PREFACE

Fourteen years ago, in introducing my 'Stories from Homer' to the public, I expressed the hope that they would 'represent Homer not unfaithfully to readers, old and young, who did not know him in the original.' The book has found, on both side of the Atlantic, many such readers, and not a few, I am proud to think, who, knowing the original, have judged this adaption to be not altogether unworthy of it. If I could have anticipated so warm a welcome for my little work—the sale now exceeds twenty thousand copies—I should not have attempted to compress into a single volume the substance of the two poems. The two volumes which I now publish, under the titles of 'The Story of the Iliad,' and 'The Story of the Odyssey,' give a much fuller, and I trust, a more adequate presentment of them. In the first of these the narrative has been made continuous and completed by a beginning and an ending, both very brief, and containing, it may be said, nothing that is not strictly Homeric; in the second, Homer's own order has been restored, so that Ulysses now tells his adventures in the first person. —A.C.

From the preface of The Story of the Iliad