Professor Jebb is disposed to attribute Il. XXIV. to the writer of Il. IX., which he does not ascribe to Homer, and would date circ. B.C. 750-600. I regret that I can go no further with him than that Il. XXIV. and Il. IX. are by the same hand.
It is beyond my scope to point out the slight and perfectly unimportant variations from the Iliad which are found in some of the Odyssean lines to which I have given a reference; they are with hardly an exception such as are occasioned by difference of context. Though unimportant they are not uninteresting, but I must leave them for the reader to examine if he feels inclined to do so.
He will observe that some lines are nearly and some quite common to the two extracts above given, and I should add that not a few other lines are repeated elsewhere in the Iliad, but enough remains that is peculiar to either of the two extracts to convince me that the writer of the Odyssey knew them both. And not only this, but they seem to have risen in her mind as spontaneously, and often no doubt as unconsciously, as passages from the Bible, Prayer-book, and Shakspeare do to ourselves.
If, then, we find the writer so familiar with two such considerable extracts from the first and last Books of the Iliad—for I believe the reader will feel no more doubt than I do, that she knew them, and was borrowing from them—can we avoid thinking it probable that she was acquainted, to say the least of it, with the intermediate Books? Such surely should be the most natural and least strained conclusion to arrive at, but I will proceed to shew that she knew the intermediate Books exceedingly well.
I pass over the way in which Mentor's name is coined from Nestor's (cf. Il. II. 76-77 and Od. ii. 224, 225, and 228), and will go on to the striking case of Ulysses' servant Eurybates. In Od. xix. 218, 219 Penelope has asked Ulysses (who is disguised so that she does not recognise him) for details as to the followers Ulysses had with him on his way to Troy, and Ulysses answers that he had a servant named Eurybates who was hunched in the shoulders (xix. 247). Turning to Il. II. 184 we find that Ulysses had a servant from Ithaca named Eurybates, but he does not seem to have been hunched in the shoulders; on reading further, however, we immediately come to Thersites, "whose shoulders were hunched over his chest" (Il. II. 217, 218). Am I too hasty in concluding that the writer of the Odyssey, wanting an additional detail for Penelope's greater assurance, and not finding one in the Iliad, took the hunchiness off the back of the next man to him and set it on to the back of Eurybates? I do not say that no other hypothesis can be framed in order to support a different conclusion, but I think the one given above will best commend itself to common sense; and the most natural inference from it is that the writer of the Odyssey knew at any rate part of Il. II. much as we have it now.
I often wondered why Menelaus should have been made to return on the self-same day as that on which Orestes was holding the funeral feast of Ægisthus and Clytemnestra; the Greek which tells us that he did so runs:—
αὐτῆμαρ δέ οἱ ἦλθε βοὴν ἀγαθὸς Μενέλαος (Od. iii. 311).
I did not find the explanation till I remembered that in Iliad II. 408, when Agamemnon has been inviting the Achæan chieftains to a banquet, he did not ask Menelaus, for Menelaus came of his own accord:—