William Ewart Gladstone — four times Prime Minister of Great Britain — was also a devoted Homeric scholar who spent decades studying the Iliad and Odyssey. Volume 1 of his three-volume study covers the prolegomena and the ethnology of the Greek races, examining the historical world reflected in Homer’s poems with the rigorous, if sometimes idiosyncratic, approach of a Victorian statesman-scholar.
This free EPUB is formatted for e-readers. Whatever one makes of Gladstone’s specific conclusions, the work is a remarkable document of Victorian classical scholarship and of a powerful mind’s engagement with the Homeric question, which fascinated the nineteenth century as much as it does the twenty-first.