notice
this argument; especially when we see how pitiably poor they are in
probabilities or presumptions of any kind. The miserable shred of an
argument with those who wish to carry up Homer as high as any colourable
pretext will warrant, is this, that he must have lived pretty near to
the war which he celebrates, inasmuch as he never once alludes to a
great revolutionary event in the Peloponnesus. Consequently, it is
argued, Homer did not live to witness that revolution. Yet he must have
witnessed it, if he had lived at the distance of eighty years from the
capture of Troy; for such was the era of that event, viz., the return of
the Heraclidae. Now, in answer to this, it is obvious to say that
negations prove little. Homer has failed to notice, has omitted to
notice, or found no occasion for noticing, scores of great facts
contemporary with Troy, or contemporary with himself, which yet must
have existed for all that. In particular, he has left us quite in the
dark about the great empires, and the great capitals on the Euphrates
and the Tigris, and the Nile; and yet it was of some importance to have
noticed the relation in which the kingdom of Priam stood to the great
potentates on those rivers. The argument, therefore, drawn from the
non-notice of the Heraclidae, is but trivial. On the other hand, an
argument of some strength for a lower era as the true era of Homer, may
be drawn from the much slighter colouring of the marvellous, which in
Homer's treatment of the story attaches to the _Iliad_, than to the
_Seven against Thebes_. In the Iliad we have the mythologic marvellous
sometimes; the marvellous of necessity surrounding the gods and their
intercourse with men; but we have no Amphiaraus swallowed up by the
earth, no Oedipus descending into a mysterious gulf at the summons of an
unseen power. And beyond all doubt the shield of Achilles, supposing it
no interpolation of a later age, argues a much more advanced state of
the arts of design, etc., than the shields, (described by AEschylus, as
we may suppose, from ancient traditions preserved in the several
families), of the seven chiefs who invaded Thebes.

[39] '_Seven-gated_,' both as an expression which recalls the subject of
the Romance (the Seven Anti-Theban Chieftains), and as one which
distinguishes this Grecian Thebes from the Egyptian Thebes; that being
called _Hekatompylos_, or _Hundred-gated_. Of course some little
correction will always be silently applied