Mitchell Carroll
Published: 2010-07
Total Pages: 108
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This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1907. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... Chapter ah Women of tijr Biati Ill women of the iliad the reader of the Iliad and the Odyssey finds himself in an atmosphere altogether human. As he peruses these pages, so rich in pictures of the life and manners of heroic times, it matters little to him whether the men and women of epic song had merely a mythical existence, or were, in fact, historical figures. The contemporaries of Homer and later Greeks had an unshaken belief in the reality of those men and women; and the poet has breathed into them the breath of genius, which gives life and immortality. We have in these poems the most ancient expression of the national sentiment of the Greeks, and from them we can form a correct idea of the relations of men and women in prehistoric times, and of the character and status of woman, in the childhood of the Greek world. It is a noteworthy fact that the plots of both the Iliad and the Odyssey--as well as the most interesting episodes they contain--turn upon love for women; and a clear idea of the importance of woman in the Heroic Age could not be given better than by briefly reviewing the brilliant panorama of warlike and domestic scenes in which woman figures. We are first introduced to a Greek camp in Troy land. During ten long years the hosts of the Achaeans have been gathered before the walls of Ilium. What is the cause of this long struggle? A woman! Paris, son of King Priam, had carried off to his native city Queen Helen, wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta. Aided by the wiles of Aphrodite, to whom he had awarded the golden apple as the fairest in the contest of the three goddesses, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, Paris succeeded in winning the heart of this fairest of Greek women and in persuading her to desert husband and daughter to follow the fortunes of a h...