studious adhesion to the traditional models. From casual strollers
like the rhapsodists and chanters at festivals, we look for
nothing of the sort. _They_ might be expected to introduce
great feats done by sergeants and privates, so to speak--men of
the nameless [Greek: laos], the host, the foot men--who in
Homer are occasionally said to perish of disease or to fall under
the rain of arrows, but are never distinguished by name. The
strollers, it might be thought, would also be the very men to
introduce fairy tales, freaks of primitive Ionian myth,
discreditable anecdotes of the princely heroes, and references to
the Ionian colonies.

But it is not so; the serious, laborious authors of the long
Cyclic poems do such un-Homeric things as these; the gay,
irresponsible strolling singers of a lay here and a lay there--
lays now incorporated in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_--
scrupulously avoid such faults. They never even introduce a signet
ring. These are difficulties in the theory of the _Iliad_ as
a patchwork by many hands, in many ages, which nobody explains;
which, indeed, nobody seems to find difficult. Yet the difficulty
is insuperable. Even if we take refuge with Wilamowitz in the idea
that the Cyclic and Homeric poems were at first mere protoplasm of
lays of many ages, and that they were all compiled, say in the
sixth century, into so many narratives, we come no nearer to
explaining why the tone, taste, and ideas of two such narratives--
Illiad and Odyssey--are confessedly distinct from the tone, taste,
and ideas of all the others. The Cyclic poems are certainly the
production of a late and changed age? [Footnote: For what manner
of audience, if not for readers, the Cyclic poems were composed is
a mysterious question.] The _Iliad_ is not in any degree--