ins nothing else." Moreover,
we find no contradictions warranting this belief, and the so-called
sixteen poets concur in getting rid of the following leading men in the
first battle after the secession of Achilles: Elphenor, chief of the
Euboeans; Tlepolemus, of the Rhodians; Pandarus, of the Lycians; Odius, of
the Halizonians; Pirous and Acamas, of the Thracians. None of these heroes
again make their appearance, and we can but agree with Colonel Mure, that
"it seems strange that any number of independent poets should have so
harmoniously dispensed with the services of all six in the sequel." The
discrepancy, by which Pylaemenes, who is represented as dead in the fifth
book, weeps at his son's funeral in the thirteenth, can only be regarded
as the result of an interpolation.

Grote, although not very distinct in stating his own opinions on the
subject, has done much to clearly show the incongruity of the Wolfian
theory, and of Lachmann's modifications with the character of
Peisistratus. But he has also shown, and we think with equal success, that
the two questions relative to the primitive unity of these poems, or,
supposing that impossible, the unison of these parts by Peisistratus, and
not before his time, are essentially distinct. In short, "a man may
believe the Iliad to have been put together out of pre-existing songs,
without recognising the age of Peisistratus as the period of its first
compilation." The friends or literary _employes_ of Peisistratus must have
found an Iliad that was already ancient, and the silence of the
Alexandrine critics respecting the Peisistratic "recension," goes far to
prove, that, among the numerous manuscripts they examined, this was either
wanting, or thought unworthy of attention.

"Moreover," he continues, "the whole tenor of the poems themselves
confirms what is here remarked. There is nothing, either in the Iliad or
Odyssey, which savours of modernism, applying that term to the age of
Peisistratus--nothing which brings to our view the alterations brought
about by two centuries, in the Greek language, the coined money, the
habits of writing and reading, the despotisms and republican governments,
the close military array, the improved construction of ships, the
Amphiktyonic convocations, the mutual frequentation of religious
festivals, the Oriental and Egyptian veins of religion, &c., familiar to
the latter epoch. These alterations Onomakritus, and the other literary
friends of Pei