theory, even the oldest parts of our _Iliad_ are now full of
what we may call quite recent Ionian additions, full of late
retouches, and full, so to speak, of omissions of old parts.

Through four or five centuries, by the hypothesis, every singer
who could find an audience was treating as much as he knew of a
vast body of ancient lays exactly as he pleased, adding here,
lopping there, altering everywhere. Moreover, these were centuries
full of change. The ancient Achaean palaces were becoming the
ruins which we still behold. The old art had faded, and then
fallen under the disaster of the Dorian conquest. A new art, or a
recrudescence of earlier art, very crude and barbaric, had
succeeded, and was beginning to acquire form and vitality. The
very scene of life was altered: the new singers and listeners
dwelt on the Eastern side of the Aegean. Knights no longer, as in
Europe, fought from chariots: war was conducted by infantry, for
the most part, with mounted auxiliaries. With the disappearance of
the war chariot the huge Mycenaean shields had vanished or were
very rarely used. The early vase painters do not, to my knowledge,
represent heroes as fighting from war chariots. They had lost
touch with that method. Fighting men now carried relatively small
round bucklers, and iron was the metal chiefly employed for
swords, spears, and arrow points. Would the new poets, in
deference to tradition, abstain from mentioning cavalry, or small
bucklers, or iron swords and spears? or would they avoid puzzling
their hearers by speaking of obsolete and unfamiliar forms of
tactics and of military equipment? Would they therefore sing of
things familiar--of iron weapons, small round shields, hoplites,
and cavalry? We shall see that confused and self-contradictory
answers are given by criticism to all these questions by scholars