who hold that the Epics are not the product of one, but of many
ages.

There were other changes between the ages of the original minstrel
and of the late successors who are said to have busied themselves
in adding to, mutilating, and altering his old poem. Kings and
courts had passed away; old Ionian myths and religious usages,
unknown to the Homeric poets, had come out into the light;
commerce and pleasure and early philosophies were the chief
concerns of life. Yet the poems continued to be aristocratic in
manners; and, in religion and ritual, to be pure from
recrudescences of savage poetry and superstition, though the
Ionians "did not drop the more primitive phases of belief which
had clung to them; these rose to the surface with the rest of the
marvellous Ionic genius, and many an ancient survival was
enshrined in the literature or mythology of Athens which had long
passed out of all remembrance at Mycenas." [Footnote: _Companion
to the Iliad_, p. 7.]

Amazing to say, none of these "more primitive phases of belief,"
none of the recrudescent savage magic, was intruded by the late
Ionian poets into the Iliad which they continued, by the theory.
Such phases of belief were, indeed, by their time popular, and
frequently appeared in the Cyclic poems on the Trojan war;
continuations of the _ILIAD_, which were composed by Ionian
authors at the same time as much of the _ILIAD_ itself (by
the theory) was composed. The authors of these Cyclic poems--
authors contemporary with the makers of much of the _ILIAD_--
_were_ eminently "un-Homeric" in many respects. [Footnote:
_Cf_. Monro, _The Cyclic Poets; Odyssey_, vol. ii, pp.