Al 
antiquity, the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey, as we 
now have them, may probably be referred to a period even sub- 
sequent to the age of Herodotus. The author argued, from 
an examination of the numerous passages in Pindar that refer 
to the Trojan war, that that poet could not have known our 
Iliad, but that other ancient Epics took their place in his time, 
the same, in fact, as the Greek Tragic writers used for the 
themes of their plays. Out of about fifty passages in Pindar, 
and even more than that number of Greek Plays, the titles of 
which, and to some extent the subjects, are known to us, the 
writer contended tbat only two, the Rhesus and the Cyclops, 
could be referred to our texts of Homer; while out of at least 
fifty passages in Plato, where Homer is mentioned by name, and 
citations made from him, there are none which do not refer to 
our present texts. Hence it was argued, that the compilation of 
our Homer from those older epics was made between B.c. 450 and 
400; that its preservation was due to the fact that it was from 
the first a written work, and that it finally superseded the more 
ancient epics, which were recited by the rhapsodists, from the 
superior merit of the poetry as well as from its being better 
adapted to the advanced literature of the period when it was 
written. The more comprehensive poems on the Troica, which 
are commonly held to be later in date, secondary in importance, 
and merely supplementary to the Iliad and the Odyssey, were 
shown to be in all probability the original poems, reduced to 
writing probably after the composition of the Ihad and Odyssey, 
but wholly unable to compete with them in merit, and therefore 
regarded in much later ages, in which we first find any separate 
account of them, as the inferior productions of post-Homeric 
poets. The author further argued from the remarkable resem- 
blances between the style and diction of Homer and Herodotus, 
and from the generally Asiatic character of the Homeric similes 
and scenery, that the compiler of our poems was an inhahitant 
of Asia Minor, and that possibly the poet Antimachus of Colo- 
