a handsome villa and a troop of friends.  He enjoyed everything that was beautiful and seemed as happy when a friend had written a good poem as if he had composed it himself.  He was never satisfied with his verse till he had made every line as perfect as possible.  When he was ill and knew that he could not recover, he made a will, and in it he ordered the AEneid to be burned, because it was not so polished as he wished.  “I meant to spend three years more on it,” he said.  Fortunately for all the people who enjoy a great poem, the Emperor forbade that this part of the will should be carried out.  He gave the manuscript to three friends of Virgil, all of them poets, with orders to strike out every phrase that they believed Virgil would have struck out on revision, but not to add one word.  This is the way that the AEneid was saved for us.  If it had been destroyed, we should have lost the work of one of the best storytellers that have ever lived.