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 830 HISTORY OF GREECE. supposition from Strabo as implicitly as he took it from De"m trius. They call Ilium by the disrespectful appellation of New Ilium while the traveller in the Troad looks for Old Ilium as if it were the unquestionable spot where Priam had lived and moved ; the name is even formally enrolled on the best maps re- cently prepared of the ancient Troad. 1 1 The controversy, now half a century old, respecting Troy and the Trojan war between Bryant and his various opponents, Morritt, Gilbert Wakefield, the British Critic, etc., seems now nearly forgotten, and I cannot think that the pamphlets on either side would be considered as displaying much ability, if published at the present day. The discussion was first raised by the publication of Le Chevalier's account of the plain of Troy, in which the author professed to have discovered the true site of Old Ilium (the supposed Homeric Troy), about twelve miles from the sea near Bounar- bashi. Upon this account Bryant published some animadversions, followed up by a second treatise, in which he denied the historical reality of the Trojan war, and advanced the hypothesis that the tale was of Egyptian origin (Dis- sertation on the War of Troy, and the Expedition of the Grecians as de scribed by Homer, showing that no such Expedition was ever undertaken, and that no such city of Phrygia existed, by Jacob Bryant; seemingly 1797, though there is no date in the title-page : Morritt's reply was published in 1798). A reply from Mr. Bryant and a rejoinder from Mr. Morritt, as well as a pamphlet from G. Wakefield, appeared in 1799 and 1800, besides an Expostulation by the former addressed to the British Critic. Bryant, having dwelt both on the incredibilities and the inconsistencies of the Trojan war, as it is recounted in Grecian legend generally, nevertheless admitted that Homer had a groundwork for his story, and maintained that that groundwork was Egyptian. Homer (he thinks) was an Ithacan, de- scended from a family originally emigrant from Egypt : the war of Troy was originally an Egyptian war, which explains how Memnon the Ethiopian came to take part in it : " upon this history, which was originally Egyptian, Homer founded the scheme of his two principal poems, adapting things to Greece and Phrygia by an ingenious transposition:" he derived information from priests of Memphis or Thebes (Bryant, pp. 102, 108, 126). The "Hpof A-lyvnTiof, mentioned in the second book of the Odyssey (15), is the Egyp- tian hero, who affords, in his view, an evidence that the population of that island was in part derived from Egypt. No one since Mr. Bryant, I appre- hend, has ever construed the passage in the same sense. Bryant's Egyptian hypothesis is of no value, but the negative portion of his argument, summing up the particulars of the Trojan legend, and con- tending against its historical credibility, is not so easily put aside. Few persons will share in the zealous conviction by which Morritt tries to make it appear that the 1100 ships, the ten years of war, the large confederacy of princes from all parts of Greece, etc., have nothing but what is consonant with