A General History for Colleges and High Schools

also made them artists in language. "Of all the beautiful things which they created," says Professor Jebb, "their own language was the most beautif

ad (from Ilios, Troy) is the "Wrath of Achilles." The Odyssey tells of the long wanderings of the hero Odysseus (Ulysses) up and down over many seas while se

a copy beneath his pillow,-a copy prepared especially for him by his preceptor Aristotle, and called the "casket edition," from the jewelled box in which Alexander is said to have kept it. We preserve it quite as sacredly in all ou

ration:

of the ninth or tenth century B.C., one or two centuries after the events commemorated in his poems. Though tradition represents many cities as contending for the honor of having been his birthplace, still he was generally

that is, to be built up out of the fragments of an extensive ballad literature that grew up in an age preceding the Homeric. The "Wrath of Achilles," which forms the nucleus of the Ilia

of heroes, and of a far-away time when gods mingled with men. Hesiod sings of common men, and of every-day, present duties. His greatest poem, a didactic epic, is entitled Works and Days. This is, in the main, a sort of farmers' calendar, in which

e earliest of the Lesbian singers was the poetess Sappho, whom the Greeks exalted to a place next to Homer. Pl

Polycrates of Samos. He seems to have enjoyed to the full the gay and easy life of a courtier, and sung so voluptuously of love

e in which his memory was held that when Alexander, one hundred years after Pindar's time, levelled the city of Thebes to the ground on account of a revolt, the house of the poet was spared, and left standing amid the general ruin (see p. 161).

ure. With deep meaning he says, "Become that which t