Читать книгу The Story of Greece: Told to Boys and Girls онлайн

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The Iliad and the Odyssey were written by a poet named Homer, so many wise folk tell. While others, it may be just as wise, say that these poems were not written by one man, but were gathered from the legends of the people, now by one poet, now by another, until they grew into the collection of stories which we know as the Iliad and the Odyssey.

At first these old stories were not written in a book; they were sung or told in verse by the poets to the people of Hellas. And because what is ‘simple and serious lives longer than what is merely clever,’ these grave old stories of two thousand years ago are still alive, and people are still eager to read them.

Some day you will read the Iliad and the Odyssey. In this story I can only tell you about a few of the mighty warriors who fought at Troy, about a few of their strange adventures.

If you look at a map of Greece you will easily find, in the south, the country called Peloponnesus. In Peloponnesus you will see Sparta, the capital city, over which Menelaus was king, when the story of the Iliad begins.