SOURCE: "Notes of Change in the Odyssey" in Homer and His Age, 1906. Reprint by AMS Press, 1968, pp. 229-43.

Lang was one of England's most powerful men of letters during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. A romantic vision of the past imbued Lang's writings, coloring his work as a translator, poet, and revisionist historian. Among the chief proponents of Romanticism in a critical battle that pitted late-nineteenth-century revivalist Romanticists against the defenders of Naturalism and Realism, Lang espoused his strong preference for romantic adventure novels throughout his literary criticism. In this essay, Lang contends that there are few societal differences between the Iliad and the Odyssey,arguing that "all these so-called differences between Iliad and Odyssey do not point to the fact that the Odyssey belongs to a late and changed period of culture, of belief and customs. "

If the Homeric descriptions of details of life contain...