ations. It is possible, indeed, that
in its leading outline, the Iliad may be true to historic fact,
that in the great maritime expedition of western Greece against
the rival and half-kindred empire of the Laomedontiadae, the
chieftain of Thessaly, from his valour and the number of his
forces, may have been the most important ally of the Peloponnesian
sovereign; the preeminent value of the ancient poetry on the
Trojan war may thus have forced the national feeling of the
Athenians to yield to their taste. The songs which spoke of their
own great ancestor were, no doubt, of far inferior sublimity and
popularity, or, at first sight, a Theseid would have been much
more likely to have emanated from an Athenian synod of compilers
of ancient song, than an Achilleid or an Olysseid. Could France
have given birth to a Tasso, Tancred would have been the hero of
the Jerusalem. If, however, the Homeric ballads, as they are
sometimes called, which related the wrath of Achilles, with all
its direful consequences, were so far superior to the rest of the
poetic cycle, as to admit no rivalry,--it is still surprising, that
throughout the whole poem the _callida junctura_ should never
betray the workmanship of an Athenian hand, and that the national
spirit of a race, who have at a later period not inaptly been
compared to our self admiring neighbours, the French, should
submit with lofty self denial to the almost total exclusion of
their own ancestors--or, at least, to the questionable dignity of
only having produced a leader tolerably skilled in the military
tactics of his age."(27)

To return to the Wolfian theory. While it is to be confessed, that Wolf's
objections to the primitive integrity of the Iliad and Odyssey have never
been wholly got over, we cannot help discovering that they have failed to
enlighten us as to any substantial point, and that the difficulties with
which the whole subject is beset, are rather augmented than otherwise, if
we admit his hypothesis. Nor is Lachmann's(28) modification of his theory
any better. He divides the first twenty-two books of the Iliad into
sixteen different songs, and treats as ridiculous the belief that their
amalgamation into one regular poem belongs to a period earlier than the
age of Peisistratus. This, as Grote observes, "explains the gaps and
contradictions in the narrative, but it expla