Plato and Xenophon will allow us to know. He was one of the dramatis

personae in two dramas as unlike in principles as in style. He appears as

the enunciator of opinions as different in their tone as those of the

writers who have handed them down. When we have read Plato or Xenophon,

we think we know something of Socrates; when we have fairly read and

examined both, we feel convinced that we are something worse than

ignorant.

It has been an easy, and a popular expedient, of late years, to deny the

personal or real existence of men and things whose life and condition were

too much for our belief. This system--which has often comforted the

religious sceptic, and substituted the consolations of Strauss for those

of the New Testament--has been of incalculable value to the historical

theorists of the last and present centuries. To question the existence of

Alexander the Great, would be a more excusable act, than to believe in

that of Romulus. To deny a fact related in Herodotus, because it is

inconsistent with a theory developed from an Assyrian inscription which no

two scholars read in the same way, is more pardonable, than to believe in

the good-natured old king whom the elegant pen of Florian has

idealized--Numa Pompilius.

Scepticism has attained its culminating point with respect to Homer, and

the state of our Homeric knowledge may be described as a free permission

to believe any theory, provided we throw overboard all written tradition,

concerning the author or authors of the Iliad and Odyssey. What few

authorities exist on the subject, are summarily dismissed, although the

The Iliad of Homer