More thoroughly silly questions have been asked about Homer than about any other man or topic. Did Homer exist? Was there one Homer or two Homers? Were the Homeric poems composed by a syndicate or by one man? and so on and so on. Only in thoroughly academic minds could such questions generate. Only minds dead to poetry and the modes of its composition would waste themselves on such mental trivialities, on such extravagant fantasies.

Of one thing we are sure, that the Odyssey and the Iliad are at once the first and the greatest of all European epics, that they were composed deliberately, and that they deal with the deeds of men who might have lived, or did actually live, in an age of which we are fortunate enough to know a good deal more than the mere historical outlines.