342-384.] They had ideas very different from those of the authors
of the _Iliad_ and _ODYSSEY_, as these ideas have
reached us.

Helbig states this curious fact, that the Homeric poems are free
from many recent or recrudescent ideas common in other Epics
composed during the later centuries of the supposed four hundred
years of Epic growth. [Footnote: _Homerische Epos_, p. 3.]
Thus a signet ring was mentioned in the _Ilias Puma_, and
there are no rings in _Iliad_ or _Odyssey_. But Helbig
does not perceive the insuperable difficulty which here encounters
his hypothesis. He remarks: "In certain poems which were grouping
themselves around the _Iliad and _Odyssey, we meet data
absolutely opposed to the conventional style of the Epic." He
gives three or four examples of perfectly un-Homeric ideas
occurring in Epics of the eighth to seventh centuries, B.C., and a
large supply of such cases can be adduced. But Helbig does not ask
how it happened that, if poets of these centuries had lost touch
with the Epic tradition, and had wandered into a new region of
thought, as they had, examples of their notions do not occur in
the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. By his theory these poems
were being added to and altered, even in their oldest portions, at
the very period when strange fresh, or old and newly revived
fancies were flourishing. If so, how were the _Iliad_ and
_Odyssey_, unlike the Cyclic poems, kept uncontaminated, as
they confessedly were, by the new romantic ideas?

Here is the real difficulty. Cyclic poets of the eighth and
seventh centuries had certainly lost touch with the Epic
tradition; their poems make that an admitted fact. Yet poets of