NEW THEORY OF ACHILLES' SHIELD. 313 



Of course, if we accept these views, we have no 

 difficulty in understanding that a poet so ancient as 

 Homer should refer to the constellations which still 

 appear upon celestial spheres. And, in any case, the 

 mere question of antiquity presents, as we have already 

 shown, little difficulty. 



But there is one difficulty, a notice of which must 

 close this paper, already carried far beyond the limits 

 I had proposed to myself: It may be thought re- 

 markable that heroes of Greek mythology, as Perseus 

 ' and Orion, should be placed by Homer, or even by 

 Arntus, in spheres which are undoubtedly of eastern 

 origin. 



Now it may be remarked, first, of Homer, that many 

 acute critics consider the whole story of the ' Iliad ' to 

 be, in reality, merely an adaptation of an eastern nar- 

 rative to Greek scenes and names. It is pointed out, 

 that, whereas the Catalogue in Book II. reckons up- 

 wards of 100,000 men, only 10,000 fought at Mara- 

 thon ; and, whereas there are counted no less than 

 1,200 ships in the Catalogue, there were but 271 at 

 Artemisium, and at Salamis but 378. However this 

 may be, we have the distinct evidence of Herodotus 

 that the Greek mythology was derived originally from 

 foreign sources. He says, ' All the names of the gods 

 in Greece were brought from Egypt,' an opinion in 

 which Diodorus and other eminent authorities concur. 

 But it is the opinion of acute modern critics that we 

 must go beyond Egyptian to Assyrian, or Indian, 

 perhaps even to Hebrew sources for the origin of 



