and we cannot trace the poem in which it comes. Pindar, a little later, mentions Homer several times. He blames him for exalting Odysseus—a reference to the Odyssey—but pardons him because he has told "straightly by rod and plummet the whole prowess of Aias"; especially, it would seem, his rescue of the body of Achilles, which was described in two lost epics, the Little Iliad* and the Æthiopis.* He bids us "remember Homer's word: A good messenger brings honour to any dealing"—a word, as it chances, which our Homer never speaks; and he mentions the "Homêridæ, singers of stitched lays."
If Æschylus ever called his plays[1] "slices from the great banquets of Homer," the banquets he referred to must have been far richer than those to which we have admission. In all his ninety plays it is hard to find more than seven which take their subjects from our Homer, including the Agamemnon and Choëphoroi,[2] and it would need some spleen to make a critic describe these two as 'slices' from the Odyssey. What Æschylus meant by 'Homer' was the heroic saga as a whole. It is the same with Sophocles, who is called 'most Homeric,' and is said by Athenæus (p. 277) to "rejoice in the epic cycle and make whole dramas out of it." That is, he treated those epic myths which Athenæus only knew in the prose 'cycles' or handbooks compiled by one Dionysius in the second century B.C., and by Apollôdorus in the first. To Xenophanes (sixth century) 'Homer and Hesiod ' mean all the epic tradition, sagas and theogonies alike, just as they do to Herodotus when he says (ii. 53), that they two "made the Greek religion, and distributed to the gods their titles
