These opinions, in which we heartily agree--there never was such a
thing as a "popular" Epic--were published fourteen years ago. Mr.
Leaf, however, would not express them with regard to "our"
_Iliad_ and Odyssey, because, in his view, a considerable
part of the _Iliad_, as it stands, was made, not by Court
bards in the Achaean courts of Europe, not for an audience of
noble warriors and dames, but by wandering minstrels in the later
Ionian colonies of Asia. They did not chant for a military
aristocracy, but for the enjoyment of town and country folk at
popular festivals. [Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. p. xvi. 1900.] The
poems were _begun_, indeed, he thinks, for "a wealthy
aristocracy living on the product of their lands," in European
Greece; were begun by contemporary court minstrels, but were
continued, vastly expanded, and altered to taste by wandering
singers and reciting rhapsodists, who amused the holidays of a
commercial, expansive, and bustling Ionian democracy. [Footnote:
_Companion to the Iliad_, p. II.]

We must suppose that, on this theory, the later poets pleased a
commercial democracy by keeping up the tone that had delighted an
old land-owning military aristocracy. It is not difficult,
however, to admit this as possible, for the poems continued to be
admired in all ages of Greece and under every form of society. The
real question is, would the modern poets be the men to keep up a
tone some four or five centuries old, and to be true, if they were
true, to the details of the heroic age? "It is not beyond the
bounds of possibility that some part of the most primitive
_Iliad_ may have been actually sung by the court minstrel in
the palace whose ruins can still be seen in Mycenae." [Footnote:
Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p. xv.] But, by the expansionist