Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/71

Rh arms of Achilles; the Sack* begins after the reception of the Wooden Horse. The Æthiopis* has five books, the Sack* two; seven in all. But one of the tables treats them both as a single continuous poem of 9500 lines, which must mean at the very least ten books. On the other hand, Proclus makes the Homecomings,* which must have been a series of separate lays almost as elastic as the Eoiai* themselves (see p. 60), into a single poem.

As for the date of these poems, they were worked into final shape much later than our Homer, and then apparently more for their historical matter than for their poetic value. They quote Iliad, Odyssey, and Theogony; they are sometimes brazen in their neglect of the digamma; they are often modern and poor in their language. On the other hand, it is surely perverse to take their mentions of ancestor-worship, magic, purification, and the like, as evidence of lateness. These are all practices of dateless antiquity, left unmentioned by 'Homer,' like many other subjects, from some conventional repugnance, whether of race, or class, or tradition. And the actual matter of the rejected epics is often very old. We have seen the relation of to the Little Iliad* In the Cypria* Alexander appears in his early glory as conqueror of Sidon; there is a catalogue of Trojans which cannot well have been copied from our meagre list in B, and is perhaps the source of it; there is a story told by Nestor which looks like the original of part of our Hades-legend in. And as for quotations, the words "The purpose of Zeus was fulfilled" are certainly less natural where they stand in the opening of the Iliad than in the Cypria* where they refer to the whole design of relieving Earth of her burden of men by means of the Trojan War. We have 125 separate quotations from the