as one poem; it seems more probable that it was put together about the time of the Pisistratidae. The
Iliad
and, more or less, all epic poems, the subjects of which are taken from history have no rounded conclusion; they remain, after all, but single chapters from the volume of history, although they are ornamental chapters. Consider the exquisite simplicity of the
Paradise Lost
. It and it alone really possesses a beginning, a middle, and an end; it has the totality of the poem as distinguished from the
ab ovo
birth and parentage, or straight line, of history.
2.
As to the subject.
In Homer, the supposed importance of the subject, as the first effort of confederated Greece, is an after-thought of the critics; and the interest, such as it is, derived from the events themselves, as distinguished from the manner of representing them, is very languid to all but Greeks. It is a Greek poem. The superiority of the