The fourth condition would be fulfilled by a natural consequence of the same feeling. The soldiers of these free bands would feel respect for the title, and would hardly employ it when they wanted to abuse one another.
As to the disappearance of the common use of the word, we must recollect that the race which supplanted the Ἀχαιοὶ, however nearly allied to them by blood, was altogether alien and hostile to them at the time. The manner in which the Ἀχαιοὶ were driven up into Ægialia, shews clearly that the Heracleid invaders made what is called clean work. There is nothing remarkable therefore in the disappearance of the word from common use: neither is it strange that, when the new settlers began to look back for stories of glory and feats of arms, their attention should fall, almost as a matter of course, upon that generation whose exploits had been perpetuated, either by the greatest of poems ever composed, or by the noblest collection of legends which the world has ever seen.
Even if these conditions are satisfied, the hypothesis still rests upon very slight evidence. They are not sufficiently inconsistent at first sight, to make it very remarkable that a hypothesis should be capable of being shaped into conformity with all of them. However, it may be said that it is a hypothesis which has no improbability a priori: such people as composed these bands did exist, we know; it is likely that they should have a peculiar name; and we find, I think, no other name for them.
I have only to add that I have taken the whole of the Iliad and Odyssey as safe authority. If we believe them to be the work of a great number of poets, the evidence as to the use of any word found in them generally, or of any habits appearing consistently throughout, is still stronger than if we consider the whole as the work of a single author.
