in its leading outline, the Iliad may be true to historic fact,

that in the great maritime expedition of western Greece against

the rival and half-kindred empire of the Laomedontiadae, the

chieftain of Thessaly, from his valour and the number of his

forces, may have been the most important ally of the Peloponnesian

sovereign; the preeminent value of the ancient poetry on the

Trojan war may thus have forced the national feeling of the

Athenians to yield to their taste. The songs which spoke of their

own great ancestor were, no doubt, of far inferior sublimity and

popularity, or, at first sight, a Theseid would have been much

more likely to have emanated from an Athenian synod of compilers

of ancient song, than an Achilleid or an Olysseid. Could France

have given birth to a Tasso, Tancred would have been the hero of

the Jerusalem. If, however, the Homeric ballads, as they are

sometimes called, which related the wrath of Achilles, with all

its direful consequences, were so far superior to the rest of the

poetic cycle, as to admit no rivalry,--it is still surprising, that

throughout the whole poem the callida junctura should never

betray the workmanship of an Athenian hand, and that the national

spirit of a race, who have at a later period not inaptly been

compared to our self admiring neighbours, the French, should

submit with lofty self denial to the almost total exclusion of

their own ancestors--or, at least, to the questionable dignity of

only having produced a leader tolerably skilled in the military

tactics of his age."(27)

The Iliad of Homer