the poems, the
supposed historical residue would hardly be worth the trouble of saving.
As Mr. Cox well observes, "It is of the very essence of the narrative
that Paris, who has deserted Oinone, the child of the stream Kebren, and
before whom Here, Athene, and Aphrodite had appeared as claimants
for the golden apple, steals from Sparta the beautiful sister of the
Dioskouroi; that the chiefs are summoned together for no other purpose
than to avenge her woes and wrongs; that Achilleus, the son of the
sea-nymph Thetis, the wielder of invincible weapons and the lord of
undying horses, goes to fight in a quarrel which is not his own; that
his wrath is roused because he is robbed of the maiden Briseis, and that
henceforth he takes no part in the strife until his friend Patroklos has
been slain; that then he puts on the new armour which Thetis brings to
him from the anvil of Hephaistos, and goes forth to win the victory. The
details are throughout of the same nature. Achilleus sees and converses
with Athene; Aphrodite is wounded by Diomedes, and Sleep and Death bear
away the lifeless Sarpedon on their noiseless wings to the far-off
land of light." In view of all this it is evident that Homer was not
describing, like a salaried historiographer, the state of things which
existed in the time of his father or grandfather. To his mind the
occurrences which he described were those of a remote, a wonderful, a
semi-divine past.

This conclusion, which I have thus far supported merely by reference to
the Iliad itself, becomes irresistible as soon as we take into account
the results obtained during the past thirty years by the science of
comparative mythology. As long as our view was restricted to Greece,
it was perhaps excusable that Achilleus and Paris should be taken for
exaggerated copies of actual persons. Since the day when Grimm laid the
foundations of the science of mythology, all this has been changed. It
is now held that Achilleus and Paris and Helena are to be found, not
only in the Iliad, but also in the Rig-Veda, and therefore, as mythical
conceptions, date, not from Homer, but from a period preceding the
dispersion of the Aryan nations. The tale of the Wrath of Achilleus, far
from originating with Homer, far from being recorded by the author of
the Iliad as by an eyewitness, must have been known in its essential
features in Aryana-vaedjo, at that remote epoch when the Indian, the
Greek, and the Teuton were as yet one and