ve rather than iconoclastic. Equally true is this of recent
classical archaeology. Here no such revolution has been effected as that
which virtually created anew the history of Oriental antiquity; yet the
bearings of the new knowledge are similar in kind if different in
degree. The world had never quite forgotten the history of the primitive
Greeks as it had forgotten the Mesopotamians, the Himyaritic nations and
the Hittites; but it remembered their deeds only in the form of poetical
myths and traditions. These traditions, finding their clearest
delineation in the lines of Homer, had been subjected to the analysis of
the critical historians of the early decades of the 19th century, and
their authenticity had come to be more than doubted. The philological
analysis of Wolf and his successors had raised doubts as to the very
existence of Homer, and at one time the main current of scholarly
opinion had set strongly in the direction of the belief that the _Iliad_
and the _Odyssey_ were in reality but latter-day collections of divers
recitals that had been handed down by word of mouth from one generation
to another of bards through ages of illiteracy. It was strenuously
contended that the case could not well be otherwise, inasmuch as the art
of writing must have been quite unknown in Greece until after the
alleged age of the traditional Homer, whose date had been variously
estimated at from 1000 to 800 B.C. by less sceptical generations. It had
come to be a current belief that the _Iliad_ was first committed to
writing in the age of Peisistratus. A prominent controversialist, F.A.
Paley, even went so far as to doubt whether a single written copy of the
_Iliad_ existed in Greece at the time of the Peloponnesian War. The
doubts thus cast upon the age when the Homeric poems first assumed the
fixed form of writing were closely associated with the universal
scepticism as to the historical accuracy of any traditions whatever
regarding the early history of Greece. Cautious historians had come to
regard the so-called "Heroic Age" as a prehistoric period regarding
which nothing definite was known, or in all probability could be known.
It was ably argued by Sir George Cornewall Lewis, in connexion with his
inquiries into early Roman history, that a verbal tradition is not
transmitted from one generation to another in anything like an
authentic form for a longer period than about a century. If, then, the
art of writing was unknown in Gre