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well of the 99 steps.' There is a stairway leading down to the water; but, after all, 99 very shallow steps make no great depth, and 99 is not to be taken literally in Turkish terminology. There are literally 99 names of Allah only the camel knows the hundredth name: hence its proud look. But in common usage 99 is like 1001, merely a number. The Thousand and one Churches' are only 28 all told.

Accordingly, Dr Leaf rightly refrains from using this passage as a proof that Strabo had passed along that way, the shortest from Cilicia to the Mæander valley. The reasons are evident: (1) The argument is inconclusive in itself. (2) The statement may be derived by Strabo from some other authority. (3) Strabo describes Soatra as being near Garsaoura, which is so vague as to be quite misleading. No one who had actually been at Soatra would describe it so. (4) He has quaint tales about this region, as e.g. that in Lake Tatta, if a bird touches the water, it can be caught by hand. As the lake is very salt, this is like the modern children's saying that, if you can put salt on a bird's tail, you can catch it. Strabo probably got it from some old traveller's tale. (5) He speaks of Iconium as 'somewhere in this region,' and conjoins it with the great lakes which are still more remote, across the mountains from Iconium. (6) Most conclusive of all: in Savatra, as the reviewer observed in 1901, the water is near the surface and the refugees who had recently settled there had wells in which the water was standing within four feet of the wooden cover. There is not a passage where Strabo shows personal knowledge of Lycaonia or east or central Phrygia, though he has often good touches, which are probably taken from Artemidorus or other authority.

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Dr Leaf is fully justified in demanding strict proof in each case, viz. a formal assertion on Strabo's part, about the extent of the geographer's travels. In this case a careful examination has shown that he was not an- eye-witness, but a good, though occasionally somewhat vague, user of old authorities. Strabo, however, is perfectly truthful, and, while he, after the ancient

The reviewer was misled by the fallacy about Soatra, until, in writing a commentary on Strabo's account of Phrygia and Lycaonia, the arguments against it became evident.

fashion, rarely quotes his authority formally, yet he seldom leaves any justifiable doubt as to what he had seen and what he had taken from others.

But, as we have said, the firm basis on which the value of Dr Leaf's study of Strabo rests is his own personal exploration and his own knowledge of the country. He lingers with loving care over everything that can throw light on Homer. He has studied every question on the spot. He was already familiar with every question, and had pondered every argument before he visited the Troad. Then he went to see for himself, and once again reviewed and revised his own former opinions.

Recent discovery has convinced almost every one that after all Agamemnon once lived and ruled and led a Greek host of ships and men. Even those who do not believe him to have actually reigned in Argos or sailed to Troy, cannot now treat the idea that there was once a real lord of men, Agamemnon, with the contemptuous indifference of criticism forty years ago, or pass it by as the idle dreaming of an ill-regulated enthusiasm, The sword that was used by an Argive prince twelve centuries before Christ, the halls in which he lived and dispensed justice, the ornaments and works of art which were made by his workmen or imported by his subjects or his visitors-all these undeniable facts forcibly prevent us from denying that the prince may have sacked Troy. We may prefer to explain the origin of the 'tale of Troy divine' in some other way, and not as the history of actual events; but we must now treat the view that it is a fundamentally true tale as probably right. There is a widespread and growing feeling that in the immediate future the attitude towards the Homeric Poems which is most likely to lead to further discovery is that they preserve a picture of a period of history which did once exist. Partly as works of extreme antiquity, partly as dependent on a still older school of bards who kept alive a genuine tradition, these poems permit a glimpse into the process by which the fine product called Hellenism-with its freedom of view in politics and society, its delicate perception of symmetry in art and in literature, its bold confidence in the individual man as the judge of his own life, and

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the true centre of his own universe-was evolved amid the strife of nations in the Levant and the Egean from the amalgamation of various Aryan and nonAryan tribes in the Greek lands. Hellenism was a product so many-sided that it could not arise amid a homogeneous race; so delicate that the proper balance of the various racial characteristics which produced it could not last very long; so important in the development of modern society that it cannot lose its value for us; so unique in type that it can never cease to interest educated men. The true way of understanding its origin is to study the poems of Homer as history, and to compare them with the material surroundings of the earliest Greek society as revealed to us by the spade of the excavator and by the study of words. What further methods of study will be developed with increasing knowledge, it is impossible to say; but the long controversy provoked by Wolff is practically closed. Almost all sane judgment is now more and more definitely decided that poems which were able to influence so profoundly the religion and thought of the Greeks must have a solid foundation in reality; it was because they represented a real power that they could succeed in creating a Hellenic unity. One supreme poet gathered up floating tradition and religious ideas into a poem of the world's literature and memory.

The Homeric heroes were real men full of many-sided human actuality, and not one-sided abstractions; and the Homeric gods have always been gods; the envisagement of the religious ideas of an advanced and advancing people, neither personifications of wind or sea or sky, nor conceptions slightly developed beyond the totem or the fetish of primitive savages. Totemistic or fetishistic theories about the relation of Greek religion to the ideas of primitive races have their value and their portion of truth; but they distract attention from the Hellenism of Greek religion. What is Hellenic in the gods of Homer is precisely that which has been added to the gods of the races whose amalgamation produced the Hellenic people; and those races had already developed far beyond the stage of the totem and the fetish.

I do not wish to disparage the work of the many Homeric critics: that has its distinct value, sometimes

real and positive, sometimes the negative result of conclusively disproving the theories that they were trying to prove-which is no small service. But the new era demands new methods. It is and will continue to be an epoch of the discovery of new elements rather than of the re-combination of old elements. In discovery, and in the striking out of new methods, has always lain the strength of English scholarship; and there never was a time when minds not enslaved to established views, yet disciplined by rigid philological training and the grammar of Homer, had such a promising field open to them. The difficulty is not to find the minds, but to find the time, i.e. the money; and in the growing alienation of national taste among the wealthy and educated classes from ancient scholarship-an alienation caused mainly by a natural and healthy revolt from the narrowness and the misdirection of classical study and teaching as long practised-it is difficult to see much likelihood that England will play a great part in the new era. The reviewer who can only look from Mount Pisgah over the Promised Land, may take the risk of forecasting the future in which he cannot hope to take part.

In all discussions with regard to the trustworthiness of Homer as preserving a record of real history, there is a tendency to mix up two totally different questions. Take e.g. the two catalogues in 'Iliad 'II: do these represent a real record or memory transmitted from 12001190 B.C. of the forces, the ships, and the names and the numbers, or do they represent Homer's idea several centuries later of the facts as they had come down to him, transmitted through the memory of generations and centuries, of what actually took place and was the case at the time when the Trojan War occurred? The gods were partners in the war, according to Homer's idea; but few would maintain that in the actual war, Apollo, etc., played a part and fought and slew. They are an intrusion in history.

It may be said that we do not know the date of Homer; but there was a memory preserved of him, constituting an authority as trustworthy as any record of that ancient period can be. Herodotus may be taken as representing the ordinary view current in the Asiatic

Greek coast towns on the subject, and he dates Homer about four centuries before himself, i.e. roughly speaking, about 850-830. Other dates were assigned by various ancient historians; but all presume that the poet lived a long time after the War of Troy. There is some reason to be detected in most cases for the different dates; but Herodotus, as usual, preserves the floating tradition in the coast-towns and harbours of Asia Minor. He knew nothing of Asia Minor except according to the reports which had penetrated to these cities. He had not travelled in the country. His ignorance of details is palpable when he attempts to describe any operation that had its scene in the inner part of the country; but he does report faithfully what he heard and his value stands firm on this foundation.

It has even been discussed whether the catalogue of the Greek ships applies to the facts at the period when it set sail from the Boeotian coast or is true to the different circumstances which characterised the end of the Trojan War. The enumeration of ships would necessarily be very different at the beginning of the voyage and after battles had taken place and heroes had perished, or been detained like Philoctetes from taking part in the war; further, many other causes waste away the strength of a navy or an army during ten years of fighting.

With regard to the whole question we seek for some great historic principle, and this we find in the law of history, and specially economic history, that a city on the great waterway of the Hellespont and the Bosphorus which is strong enough to close the passage to and from the Black Sea must profoundly affect the course of events. Dr Walter Leaf put this truth in an article somewhere in a striking form when he protested against the idea that Constantinople derived its importance from being the road-link between Europe and Asia. I cannot remember the exact place, but the statement is to this effect-if all communication by way of Constantinople between Europe and Asia were stopped, if the roads leading into Thrace and the roads leading to Bithynia and Anatolia generally were blocked, it would make no serious difference to any body of persons in any other part of the world; but, if the waterway were closed against trade to-day, to-morrow the effect would be felt Vol. 247.-No. 490.

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