or against the existence of Homer.  Today we begin to think the problem insoluble.  What is certain is that these poems are very old, probably of the ninth century.  The Iliad was composed in Asia Minor and is perhaps the result of the union of two poems—­one dedicated to the combats of the Trojans, and the other to the adventures of Achilles.  The Odyssey appears to be the work of one author; but it cannot be affirmed that it is of the same author as the Iliad.

=The Greeks at the Time of Homer.=—­We are not able to go back very far in the history of the Greeks; the Homeric poems are their oldest historical document.  When these were composed, about the ninth century B.C., there was not yet any general name to designate all the inhabitants of Greece:  Homer mentions them under the names of their principal tribes.  From his description it appears that they have made some progress since their departure from Asia.  They know how to till the ground, how to construct strong cities and to organize themselves into little peoples.  They obey kings; they have a council of old men and an assembly of the people.  They are proud of their institutions, they despise their less advanced neighbors, the Barbarians, as they call them.  Odysseus, to show how rude the Cyclops were, says, “They have no rules of justice nor places where they deliberate; each one governs himself, his wife, and children, and has no association with others.”  But these Greeks themselves are half barbarians; they do not know how to write, to coin money, nor the art of working in iron.  They hardly dare to trust themselves on the sea and they imagine that Sicily is peopled with monsters.

=The Dorians.=—­Dorians was the name given to those sons of the mountaineers who had come from the north and had expelled or subjected those dwelling in the plains and on the shore of the Peloponnesus; the latter, crowded into too narrow limits, sent colonies into Asia.  Of these mountain bands the most renowned came from a little canton called Doris and preserved the name Dorians.  These invaders told how certain kings of Sparta, the posterity of Herakles, having been thrust out by their subjects, had come to seek the Dorians in their mountains.  These people of the mountains, moved by their love for Herakles, had followed his descendants and had replaced them on their throne.  By the same stroke they dispossessed the inhabitants and took their place.  They were a martial, robust, and healthy race, accustomed to cold, to meagre food, to a scant existence.  Men and women wore a short tunic which did not reach to the knee.  They spoke a rude and primitive dialect.  The Dorians were a race of soldiers, always obliged to keep themselves under arms; they were the least cultivated in Greece, since, situated far from the sea, they preserved the customs of the barbarous age; they were the most Greek because, being isolated, they could neither mingle with strangers nor imitate their manners.