if letters were dimly known, had never applied them to literature.
In such circumstances no man could have a motive for composing a
long poem. [Footnote: _Prolegomena to the Iliad_, p. xxvi.]

Yet if the original poet, "Homer," could make "the greater part
of the songs," as Wolf admitted, what physical impossibility stood
in the way of his making the whole? Meanwhile, the historical
circumstances, as conceived of by Wolf, were imaginary. He did not
take the circumstances of the poet as described in the Odyssey.
Here a king or prince has a minstrel, honoured as were the
minstrels described in the ancient Irish books of law. His duty is
to entertain the prince and his family and guests by singing epic
chants after supper, and there is no reason why his poetic
narratives should be brief, but rather he has an opportunity that
never occurred again till the literary age of Greece for producing
a long poem, continued from night to night. In the later age, in
the Asiatic colonies and in Greece, the rhapsodists, competing for
prizes at feasts, or reciting to a civic crowd, were limited in
time and gave but snatches of poetry. It is in this later civic
age that a poet without readers would have little motive for
building Wolfs great ship of song, and scant chance of launching
it to any profitable purpose. To this point we return; but when
once critics, following Wolf, had convinced themselves that a long
early poem was impossible, they soon found abundant evidence that
it had never existed.

They have discovered discrepancies of which, they say, no one sane
poet could have been guilty. They have also discovered that the
poems had not, as Wolf declared, "one 'harmony of colour" (_unus
color_). Each age, they say, during which the poems were