SOURCE: "The Epic Illusion (Continued)" in The Poetry of Homer, University of California Press, 1938, pp. 57-80.

Bassett was an influential Greek scholar and one of the foremost Homeric specialists of his time. In this excerpt from a posthumously published collection of lectures, he analyzes Homer's use of dialogue to create the "illusion of personality" in the characters of the Odyssey and the Iliad.

No poetic picture of past human life can produce the illusion of reality if it does no more than convince us with its general likeness to life. The real world that we know is peopled with other human beings no two of whom are identical. The more intimately we enter into the lives of others, the more we feel the uniqueness of their individualities. The universal human interest is never in typical "man"; it is in persons—because individuals, not types, belong to life. The...