"Iliad," declines the combat until he can be assured that his opponent is not a god in disguise. "Flat burglary as ever was committed," cry our learned Dogberrys. For has not Diomede just wounded Aphrodite and struck down Ares in the fifth book? But Diomede had been expressly warned by Athena to confine his attacks to Ares and Aphrodite, and the power of "discerning god from man" was of course not a permanent endowment, but was bestowed upon him for that occasion.
Again, the petitionary embassy of the Greeks to Achilles in the ninth book is thought to be irreconcilable with Achilles' scornful or doubtful references in later books to the possibility or probability of such an appeal to his pity. But in repeated readings of these books in the class-room, I have never known a student to stumble at this supposed stone of offense. And, indeed, it does not require much insight into the logic of passion to see that an angry man may well spurn profferred atonement to-day, and yet cry out exultingly when he sees his enemy reduced to still more grievous straits on the morrow. "Now methinks that the sons of the Achæans will stand in prayer about my knees, for intolerable need is come upon them."
Mr. Lang makes much use of Matthew Arnold's argument of the improbability of the existence of four or five nearly contemporaneous great poets, all working in the "grand style." One is pleased to note that he repudiates Professor Jebb's suggestion that what the great critic took for the grand style was merely the traditional epic diction, an assumption sufficiently refuted by Arnold's discriminating remarks on Quintus of Smyrna. Mr. Lang also points out that Thackeray and Scott, in the days of proof-readers, could not attain to anything approaching the unfailing accuracy demanded by Homeric critics; he affirms that the lapses and nods of Homer are not discernible to the unmicroscopic eye, and that they never disturb any readers except "spectacled young Germans on their promotion"; he shows that philosophic consistency is not to be looked for in scenes where the gods play a part, "mythology being consistent only in inconsistency"; and then, growing weary of the controversy, petulantly protests that it is idle to argue with men who, to prove that a certain idea is unhomeric, expunge all passages in which it occurs. And yet he still persists in arguing, and grows too angry to be always amusing: "A critic who can seriously advance such a theory simply proves that he is incapable of understanding what poetry is." "It is possible to give people poetry, but impossible to give them the brains to understand and the hearts to feel it." Is there not a slight failure here in the urbanity that we look for in the writer of "Letters to Dead Authors"? We should bear in mind the provocation, however. For it appears from the chapters on the "Odyssey" that he has actually read Kirchhoff and Niese through, pen in hand. The nervous strain of such a task palliates, if it does not justify, the vivacity of Mr. Lang's irreverent treatment of an argument contributed to the discussion by an estimable scholar who is thought in Germany to combine literary grace with scientific thoroughness, Wilamowitz-Moellendorf: "Telemachus (Ody. 1,471) sits down in his bed and takes off his chiton. But the chiton reached to his feet. How then could he take it off when sitting down? The critic can try the experiment with his night-shirt: he will be far from ingenious if he does not solve the problem."
More attractive than these polemics are the archæological and literary chapters at the end of Mr. Lang's volume. What is the relation of the Mycenæ finds to the art described in Homer? Closer study reveals that the two arts are not identical, as was incautiously assumed at first. How shall we date the art of Mycenæ by Egyptian or by Assyrian analogies? Examples of Mycenæn art have been found in Egyptian tombs of the sixteenth century B. C., a date which startles the most resolute pre-Dorian. On the other hand, if we make the treasures of Mycenæ rich in gold contemporaneous with the Assyrian art of the period from 800 to 600 B. C., we must assume that the later Greeks, while preserving the earlier Homeric tradition, had completely forgotten the mighty chiefs who so recently had reared the Lion's gate of Mycenæ. Mr. Lang evidently doubts the possibility of attaining certainty with our present knowledge. Can we argue that Homer is later than carved gems because he never mentions them? We could in the same way infer that Shakespeare is later than tobacco. Can we date pottery by the tomb in which it is found? But ancient heirlooms may have been buried with the dead, or modern articles dropped or deposited by a desecrating or pious hand. Then, too, there is the malicious fact that "old Mexican pottery is often, in shape, color, and decoration, hardly to be distinguished from that of Mycenæ or Ialysus." It would be unbecoming for a
