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2 for literary purposes, the sense of literary property was not strong, and each bard or "rhapsode" felt at liberty to modify and to add. But that a true and great poetic genius put the poems into essentially their present form, fewer doubt now than a quarter of a century ago. This poet probably lived as early as the ninth century before our era. Other scholars would hold that the poems are the product of three or four poets in different ages,—the later poet extending and developing the plan of his predecessors. The earliest of these may have lived as early as the tenth century, and the latest in the eighth century B. C.

The translations from the Iliad are by William Cullen Bryant; that from the Odyssey by Philip Stanhope Worsley.

 

left in haste

The mansion, and retraced his way between

The rows of stately dwellings, traversing

The mighty city. When at length he reached

The Scaean gates, that issue on the field,

His spouse, the nobly dowered Andromache,

Came forth to meet him—daughter of the prince

Eëtion, who, among the woody slopes

