We can only speak of the poets as selecting, each for himself, from the same mass of materials. If we conceive one poem to have been made before another, then the author or authors of that other may borrow from the earlier work. Thus, when the Cypria or other Cyclic poems coincide in topic with the Iliad and Odyssey, that may be (1) because the authors work out hints given in these finished poems; or (2) the authors may have had recourse to the same "masses of tradition" as were open to the author of the Iliad. But the Cyclic poets do not often appear to know Achaean traditions, of the Trojan affair outside of our Homer. We have shown that Palamedes was not originally an Achaean of the Achaeans, but a culture hero. The legend of Telephus, with its sympathetic magic, is wholly un-Achaean; so is Iphigeneia; so are the sons of Theseus; so is the Attic Nemesis.
As we shall show in an Appendix, Mr. Murray accounts for the non-Achaean elements so conspicuous in the Cyclic poems, by the theory that they once also appeared in the lays whence our Iliad arose, but were expurgated by the clear Hellenic spirit of Greece in the sixth century, because these lays alone were recited at Panionian and Panathenaean festivals. Our own conclusion is that the Muses befriended Homer when they permitted the fragments of the Cyclic poems to escape the tooth of time. For these fragments suffice to prove that the Ionian poets could take up an Achaean theme, but in a score of ways, in their epics, betrayed themselves as non-Achaean.
Their poems are not sections cut out of an Achaean mass of lays, and our Homer is not a similar section, is not Cyclic. It has now been proved, I think, that in no point or trait of life, religion, legends, armour, tactics, rites, taste, poetic method, or anything else, is Homer affected by Ionian influences. The Iliad, and mainly the Odyssey, are entirely distinct in all their contents from Ionian work. They are much older, and are the fruit of the brief-lived flower of Achaean culture.[44]
[1] In English the best critical treatises are Homer and the Cyclic Poems, by the late Mr. Binning Monro in his Odyssey, Books xiii.-xxiv. pp. 340-384, with his "On the Fragment of Proclus's Abstract of the Epic Cycle," Journal of Hellenic Society, vol. iv. pp. 305-334. The discussion of the whole topic by Mr. T. W. Allen in The Classical Quarterly (1908) leaves no hint of ancient evidence unexplored, however remote and obscure its lurking place. Mr. Allen specially criticises the ingenious inferences of von Wilamowitz Moellendorff in his Homerische Untersuchungen, inferences which appear to be accepted by Mr. Murray in his Rise of the Greek Epic, and his lecture, "Anthropology in the Greek Epic Tradition outside of Homer," in Anthropology and the Classics, 1908.
[2] Kinkel, Epicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, 1898.
[3] J. H. S., vol. iv p. 305.
[4] Odyssey, vol. ii pp. 352-354.
[5] Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, vol. ii pp. 488-493. Mr. Monro seems to have been unaware of these facts. Odyssey, vol. ii p. 354.
[6] Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 350.