Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/150

 134 HISTORY OF GREECE. which differ among themselves (as I have before observed) by an interval of four hundred and sixty years, and which for the most part determine the date of Homer by reference to some other event, itself fabulous and unauthenticated, such as the Trojan w&r, the Return of the Herakleids, or the Ionic migra- tion. Krates placed Homer earlier than the Return of the Herakleids, and less than eighty years after the Trojan war: Eratosthenes put him one hundred years after the Trojan war : Aristotle, Aristarchus, and Castor made his birth contemporary with the Ionic migration, while Apollodorus brings him down to one hundred years after that event, or two hundred and forty years after the taking of Troy. Thucydides assigns to him a date much subsequent to the Trojan war. 1 On the other hand, Theopompus and Euphorion refer his age to the far more recent period of the Lydian king, Gyges, (01. 18-23, B. c. 708-688,) and put him five hundred years after the Trojan epoch. 2 What were the grounds of these various conjectures, we do not know ; though in the statements of Krates and Eratosthenes, we may pretty well divine. But the oldest dictum preserved to us re- specting the date of Homer, meaning thereby the date of the Iliad and Odyssey, appears to me at the same time the most credible, and the most consistent with the general history of the ancient epic. Herodotus places Homer four hundred years be- fore himself; taking his departure, not from any fabulous event, but from a point of real and authentic time. 3 Four centuries 1 Thucyd. i. 3. in Mr. Clinton's Chronology, vol. i. p. 146. He prefers the view of Aristotle, and places the Iliad and Odyssey a century earlier than I am inclined to do, 940-927 B. c. Krates, probably placed the poet anterior to the Return of the Herakleids, because the Iliad makes no mention of Dorians in Peloponnesus : lirastos- thenes may be supposed to have grounded his date on the passage of the Iliad, which mentions the three generations descended from ./Eneas. We should have been glad to know the grounds of the very low date assigned by Theopompus and Enphorion. The pseudo-Herodotus, in his life of Homer, puts the birth of the poet one hundred and sixty-eight years after the Trojan war. 1 Herodot. ii. 53. Herakleides Ponticus affirmed that Lykurgus had brought into Peloponnesus the Homeric poems, which had before been
 * See the statements and citations respecting the age of Homer, collected