discoveries, and of manuscripts. {Footnote: The Iliad. Macmillan & Co. 1900, 1902.} His volumes are, I doubt not, as they certainly deserve to be, on the shelves of every Homeric student, old or young, and doubtless their contents reach the higher forms in schools, though there is reason to suppose that, about the unity of Homer, schoolboys remain conservative.
In this book of more than 1200 pages Mr. Leaf's space is mainly devoted to textual criticism, philology, and pure scholarship, but his Introductions, Notes, and Appendices also set forth his mature ideas about the Homeric problem in general. He has altered some of his opinions since the publication of his Companion to the Iliad(1892), but the main lines of his old system are, except on one crucial point, unchanged. His theory we shall try to state and criticise; in general outline it is the current theory of separatist critics, and it may fairly be treated as a good example of such theories.
The system is to the following effect: Greek tradition, in the classical period, regarded the Iliad and Odyssey as the work of one man, Homer, a native of one or other of the Ionian colonies of Asia Minor. But the poems show few obvious signs of origin in Asia. They deal with dwellers, before the Dorian invasion (which the poet never alludes to), on the continent of Europe and in Crete. {Footnote: If the poet sang after the tempest of war that came down with the Dorians from the north, he would probably have sought a topic in the Achaean exploits and sorrows of that period. The Dorians, not the Trojans, would have been the foes. The epics of France of the eleventh and twelfth centuries dwell, not on the real victories of the remote Charlemagne so much as on the disasters of Aliscans and Roncesvaux—defeats at Saracen hands, Saracens being the enemies of the twelfth-century poets. No Saracens, in fact, fought at Roncesvaux.} The lays are concerned with "good old times"; presumably between 1500 and 1100 B.C. Their pictures of the details of life harmonise more with what we know of the society of that period from the evidence of buildings and recent excavations, than with what we know of the life and the much more rude and barbaric art of the so-called "Dipylon" period of "geometrical" ornament considerably later. In the Dipylon age though the use of iron, even for swords (made on the lines of the old bronze sword), was familiar, art was on a most barbaric level, not much above the Bed Indian type, as far, at least, as painted vases bear witness. The human figure is designed as in Tommy Traddles's skeletons; there is, however, some crude but promising idea of composition.
The picture of life in the Homeric poems, then, is more like that of, say, 1500–1100 B.C. than of, say, 1000–850 B.C. in Mr. Leaf's opinion. Certainly Homer describes a wealthy aristocracy, subject to an Over-Lord, who rules, by right divine, from "golden Mycenae." We hear of no such potentate in Ionia. Homer's accounts of contemporary art seem to be inspired by the rich art generally dated about 1500–1200. Yet there are "many traces of apparent anachronism," of divergence from the more antique picture of life. In these divergences are we to recognise the picture of a later development of the ancient existence of 1500–1200 B.C.? Or have elements of the life of a much later age of Greece (say, 800–550 B.C.) been consciously or unconsciously introduced by the late poets? Here Mr. Leaf recognises a point on which we have insisted, and must keep insisting, for it is of the first importance. "It is a priori the most probable" supposition that, "in an uncritical age," poets do not "reproduce the circumstances of the old time," but "only clothe the old tale in the garb of their own days." Poets in an uncritical age always, in our experience, "clothe old tales with the garb of their own time," but Mr. Leaf thinks that, in the case of the Homeric poems, this idea "is not wholly borne out by the facts."
In fact, Mr. Leaf's hypothesis, like Helbig's, exhibits a come-and-go between the theory that his late poets clung close to tradition and so kept true to ancient details of life, and the theory that they did quite the reverse in many cases. Of this frequent examples will occur. He writes, "The Homeric period is certainly later than the shaft tombs" (discovered at Mycenae by Dr. Schliemann), "but it does not necessarily follow that it is post-Mycenaean. It is quite possible that certain notable differences between the poems and the monuments" (of Mycenae) "in burial, for instance, and in women's dress may be due to changes which arose within the Mycenaean age itself, in that later part of it of which our knowledge is defective—almost as defective as it is of the subsequent 'Dipylon' period. On the whole, the resemblance to the typical Mycenaean culture is more striking than the difference." {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. i. pp. xiii.-xv. 1900.}
So far Mr. Leaf states precisely the opinion for which we argue. The Homeric poems describe an age later than that of the famous tombs—so rich in relics—of the Mycenaean acropolis, and earlier than the tombs of the Dipylon of Athens. The poems thus spring out of an age of which, except from the poems themselves, we know little or nothing, because, as is shown later, no cairn burials answering to the frequent Homeric descriptions have ever been discovered—so relics corroborating Homeric descriptions are to seek. But the age attaches itself in many ways to the age of the Mycenaean tombs, while, in our opinion, it stands quite apart from the post-Dorian culture.
Where we differ from Mr. Leaf is in believing that the poems, as wholes, were composed in that late Mycenaean period of which, from material remains, we know very little; that "much new" was not added, as he thinks, in "the Ionian development" which lasted perhaps "from the ninth century B.C. to the seventh." We cannot agree with Mr. Leaf, when he, like Helbig, thinks that much of the detail of the ancient life in the poems had early become so "stereotyped" that no continuator, however late, dared "intentionally to sap" the type, "though he slipped from time to time into involuntary anachronism." Some poets are also asserted to indulge in voluntary anachronism when, as Mr. Leaf supposes, they equip the ancient warriors with corslets and greaves and other body armour of bronze such as, in his opinion, the old heroes never knew, such as never were mentioned in the oldest parts or "kernel" of the poems. Thus the traditional details of Mycenaean life sometimes are regarded as "stereotyped" in poetic tradition; sometimes as subject to modern alterations of a sweeping and revolutionary kind.
As to deliberate adherence to tradition by the poets, we have proved that the Cyclic epic poets of 800–660 B.C. wandered widely from the ancient models. If, then, every minstrel or rhapsodist who, anywhere, added at will to the old "kernel" of the Achilles was, so far as he was able, as conscientiously precise in his stereotyped archaeological details as Mr. Leaf sometimes supposes, the fact is contrary to general custom in such cases. When later poets in an uncritical age take up and rehandle the poetic themes of their predecessors, they always give to the stories "a new costume," as M. Gaston Paris remarks in reference to thirteenth century dealings with French epics of the eleventh century. But, in the critics' opinion, the late rehandlers of old Achaean lays preserved the archaic modes of life, war, costume, weapons, and so forth, with conscientious care, except in certain matters to be considered later, when they deliberately did the very reverse. Sometimes the late poets devoutly follow tradition. Sometimes they deliberately innovate. Sometimes they pedantically "archaise," bringing in genuine, but by their time forgotten, Mycenaean things, and criticism can detect their doings in each case.
Though the late continuators of the Iliad were able, despite certain inadvertencies, to keep up for some four centuries in Asia the harmonious picture of ancient Achaean life and society in Europe, critics can distinguish four separate strata, the work of many different ages, in the Iliad. Of the first stratum composed in Europe, say about 1300–1150 B.C. (I give a conjectural date under all reserves), the topic was THE Wrath of ACHILLES. Of this poem, in Mr. Leaf's opinion, (a) the First Book and fifty lines of the Second Book remain intact or, perhaps, are a blend of two versions. (b) The Valour of Agamemnon and Defeat of THE Achaeans. Of this there are portions in Book XI., but they were meddled with, altered, and generally doctored, "down to the latest period," namely, the age of Pisistratus in Athens, the middle of the sixth century B.C. (c) The fight in which, after their defeat, the Achaeans try to save the ships from the torch of Hector, and the Valour of Patroclus (but some critics do not accept this), with his death (XV., XVI. in parts). (d) Some eighty lines on the ARMING OF ACHILLES (XIX.). (e) Perhaps an incident or two in Books XX., XXI. (f) The Slaying HECTOR by Achilles, in Books XXI., XXII. (but some of the learned will not admit this, and we shall, unhappily, have to prove that, if Mr. Leaf's
