to land tenure, burial, the construction of houses, marriage
customs, weapons, and armour in the _Iliad_ and
_Odyssey_. These supposed anachronisms we examine later: if
they really exist they show that the poets were indifferent to
local colour and archaeological precision, or were incapable of
attaining to archaeological accuracy. In fact, such artistic
revival of the past in its habit as it lived is a purely modern
ideal.

We are to show, then, that the Epics, being, as wholes, free from
such inevitable modifications in the picture of changing details
of life as uncritical authors always introduce, are the work of
the one age which they represent. This is the reverse of what has
long been, and still is, the current theory of Homeric criticism,
according to which the Homeric poems are, and bear manifest marks
of being, a mosaic of the poetry of several ages of change.

Till Wolf published his _Prolegomena_ to [blank space] (1795)
there was little opposition to the old belief that the
_ILIAD_ and Odyssey were, allowing for interpolations, the
work of one, or at most of two, poets. After the appearance of
Wolfs celebrated book, Homeric critics have maintained, generally
speaking, that the _ILIAD_ is either a collection of short
lays disposed in sequence in a late age, or that it contains an
ancient original "kernel" round which "expansions," made
throughout some centuries of changeful life, have accrued, and
have been at last arranged by a literary redactor or editor.

The latter theory is now dominant. It is maintained that the
_Iliad_ is a work of at least four centuries. Some of the