The epic stage.
The earliest historical stage.
§ 33. As regards the second stage, or 'epic age,' I have already, in my Greek Literature, shown
ample reasons for not dating it very early; and further researches since made rather confirm this view. The personages described seem to belong to the ninth century before Christ; but it was gone before the poets brought together their work into the famous epics which were the opening of Greek literature. The Iliad and the Odyssey therefore seem to me to describe the second, then already bygone, stage of Greek history, which was certainly separated by a gap from the third. This last begins with the contemporary allusions of the earliest lyric poets, Archilochus, Callinus, Tyrtæus,—none of whom were earlier than 700 B.C., and who more probably lived from 660 B.C. onward[73:1].
According to the theory of the Greeks, which is not yet extinct, three centuries separated this real history from the epic period, when the Trojan heroes and their singers lived; and even among recent critics there are some who wish to place the composition of the Iliad as far back as 900 B.C.
The gap between Homer and Archilochus.
Old lists suspicious, and often fabricated.
No chronology of the eighth century B.C. to be trusted.
I do not believe in so huge a gap in Greek
literature. It seems to me impossible that the stream of original epic should have dried up long before Archilochus arose towards the middle of the seventh century B.C. And here it is that the moderns have been deceived by the elaborate construction of four centuries of history made by the Greeks to fill the void between the events of the Iliad and the events of the earliest history. In the seventh century we have contemporary allusions to Gyges, king of Lydia, known to us from Assyrian inscriptions; we have yearly archons at Athens, and a series of priestesses at Argos; presently we have historical colonies and many other real evidences on which to rely. But before 700 B.C. it is not so. Some stray facts remained, as when Tyrtæus tells us that he fought in the second Messenian war, and that the first had been waged by the grandfathers of his fellow-soldiers[74:1]. The double kingship of Sparta was there, though I am at a loss to know how we can trust a list of names coming down from a time when writing was not known[74:2].
