of the army.
The Trojans drew this horse into the city; during the night the chiefs
came forth and opened the city to the Greeks. Troy was burnt, the men
slaughtered, the women led away as slaves. But the chiefs of the
Greeks on their return were beset by tempest. Some perished in the
sea, others were cast on foreign shores. Odysseus, the most crafty of
the chiefs, was for ten years buffeted from one land to another,
losing successively all his ships, himself the sole survivor of the
disasters.

All antiquity had steadfast faith in the Trojan War. 1184 B.C. was set
as the date of the ending of the siege, and men pointed out the site
of the city. In 1874 Schliemann purposed to excavate this site; it was
necessary to traverse the debris of many cities which lay over it; at
last at a depth of about fifty feet he found in the deepest bed of
debris the traces of a mighty city reduced to ashes, and in the ruins
of the principal edifice a casket filled with gems of gold which he
called the Treasury of Priam. There was no inscription, and the city,
the whole wall of which we have been able to bring to light, was a
very small one. A large number of small, very rude idols have been
found, which represent an owl-headed goddess (the Greeks thus
represented the goddess Pallas). Beyond this no proof has been found
that this city was called Troy.

=The Homeric Poems.=--It is the two poems attributed to Homer which
have made the taking of Troy renowned throughout the world--the
Iliad, which related the combats of the Greeks and the exploits of
Achilles before Troy; and the Odyssey, which recounts the adventures
of Odysseus (Ulysses) after the capture of Troy.

These two poems were handed down for centuries without being committed
to writing; the rhapsodists, wandering singers, knew long passages
from them by heart and recited them at feasts. It is not till the
sixth century that Pisistratus, a prince of Athens, had them collected
and edited.[48] The two poems became from that time and always
remained the most admired works of Greek literature.

The Greeks said that the author of these poems was Homer, a Greek of
Ionia, who lived about the tenth or the ninth century B.C. They
represented him as a blind old man, poor and a wanderer. Seven towns
disputed the honor of being his birth-place. This tradition was
received without hesitation. But at the end of the eighteenth century
a German scholar, Wolf, noticed certain contradictions in