“Mr. Finck’s reading, wide as it is, is not wide enough; for had he read the Alexandrian poets, Theoeritus especially, or Behr A’Adin among the Arabs, to speak of no others, he could not possibly have had courage left to maintain his theory; and with him, really, it seems more a matter of courage than of facts, notwithstanding his evident training in a scientific atmosphere.”

GLADSTONE ON THE WOMEN OF HOMER

The divers specifications of my ignorance and stupidity contained in the foregoing criticisms will be attended to in their proper place in the chronological order of the present chapter, which naturally begins with Homer’s epics, as nothing definite is known of Greek literature before them.  Homer is now recognized as the first poet of antiquity, not only in the order of time; but it took Europe many centuries to discover that fact.  During the Middle Ages the second-rate Virgil was held to be a much greater genius than Homer, and it was in England, as Professor Christ notes (69), that the truer estimate originated.  Pope’s translation of the Homeric poems, with all its faults, helped to dispel the mists of ignorance, and in 1775 appeared Robert Wood’s book, On the Original Genius and Writings of Homer, which combated the foolish prejudice against the poet, due to the coarseness of the manners he depicts.  Wood admits (161) that “most of Homer’s heroes would, in the present age, be capitally convicted, in any country in Europe, on the poet’s evidence;” but this, he explains, does not detract from the greatness of Homer, who, upon an impartial view, “will appear to excel his own state of society, in point of decency and delicacy, as much as he has surpassed more polished ages in point of genius.”

In this judicious discrimination between the genius of Homer and the realistic coarseness of his heroes, Wood forms an agreeable contrast to many modern Homeric scholars, notably the Rt.  Hon. W.E.  Gladstone, who, having made this poet his hobby, tried to persuade himself and his readers that nearly everything relating not only to Homer, but to the characters he depicts, was next door to perfection.  Confining ourselves to the topic that concerns us here, we read, in his Studies on Homer (II., 502), that “we find throughout the poems those signs of the overpowering force of conjugal attachments which ... we might expect.”  And in his shorter treatise on Homer he thus sums up his views as to the position and estimate of woman in the heroic age, as revealed in Homer’s female characters: 

“The most notable of them compare advantageously with those commended to us in the Old Testament; while Achaiian Jezebels are nowhere found.  There is a certain authority of the man over the woman; but it does not destroy freedom, or imply the absence either of respect, or of a close mental and moral fellowship.  Not only the relation of Odysseus to Penelope and