Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/615

 Lang : Homer and His Age 605 are universally recognized, and the present work is admirably adapted to confer similar benefits upon Iranian studies. . The only criticism of the book to be offered here is on the positive- ness of the attribution of the monuments at Murghab to Cyrus the Great. Weissbach's ascription of the inscription and relief to the younger Cyrus and his denial of the identity of the tomb with that described by the classic writers are entitled to mention, even if one does not (like the reviewer) believe them the more probable explanations. In conclusion unlimited praise must be given to the make-up of the book, to the liberality of the index, and the execution of the map and illustrations, many of which are from unpublished photographs taken by the author or his friends. George jNIelville Bolling. Homer and His Age. By Andrew Lang. (London, New York, and Bombay : Longmans, Green, and Company. 1906. Pp. xii, 336-) The sturdy champion of Homeric unity has here given the Disin- tegrationists such a shaking up as they have rarely had before. And for all true believers what a consolation ! Against the critics who regard the Iliad as the work of four or five centuries and so a medley of old and new, of obsolete and modern, lIr. Lang maintains that it is " the work of a single age, a single stage of culture, the poet describ- ing his own environment." It is an age which has substituted crema- tion for burial of the dead ; which retains bronze for arms while employing iron for tools ; which keeps the huge Mycenaean shield now strengthened by bronze plates and has elaborated corselets and greaves. This age, he thinks, is certainly sundered from the Mycenaean prime by the century or two in which changing ideas led to the superseding of burial by burning; or by a foreign conquest and the years in which the foreign conquerors acquired the language of their subjects. To begin with, Mr. Lang finds abundant raison d'etre for the long epic in a society like that drawn in the Odyssey. There the minstrel " has an opportunity that never occurred again till the literary age of Greece for producing a long poem continued from night to night." True enough : does not Odysseus himself reel oft' a sixth of the Odyssey during one night in hall? Think, too, of poor Penelope's unbidden house-party three years running, with leisure for a dozen Iliads and Odysseys if Phemius had had a mind to sing them ! And to end with, our author makes as short work of the difficulty of handing down these long poems. They were preserved and trans- mitted, he declares, not by gilds of rhapsodists but by early written texts. It is interesting to recall how, years before Evans had dreamed of digging at Knossos, Lang had written in his Letter to Homer: " May we discover thee practising a new art and strange, graving Phoenician symbols on tablets of wood, or writing with a reed pen on slips of papyrus ?" And now we actually find at Knossos not only thousands of inscribed clay tablets, but earthen cups of Early Minoan time bear-