Chapter 23

the Achaeans demoralised by the wounding of Agamemnon, and they make a stand. "What ails us," asks Odysseus, "that we forget our impetuous valour?" The passage appears to take up the companionship of Odysseus and Diomede, who were left breakfasting together at the end of Book X. and are not mentioned till we meet them again in this scene of Book XI., as if they had just come on the field.

As to the linguistic tests of lateness "there are exceptionally numerous traces of later formation," says Mr. Monro; while Fick, tout _contraire,_ writes, "clumsy Ionisms are not common, and, as a rule, occur in these parts which on older grounds show themselves to be late interpolations." "The cases of agreement" (between Fick and Mr. Monro), "are few, and the passages thus condemned are not more numerous in the _Doloneia_ than in any average book." [Footnote: Jevons, _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, vii. p. 302.] The six examples of "a post-Homeric use of the article" do not seem so very post-Homeric to an ordinary intelligence--parallels occur in Book I.--and "Perfects in [Greek: ka] from derivative verbs" do not destroy the impression of antiquity and unity which is left by the treatment of character; by the celebrated cap with boars' tusks, which no human being could archaeologically reconstruct in the seventh century; and by the Homeric vigour in such touches as the horses unused to dead men. As the _Iliad_ certainly passed through centuries in which its language could not but be affected by linguistic changes, as it could not escape from _remaniements_, consciously or unconsciously introduced by reciters and copyists, the linguistic objections are not strongly felt by us. An unphilological reader of Homer notes that Duntzer thinks the _Doloneia_ "older than the oldest portion of the Odyssey," while Gemoll thinks that the author of the _Doloneia_. was familiar with the _Odyssey_. [Footnote: Duntzer, _Homer. Abhanglungen_, p. 324. Gemoll, _Hermes_, xv. 557 ff.]

Meanwhile, one thing seems plain to us: when the author of Book IX. posted the guards under Thrasymedes, he was deliberately leading up to Book X.; while the casual remark in Book XIV. about the exchange of shields between father and son, Nestor and Thrasymedes, glances back at