and customs of the inhabitants of these stately houses there is a certain patriarchal simplicity. The Princess Nausicaa, daughter of King Alcinous, conducts the family washing as a regular and expected part of her work, while the great chieftains themselves are men of their hands not only on the battle-field, but in the common labours of peace. Odysseus is a capable plough man, carpenter, and shipwright, as well as a good soldier. But the simplicity is by no means rudeness; it consists with a highly developed code of manners, and even a considerable refinement. Brutes like Penelope's suitors may, in half-drunken anger, fling the furniture or an ox-hoof at the object of their scorn; but there are brutes in every society, and the manners of the Achæans in general are stately and dignified.

On the field of war there is still evidence of an advanced stage of civilization. The whole question of the equipment of the Homeric heroes has been the subject of perhaps even more dispute than that of the Homeric house. Infinite pains have been spent in the effort to show, on the one hand, that the equipment worn by the heroes of the Iliad was of the more ancient type, consisting mainly of a great shield of ox-hide large enough to cover the whole body, behind which the warrior crouched, wearing for defensive armour no more than a linen corselet and leathern cap and gaiters, and on the other that the hero wore practically the complete panoply of the later Hellenic hoplite, the small round shield, the bronze helmet, with metal cuirass, belt, and greaves; while the question of whether the offensive weapons were of iron or of bronze has been debated with equal pertinacity. The discussion of such details is beyond our purpose, and it is sufficient to say that the poems seem to contemplate both forms of defensive equipment, the old form of large shield and light body armour, and the later form of small shield and metal panoply, as being in common use, while on the question of iron versus bronze, the evidence seems to indicate that the age contemplated by the bulk of the references is, in the main, a bronze-using one, though the knowledge of the superiority of iron is beginning to make itself evident.

But the point which is of importance for our present purpose is the magnificence with which the arms of the Hellenic heroes, when of metal, are wrought and decorated. The polished helmets, with their horse-hair plumes of various colours, the in-wrought breastplates, and the greaves with their silver fastenings, are not only weapons, but works of art as well. The supreme instance is, of course, the armour of Achilles, fabricated, according to the poet, by the hands of Hephæstos, but none the less to be regarded as the ideal of what the highly wrought armour of the time should be. The shield of Achilles, with its gorgeous representations of various scenes of peace and war, seems almost to transcend the possibilities of actual metal work at such a period; yet we may believe that the poet was not merely drawing upon his imagination, but giving a heightened picture of what he had himself witnessed in the way of the armourer's art. Chiefly to be noticed with regard to it is the way in which he describes the method used by Hephæstos in producing his effects—the inlaying of various metals to get the colours desired, for instance, in the vineyard scene with its dangling clusters of purple grapes, its poles, and ditch, and fence. Would any poet have imagined this had he been entirely unacquainted with similar products of the armourer's art? As we shall see, it is precisely this use of the inlaying of metal with metal, to represent the different colours of the various figures involved, which is characteristic of the skilled armourer's work in the Mycenæan period.

Such, then, are a few of the outstanding features of the state of society described for us in the Homeric poems. We are brought by them face to face with a civilization which has very distinct and pronounced characteristics of its own. It is certainly not the civilization of the earliest historic period of Greece; political organization, the relative importance of states and cities, social life, art and warfare—all are different from anything we find in the Hellas of history; in many respects this world of the poems is at a higher stage of development than that which succeeded it; but certainly it is different. Now, the question of importance for us is—Had this poetic world of the Iliad and Odyssey any basis in fact, or was it merely the creation of the poet or poets who were responsible for the tales of Ilium and of Odysseus? Were they describing things which they had seen, or of which the tradition at least had been handed down to them by those who had seen them, or were they telling of things which never had any existence save in their own minds?

This question, of course, is plainly quite distinct from that of whether the tales they tell are history or romance. The stories of the flight of Helen, of the siege of Troy, the anger of Achilles, the valour of Hector, and the love of Andromache, of the wanderings of much-enduring Odysseus, and the trials of his faithful wife, Penelope, may be fact, or they may be fiction, or, more probably perhaps than either, they may be fact largely mingled with fiction; but that is not the point. It is the medium in which these stories are set, the background of human life and society upon which they are projected. Here is a world, astonishingly real in appearance, and, if real, supremely interesting to us, as representing what the subsequent ages knew or had heard by tradition of the earliest phases of the greatest European civilization. Can we trust the picture, or must we believe it to be but a dream of a state of things which never really existed? It is, to say the least of it, extremely hard to believe that the Homeric world is entirely the product of the poetic imagination. Imagination can work wonders, but it requires to have a certain amount of material in fact to start upon in its workings. If it creates a world entirely out of its own consciousness, that world may be one of extreme beauty and splendour, but it is most unlikely that it will present any verisimilitude to actual life. It will be either vague and shadowy, or else so grandiose and unearthly in its magnificence as to have no point of connection with ordinary terrestrial life. But it is exactly here that the realism of the Homeric world strikes the student. It is not vague—on the contrary, the preciseness of its detail is almost as striking, sometimes almost as prosaic, as the detail which makes Robinson Crusoe the most realistic of all works of fiction; and while its splendours are such as we look for in vain in early historic Greece, and are certainly not borrowed from the great civilizations of Mesopotamia or the Nile Valley, they are such as we can perfectly well believe to have existed, and such as can be perfectly well paralleled, though in widely different styles, by Babylonia or by Thebes.

Was it not more likely that a picture so precise in its outlines, and so coherent, so thinkable and possible even in its most gorgeous details, should have had behind it something, probably a great deal, of fact actually seen and known, than that it should have been the mere mirage of a poet's dream? 'The picture presented to us of the Homeric heroes and their surroundings,' says Father Browne, 'is not merely vivid and complete; it is grand, though with a grandeur which is homely and simple. Hence the fascination which we find in the subject of the poems as distinct