never betrayed themselves to anything like the fatal extent of
anachronism exhibited by the Cyclic poets. How, if the true
ancient tone, taste, manners, and religion were lost, as the
Cyclic poets show that they were, did the contemporary Ionian
poets or rhapsodists know and preserve the old manner?

The best face we can put on the matter is to say that all the
Cyclic poets were recklessly independent of tradition, while all
men who botched at the _Iliad_ were very learned, and very
careful to maintain harmony in their pictures of life and manners,
except when they introduced changes in burial, bride-price,
houses, iron, greaves, and corslets, all of them things, by the
theory, modern, and when they sang in modern grammar.

Yet despite this conscientiousness of theirs, most of the many
authors of our _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ were, by the
theory, strolling irresponsible rhapsodists, like the later
_jongleurs_ of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in
mediaeval France. How could these strollers keep their modern
Ionian ideas, or their primitive, recrudescent phases of belief,
out of their lays, as far as they _did_ keep them out, while
the contemporary authors of the _Cypria_, _The Sack of Ilios_,
and other Cyclic poets were full of new ideas, legends, and
beliefs, or primitive notions revived, and, save when revived,
quite obviously late and quite un-Homeric in any case?

The difficulty is the greater if the Cyclic poems were long poems,
with one author to each Epic. Such authors were obviously men of
ambition; they produced serious works _de longue haleine_. It
is from them that we should naturally expect conservative and