and learns of his wanderings. Odysseus goes out to a farm to visit his father Laertes. (xxiv) Hermes leads the shades of the suitors to Hades; while Odysseus makes himself known to his father; and later is reconciled to his subjects.
The “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” stand at the head of the literature of Greece and of the epic poetry of the world; and their influence in the country of their origin and throughout the European peoples has been commensurate with their artistic greatness. Historically, they give the earliest picture of Aryan civilization, describing a period of culture of which we should otherwise know almost nothing. Artistically, in spite of their early date, they are the product of a mature art, expressing with supreme nobility and grace permanent and varied yet simple types of human nature, in a language unsurpassed for its combination of directness, simplicity, and beauty. “The capital distinction of Homeric poetry,” says Jebb, “is that it has all the freshness and simplicity of a primitive age,—all the charm which we associate with the ‘childhood of the world’; while on the other hand it has completely surmounted the rudeness of form, the struggle of thought with language, the tendency to grotesque or ignoble modes of speech, the incapacity for equable maintenance of a high level, which belong to the primitive stage in literature.”
