Debil aura di fama appena giunge."

--"Gier. Lib." iv. 19.

01 "The Catalogue is, perhaps, the portion of the poem in favour of

which a claim to separate authorship has been most plausibly urged.

Although the example of Homer has since rendered some such formal

enumeration of the forces engaged, a common practice in epic poems

descriptive of great warlike adventures, still so minute a

statistical detail can neither be considered as imperatively

required, nor perhaps such as would, in ordinary cases, suggest

itself to the mind of a poet. Yet there is scarcely any portion of

the Iliad where both historical and internal evidence are more

clearly in favour of a connection from the remotest period, with the

remainder of the work. The composition of the Catalogue, whensoever

it may have taken place, necessarily presumes its author's

acquaintance with a previously existing Iliad. It were impossible

otherwise to account for the harmony observable in the recurrence of

so vast a number of proper names, most of them historically

unimportant, and not a few altogether fictitious: or of so many

geographical and genealogical details as are condensed in these few

hundred lines, and incidentally scattered over the thousands which

follow: equally inexplicable were the pointed allusions occurring in

this episode to events narrated in the previous and subsequent text,

several of which could hardly be of traditional notoriety, but

through the medium of the Iliad."--Mure, "Language and Literature of

918

The Iliad of Homer