Page:Greek and Roman Mythology.djvu/149

 THE GREEK HEROES 135 These were recognized by the ancients themselves as the most noble gems in the crown of epic poetry. Both of them were in earlier times ascribed to the poetic genius of one man, Homer, who surpassed all others ; but the great dissimilarity that appears in the social relations and the religious conceptions described forces us to con- clude that the two poems must be attributed to different authors, at least in their present form. Seven cities claimed Homer as their citizen. Smyrna, the first men- tioned of these, seems to have the best right to the claim, for it appears from the Iliad itself that the poet probably came from the region near the mouth of the river Hermus. In its original form the poem described only the momen- tous quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon. But into this oldest epic, which formed the foundation of the whole Trojan chain of myths and contains the germ of all other poems on the subject, there were certainly intro- duced at a later period many kinds of interpolations, and at the same time the whole was probably revised; yet even in its present form the dramatic plot which lies at its foundation is so plainly visible that there can be no doubt of its conscious formation by one individual poet. 178. The keynote of the drama of the Iliad is struck by a description of the plague brought upon the Grecian host by Apollo, on account of an injury done to his priest Chryses in the tenth year of the siege of Troy. Just as in the progress of the chief plot the haughtiness of the commander in chief, Agamemnon, is to blame for the grievous losses and defeats of the Greeks, so here he has caused this wrath of Apollo by refusing to listen to the request of one of his priests for the restoration of a daughter who has been carried away among the spoils