presented him by his mother, a goddess of the sea; in turn he died, shot by an arrow in the heel.  The Greeks, despairing of taking the city by force, employed a trick:  they pretended to depart, and left an immense horse of wood in which were concealed the chiefs of the army.  The Trojans drew this horse into the city; during the night the chiefs came forth and opened the city to the Greeks.  Troy was burnt, the men slaughtered, the women led away as slaves.  But the chiefs of the Greeks on their return were beset by tempest.  Some perished in the sea, others were cast on foreign shores.  Odysseus, the most crafty of the chiefs, was for ten years buffeted from one land to another, losing successively all his ships, himself the sole survivor of the disasters.

All antiquity had steadfast faith in the Trojan War. 1184 B.C. was set as the date of the ending of the siege, and men pointed out the site of the city.  In 1874 Schliemann purposed to excavate this site; it was necessary to traverse the debris of many cities which lay over it; at last at a depth of about fifty feet he found in the deepest bed of debris the traces of a mighty city reduced to ashes, and in the ruins of the principal edifice a casket filled with gems of gold which he called the Treasury of Priam.  There was no inscription, and the city, the whole wall of which we have been able to bring to light, was a very small one.  A large number of small, very rude idols have been found, which represent an owl-headed goddess (the Greeks thus represented the goddess Pallas).  Beyond this no proof has been found that this city was called Troy.

=The Homeric Poems.=—­It is the two poems attributed to Homer which have made the taking of Troy renowned throughout the world—­the Iliad, which related the combats of the Greeks and the exploits of Achilles before Troy; and the Odyssey, which recounts the adventures of Odysseus (Ulysses) after the capture of Troy.

These two poems were handed down for centuries without being committed to writing; the rhapsodists, wandering singers, knew long passages from them by heart and recited them at feasts.  It is not till the sixth century that Pisistratus, a prince of Athens, had them collected and edited.[48] The two poems became from that time and always remained the most admired works of Greek literature.

The Greeks said that the author of these poems was Homer, a Greek of Ionia, who lived about the tenth or the ninth century B.C.  They represented him as a blind old man, poor and a wanderer.  Seven towns disputed the honor of being his birth-place.  This tradition was received without hesitation.  But at the end of the eighteenth century a German scholar, Wolf, noticed certain contradictions in these poems, and at last asserted that they were not the work of a single poet, but a collection of fragments from several different poets.  This theory has been attacked and supported with great energy:  for a half century men have flown into a passion for