al in preference to the canonical, the unauthentic in
preference to the authentic, the modern in preference to the ancient.

[Footnote 82: It would be unfair not to mention, as having preceded
that of M. Joly by some years, and having practically founded study on
the right lines, the handling of MM. Moland and d'Hericault,
_Nouvelles Francaises du Quatorzieme Siecle_ (Bibliotheque
Elzevirienne. Paris, 1856).]

[Sidenote: _Dictys and Dares._]

As in the case of the Alexander-Saga, their origins were the
Pseudo-Callisthenes and the _Iter ad Paradisum_, so in the Tale of
Troy they were the works of two persons whose literary offspring has
obtained for them an amount of attention transcending to a quite
ludicrous extent their literary merit--Dictys Cretensis and Dares
Phrygius, to whom may perhaps be added the less shadowy personage of
the grammarian John Tzetzes. But, as in the other case also, they were
by no means confined to such authorities. If they did not know Homer
very well at first-hand, they did know him: they knew Ovid (who of
course represents Homer, though not Homer only) extremely well: and
they knew Virgil. But partly from the instinct above referred to, of
which more presently, partly from the craze for tracing Western Europe
back to the "thrice-beaten Trojans," it pleased them to regard Homer
as a late and unhistorical calumniator, whose Greek prejudices made
him bear false witness; and to accept the pretensions of Dictys and
Dares to be contemporaries and eyewitnesses of fact. Dictys, a
companion of Idomeneus, was supposed to represent the Greek side, but
more fairly than Homer; and Dares, priest of Hephaestus, the Trojan.

The works of these two worthies, which are both of small
compass,--Dictys occupies rather more than a hundred, Dares rather
more than fifty, pages of the ordinary Teubner classics,[83]--exist at
present only in Latin prose, though, as the Greeks were more expert
and inventive forgers than the Romans, it is possible, if not even
highly probable, that both were, and nearly certain that Dictys was,
originally Greek at least in language. Dictys, the older pretty
certainly, is introduced by a letter to a certain Quintus Aradius from
Lucius Septimius, who informs "his Rufinus" and the world, with a
great deal of authority and learning, that the book had been written
by Dictys in Punic letters, which Cadmus and Agenor had then made of
common use in Greece; that some shepherds found the ma