Ardentesque avertit equos in castra, priusquam
Pabula gustassent Trojæ, Xanthumque bibissent.”
All these versions are certainly improvements upon the story as it stands in the Iliad.
[311] Mr. Knight places the Iliad about two centuries, and the Odyssey one century, anterior to Hesiod: a century between the two poems (Prolegg. c. lxi.)
[312] Hermann, Præfat. ad Odyss. p. vii.
[313] Knight, Prolegg. 1, c. Odyss. xxii. 465-478.
[314] The arguments, upon the faith of which Payne Knight and other critics have maintained the Odyssey to be younger than the Iliad, are well stated and examined in Bernard Thiersch,—Quæstio de Diversâ Iliadis et Odysseæ Ætate,—in the Anhang (p. 306) to his work Ueber das Zeitalter und Vaterland des Homer.
He shows all such arguments to be very inconclusive; though the grounds upon which he himself maintains identity of age between the two appear to me not at all more satisfactory (p. 327): we can infer nothing to the point from the mention of Telemachus in the Iliad.
Welcker thinks that there is a great difference of age, and an evident difference of authorship, between the two poems (Der Episch. Cyclus, p. 295).
O. Müller admits the more recent date of the Odyssey, but considers it “difficult and hazardous to raise upon this foundation any definite conclusions as to the person and age of the poet.” (History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, ch. v. s. 13.)