Homer would
be their guide into the "realms of gold."
It is clear enough that Homer is the best guide. His is the oldest
extant Greek, his matter is the most various and delightful, and
most appeals to the young, who are wearied by scraps of Xenophon,
and who cannot be expected to understand the Tragedians. But Homer
is a poet for all ages, all races, and all moods. To the Greeks the
epics were not only the best of romances, the richest of poetry; not
only their oldest documents about their own history,--they were also
their Bible, their treasury of religious traditions and moral
teaching. With the Bible and Shakespeare, the Homeric poems are the
best training for life. There is no good quality that they lack:
manliness, courage, reverence for old age and for the hospitable
hearth; justice, piety, pity, a brave attitude towards life and
death, are all conspicuous in Homer. He has to write of battles;
and he delights in the joy of battle, and in all the movement of
war. Yet he delights not less, but more, in peace: in prosperous
cities, hearths secure, in the tender beauty of children, in the
love of wedded wives, in the frank nobility of maidens, in the
beauty of earth and sky and sea, and seaward murmuring river, in sun
and snow, frost and mist and rain, in the whispered talk of boy and
girl beneath oak and pine tree.
Living in an age where every man was a warrior, where every city
might know the worst of sack and fire, where the noblest ladies
might be led away for slaves, to light the fire and make the bed of
a foreign master, Homer inevitably regards life as a battle.
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