Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/62

38 one of the rejected epics. The story in, 242 ff.) about Helen helping Odysseus in Troy, is definitely stated by Proclus—a suspected witness, it is true—to occur in the Little Iliad.* The succeeding one (271 ff.), makes Helen hostile to the Greeks, and cannot come from the same source. But it also reads like an abridgment. So does the story of Bellerophon in : "Proitos first sent him to slay the Chimaira: now she was a thing divine and not mortal, in front a lion, and behind a serpent, and in the middle a wild goat, breathing furious fire. Yet he slew her, obeying the signs of the gods." What signs, and how? And what is the meaning of the strange lines 200 f.? "But when he, too, was hated of all the gods, then verily down the Plain of Wandering alone he wandered, eating his heart, shunning the tread of men." The original poem, whatever it was, would have told us; the resumé takes all the details for granted.

Space does not allow more than a reference to that criterion of date which has actually been most used in the 'Higher Criticism'—the analysis of the story. It might be interesting to note that the wall round the ships in the Iliad is a late motive; that it is built under impossible circumstances; that it is sometimes there and sometimes not, and that it does not alter its conduct after Apollo has flattened it into the ditch; or that Achilles in speaks as if the events of  had not occurred; or that Odysseus' adventures in  and, and perhaps in , seem to have been originally composed in the third person, not the first, while his supposed false stories in  and  seem actually to represent older versions of the real Odysseus-legend; or that the poets of  and the following books do not seem to know that Athena had transformed their hero in  into a decrepit