e soon after
more impressive and dramatic. The Phaeacians had just heard the
culminating act in the taking of Troy, whereof Ulysses was the hero;
behold! he stands before them, in all the prestige of song. Some
critics have wondered why the name of Ulysses was withheld so long, and
have imagined all sorts of interpolations; surely they have not seen
the plan of the poet.

The Wooden Horse is not employed in the Iliad, but is one of the
striking details of the later epics, which recounted the destruction of
Troy. The song of Demodocus carries the incident back to the time of
Homer, and before Homer, for it suggests antecedent ballads or
rhapsodies which Homer knew, but did not use, and which poets after him
developed. The Odyssey takes for granted that its hearers knew the Lay
of the Wooden Horse, and also the Lay of the Strife between Ulysses and
Achilles, "the fame of which had reached the broad Heavens." Thus we
get a peep into the workshop of Homer and catch a glimpse of his
materials, which he did not invent, but found at hand. Homer is the
builder, the architectonic genius; he organizes the floating, disparate
songs of his age into a great totality, into a Greek Temple of which
they are the stones. Note what he does with this lay of Demodocus; he
puts it into its place in the total structure of the Odyssey, and thus
preserves it forever. So he has done with all his materials doubtless.

We may now see that those who cut up the Homeric poems into so many
different songs or ballads simply destroy the distinctive work of
Homer. They pry asunder the beautiful Greek Temple, lay its stones
alongside of one another, and say: behold the poet. But this is just
what he is not, and in the present Book we may see him unfolding his
own process. Homer is not Demodocus, but the latter's lay he takes up
and then weaves what he wants of it into the texture of the total poem.
He is thus a contrast to the bard, whom, however, he fully recognizes
and makes a part of his own work. Thus Homer himself really answers the
Wolfian theory, which seeks to reduce him to a Demodocus, singing
fragmentary lays about the Trojan War.

From the Greek poets the Wooden Horse passed to Virgil, who has made it
the best-known incident of the Trojan War. It is probably the most
famous stratagem of all time, due to the skill of Ulysses. Herein lies
the answer to the first lay of Demodocus; in the dispute Ulysses is
right, indeed he is a greater hero tha