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predicted. It preserves a tradition of the peoples with whom the Achæans did business at the fair of Troy; it was essentially a contemporaneous document,' and 'has survived in something very like its original form.' It certainly contains a record which could not have been invented after the twelfth century. Thus it seems to supply a strong ground for the view, probable on other and more general grounds, that the material of the Iliad was derived from the poems of Achæan minstrels who sang to the generations immediately succeeding the fall of Troy. There is indeed one feature of the Catalogue on which Mr Leaf has not touched and which seems to detract from its realism. We mean the names of the leaders. It is obvious that the chief of the Pæonians, for instance, could not have been called Pyraichmes, or the chief of the Paphlagonians Pylaimenes. Contrast these and others with the name of the Lycian Sarpedon, which obviously rests on genuine tradition. Were they inventions of Homer or of an old Achæan singer?

In his second work Mr Leaf undertakes to do for the geography of Greece what he has done in his first for that of Troy and her confederacy. In the interval between the appearance of the two books he seems to have revised his views about the Achæans, though he does not expressly say so. In 'Troy' he represented them as the original makers of Greece, who, descending from the north towards the beginning of the second millennium, occupied the peninsula, at that time entirely in the hands of the non-Hellenic Pelasgians. In 'Homer and History,' on the contrary, he sees that they are later comers; they find a Greek-speaking race already in Greece, partly dominated by rulers who had come over from Crete and introduced Minoan civilisation. They were 'part of the flood of incomers from the north, whose first wave had overwhelmed Greece and passed on to Knossos' about B.C. 1400, and from that time were the ruling tribe in Greece, though they did not occupy all the country. Thus we have four instead of two peoples on the scene-the Pelasgians,* the pre-Achæan Greeks,

* As to the Pelasgians Mr Leaf propounds an ingenious theory which does not commend itself to us. Until we have some decisive proof to the contrary we must regard Pelasgoi as a distinctly non-Greek name.

whether Greeks or Lycians or Carians, and compel them to trade with the Euxine merchants at Troy, under conditions imposed by himself. He could grow rich by exacting heavy tolls. The Hellespont was also in early times the natural outlet for Thracian trade, so that, if a market at Troy were established, it would naturally be a rendezvous for merchants from the Balkan countries. Mr Leaf sketches an imaginary picture of the annual summer fair, after which 'Priam and his retainers sat down to feast through the winter months on the toll they had taken' from the traders who had gathered under their walls. Troy thus appears in a new and unfavourable light. We have to think of her as a parasite; and no power is more offensive than one which, contributing nothing to the work of the world, exploits and feeds on the labours of others. To the Achæans the barrier which the watchmen of the Hellespont set up against free trade with the Euxine became intolerable, and the Trojan War was the inevitable result. The Lycian merchants were indeed in the same position as the Achæans, in regard to Black Sea traffic, yet they were the principal and the closest allies of the Trojans in the war. But their power too was threatened by the Achæans, who were already in possession of Rhodes, and they had therefore a good reason for making common cause with Priam.

Mr Leaf has made out a strong case for his hypothesis:

'Given the known data-the Hellespont an essential economic necessity to Greece, but blocked by a strong fort, and the expansion of Greece to the Euxine at the beginning of the historical period-there must have been a point at which that fort was taken by the Greeks. And it must have been taken much in the way which Homer describes, by a process of wearing down. A war of Troy therefore is a necessary deduction from purely geographical conditions; and the account of it in Homer agrees with all the probabilities of the case.'

The theory obviously involves divination, but it is arrived at by logical inferences, it accounts for the principal data, and it may well contain an important part of the truth.

Under Mr Leaf's analysis the Trojan Catalogue assumes a significance which would not easily have been

predicted. It preserves a tradition of the peoples with whom the Achæans did business at the fair of Troy; it was essentially a contemporaneous document,' and 'has survived in something very like its original form.' It certainly contains a record which could not have been invented after the twelfth century. Thus it seems to supply a strong ground for the view, probable on other and more general grounds, that the material of the Iliad was derived from the poems of Achæan minstrels who sang to the generations immediately succeeding the fall of Troy. There is indeed one feature of the Catalogue on which Mr Leaf has not touched and which seems to detract from its realism. We mean the names of the leaders. It is obvious that the chief of the Pæonians, for instance, could not have been called Pyraichmes, or the chief of the Paphlagonians Pylaimenes. Contrast these and others with the name of the Lycian Sarpedon, which obviously rests on genuine tradition. Were they inventions of Homer or of an old Achæan singer?

In his second work Mr Leaf undertakes to do for the geography of Greece what he has done in his first for that of Troy and her confederacy. In the interval between the appearance of the two books he seems to have revised his views about the Achæans, though he does not expressly say so. In 'Troy' he represented them as the original makers of Greece, who, descending from the north towards the beginning of the second millennium, occupied the peninsula, at that time entirely in the hands of the non-Hellenic Pelasgians. In 'Homer and History,' on the contrary, he sees that they are later comers; they find a Greek-speaking race already in Greece, partly dominated by rulers who had come over from Crete and introduced Minoan civilisation. They were part of the flood of incomers from the north, whose first wave had overwhelmed Greece and passed on to Knossos' about B.C. 1400, and from that time were the ruling tribe in Greece, though they did not occupy all the country. Thus we have four instead of two peoples on the scene-the Pelasgians,* the pre-Achæan Greeks,

* As to the Pelasgians Mr Leaf propounds an ingenious theory which does not commend itself to us. Until we have some decisive proof to the contrary we must regard Pelasgoi as a distinctly non-Greek name.

the Minoan rulers, and the Achæans. This view is unquestionably nearer to the truth, but we think that Mr Leaf is still inclined to place the conquests of the Achæans too early. We have not sufficient data to enable us to say who were the destroyers of Cnossus. The Achæans were probably pressing forward in Northern Greece in the fourteenth century, but for the date of the conquest of the Peloponnesus our sole evidence points to the thirteenth. For, according to the tradition upon which Mr Leaf himself builds, Pelops, who gave his name to the peninsula, was its conqueror, and Pelops was the grandfather of Agamemnon; so that, if we place the Trojan War at the beginning of the twelfth century, we, cannot date his reign before the first half of the thirteenth. In any case we can agree that, two generations before the war, the Achæans were the ruling power in Greece, as we find them represented in Homer. Mr Leaf conceives them as a small military caste, perhaps only a few thousands all told '; and he works out an interesting parallel between their position and that of the Normans in South Italy. He might have found another illustration, still nearer, in the conquest of Greece itself by the Franks, Lombards, and Venetians after the Fourth Crusade.

In examining Homer's view of the geography of Achæan Greece the essential thing is to determine the value of the Catalogue of the Achæan ships. Mr Leaf has submitted it to a merciless analysis, and it may safely be said that the combined forces of the unitarians will never rehabilitate the Catalogue as a document of significance for the Mycenæan age. It was composed by a Boeotian in the interests of Boeotia, which had taken no part in the Trojan War. Probably it was a work of the Hesiodic period and need not be later than 800 B.C., for Mr Allen has recently brought forward very forcible arguments for assigning to Hesiod a date a hundred years prior to that which is usually accepted. When we sweep away the Catalogue, we obtain from the rest of the Iliad and the Odyssey a consistent political map for 1200 B.C. Agamemnon was the head of an Achæan empire which embraced not only the Peloponnesus but

* In the Journal of Hellenic Studies,' vol. xxxv, pp. 85, sqq. (1915).

a large part of northern Greece and the western islands. Thucydides was right in conceiving him as much more than the temporary leader of a confederacy formed for the special purpose of the war. He was over-lord of Peleus, whose kingdom embraced Phthia and Hellas, and of Odysseus, who ruled over the Ionian islands with the exception of Corfù. Mr Leaf has shown with admirable lucidity how overwhelming are the arguments in favour of Dr Dörpfeld's identification of Homeric Ithaca with Leucas (Santa Maura). The four islands under the sway of Odysseus were Zacynthus, Dulichion, Same, and Ithaca. Zacynthus preserved its name; Dulichion is Cephallenia; Same is Thiaki, the Ithaca of historical Greece; Ithaca is Leucas. These identifications render the geography of the Odyssey completely intelligible and coherent; on the old theory we are involved in a series of insuperable difficulties. Our attitude to tradition is largely a matter of temperament; and there will probably always be some who will prefer to impose on the poet any number of inconsistencies and incongruities rather than sacrifice the tradition of the identity of the Homeric with the later Ithaca. It has been conjectured that in postHomeric days northern invaders seized Leucas, when the Ithacans were driven across to Same and carried their name with them. This may be the explanation. Calabria, which was once the name of the heel of Italy, is now the name of the toe. We know when the change happened, in the seventh century A.D., and why. If the early history of the Middle Ages were as blank to us as the dark period of Greece, we should find it far more puzzling to account for the migration of the Calabrian name than it is to discover a probable reason for the new nomenclature of the Ionian islands.

Mr Leaf has established on a firm basis the value of Homer, within certain wide limits, as a historical source. He has shown that the geographical and topographical details of the Homeric picture conform to fact so far as they can be controlled, and otherwise are self-consistent. Archæological discoveries have proved that in their picture of civilisation the poems are also true to fact, apart from some inevitable anachronisms. Such truth could not have been achieved if a poet of the tenth

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