Excerpt from The Iliad of Homer: Books I., II., III The controversy is not decided, and perhaps never will be. It seems, however, to be generally felt now that the difliculty of oral transmission was exagger ated by Wolf. At the same time, it is generally acknowledged that the differences between the Odys sey and the Iliad (differences of tradition, of belief about gods, of the state of society, etc.) are so great as to make it unlikely that they were written by the same poet or poets, or even at the same epoch. There is much in the Iliad also to favor the View, advanced by Grote and others, that it was originally an epic about Achilles (as the opening lines indicate), and that it was afterwards enlarged to include a great deal more about the other Greeks who fought against Troy. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.