42 REV. PROFESSOR D. S. MARGOLIOUTH, D.LITT., ON 



of the Poem is then somewhere between the establishment of 

 these colonies and the commencement of the historical series of 

 Greek poets. The date given by the chronogram comes in this 

 period, which is not very lengthy. 



The Troad, to which the Iliad belongs, enters history as a 

 settlement of Aeolian Greeks. The date of that settlement is 

 not certainly known, but evidently the Troad had not been 

 Hellenized previously. In the Iliad, however, the prehistoric 

 heroes of Ilios are given Hellenic names, a proceeding for which 

 as we have seen, the cryptic preface apologises, somewhat as 

 Plato in the Critias explains away an analogous Hellenization of 

 barbarians. Whether these heroes were historical or fictitious, 

 they were certainly not Hellenized before this Aeolian immigra- 

 tion. The name Ilios or Ilion is very clearly Semitic, meaning- 

 city of 17, the Hebrew El in Bethel. 



The cryptograms tell us that the community resident in this 

 place on the recommendation of the Son of Aeneas, who is men- 

 tioned in this context three times, selected the Poet Homer to 

 compose its lays in 24 cantos. The text of the Iliad lets us 

 know that a son of Aeneas was the author's patron ; it prophesies 

 that the descendants of Aeneas shall rule over the Trojans. We 

 may conclude that this person, whose name was probably Aene- 

 ades, was tyrant, or at any rate chief magistrate, in this place. 



The work, when issued, succeeded perhaps beyond the Poet's 

 hopes ; we learn that fresh offers were made him for another 

 Poem on a kindred theme ; analogy would suggest that Aeneades 

 would have liked his own exploits to be thus celebrated. Apollo 

 commanded the Poet to abandon the subject of war and to com- 

 pose the Odyssey in the same number of lays as the Iliad. 



The reason why Ilios, though the home of the Iliad, ceased to 

 be connected with it and generally with poetry, is to be found 

 in the Cimmerian invasion, dated by Herodotus in the reign of 

 the Lydian Ardys, wherein according to Strabo all this region 

 was overrun. This event accounts for the breach in the 

 continuity of Ilios and the tradition therewith connected. 



At no time does the city appear to have been of any consider- 

 able importance, since its existence in early ages seems to be 

 known only from the Homeric Poems. Nor are we to suppose 

 that when Homer was employed to compose its lays he was 

 expected to utilize historical materials ; it is most improbable 

 that any such existed. What he had to do was to compose a 

 fiction which would be agreeable to both the Hellenic ruler and 

 the non-Hellenic population. And in the main the Iliad is a 

 political pamphlet with this tendency. It is shown that this 



