are adapted to the demands of a reading public. There was no reading public either in Athens or in Ionia by 470. Anaximander wrote his words of wisdom for a few laborious students to learn by heart; Xenophanes appealed simply to the ear; it was not till forty years later that Herodotus turned his recitations into book form for educated persons to read to themselves, and Euripides began to collect a library.
This helps us to some idea of the Ionian epos as it lived and grew before its transplanting. It was recited, not read; the incidents of the Iliad and the Odyssey were mostly in their present order, and doubtless the poems roughly of their present compass, though we may be sure there were Iliads without K, and Odysseys ending, where Aristarchus ended his, at Ψ 296, omitting the last book and a half. Much more important, the Iliad did not necessarily stop at the mere funeral of Hector. We know of a version which ran on from our last line—"So dealt they with the burying of Hector; but there came the Amazon, daughter of Ares, great-hearted slayer of men"—and which told of the love of Achilles for the Amazon princess, and his slaying of her, and probably also of his well-earned death. The death of Achilles is, as Goethe felt it to be, the real finish that our Iliad wants. When the enchanted steed, Xanthus, and the dying Hector prophesy it, we feel that their words must come true or the story lose its meaning. And if it was any of the finer 'Sons of Homer' who told of that last death-grapple where it was no longer Kebrionês nor Patroclus, but Acliilles himself, who lay "under the blind dust-storm, the mighty limbs flung miglitily, and the riding of war forgotten," the world must owe a grudge to those patriotic organisers who
