When he comes to examine the Homeric geography of the Troad and Asia Minor, Mr Leaf is led by logical steps to a theory which forms his most original and striking contribution to the elucidation of the Trojan problem. His main text is the Catalogue of the Trojan forces in the Second Book. He is able to show that the geography of the Catalogue is in accordance with the rest of the Iliad, and that it implies conditions completely different from those which prevailed when the Iliad assumed its present form. These conditions suggest an hypothesis which enables him to account both for the rise of the Trojan power and for the outbreak of the Trojan War.

The overlordship of Priam seems to have extended over the Troad itself, westward to the river Esepus, beyond which was the country of the Mysians, and southwards to the Gulf of Adramyttium. Here Mr Leaf has done much to clear up the geography of the southern Troad, which he shows convincingly to have been a Pelasgian confederacy, to which the worship of Apollo Smintheus was common. He reconstructs from various passages in the Iliad the great foray of Achilles which was directed against the cities of this confederacy. This raid, in which Chryseis and Briseis were captured, was the immediate prologue to the action of the Iliad. The allies beyond the Troad who are enumerated in the Catalogue fall into four groups-the Pæonians and Thracians in the north; the Paphlagonians in the far east; the Phrygians and Mysians in the near east; the Mæonians, Carians, and Lycians in the south. Here, says Mr Leaf, we have four radial lines which represent four trade routes leading straight to what were the chief centres of trade in the early days of Greek colonisation, to Miletus, Amphipolis, Cyzicus, Sinope.' The inference is that Troy was a great commercial centre, and the question arises why? For no spot would seem less marked out by nature for commercial prosperity than the plain of Hissarlik. With its marshes and malaria, it was a poor place compared with other plains in the Troad. Moreover

'there is no natural harbour in the district. Troy cannot therefore have thriven upon her over-sea commerce, or its

close relation, piracy. Troy has indeed two roadsteads, one to the north of the Hellespont, the other, Besika Bay, to the west; but both of them are exposed anchorages, offering no safe shelter in gales.'

How then did a strong and wealthy power arise in such an unattractive situation, suitable neither for production nor for commerce nor for plunder? The secret, according to Mr Leaf, is to be found in the conformation of the Hellespont and the prevalence of certain winds in the eastern Mediterranean.

'It is easy to see that the condition which is needed in order that Troy may be an important centre of commerce is that the Hellespont should be closed to the ships of the Ægean Sea. When this is the case, the Trojan plain becomes of necessity the natural meeting place for the trade of the Ægean and the Euxine. . . . The passage of the Hellespont is easily closed against sailing ships by those who hold the land. The dominant factor in the navigation of all the eastern Mediterranean is the prevalence throughout the summer of the Etesian winds, blowing from N.W., N., or N.E., often with great violence for many days together. Any sailor making for the Propontis must perforce reckon on a delay at the mouth of the Hellespont, almost certainly for some days, perhaps for a fortnight or so. In early times, and indeed so long as galvanised iron tanks remained unknown, the water supply was a vital question for all navigation. Only a poor supply could be carried in the heavy earthenware jars on which the Greeks depended; and so it was that a delay of even two or three days wind-bound on a coast where the water supply was in hostile hands, was a matter of life and death. . . The natural supply of water for ships making the passage of the Straits is of course from the Scamander itself. This is easily defended; there is no other permanent stream for several miles. . . . There is also good water to be had at Besika Bay, a fact which has on more than one occasion proved serviceable to the British fleet. But Troy is so placed that it can easily command this also. A garrison in the castle could easily keep watch over both sources by stationing at them detachments sufficient to oppose any unauthorised landing by the crew of a merchant ship' (Troy,' pp. 261–2).

Thus the lord of the Trojan plain had it in his power to exclude from the Euxine the merchants of the Ægean,

whether Greeks or Lycians or Carians, and compel them to trade with the Euxine merchants at Troy, under conditions imposed by himself. He could grow rich by exacting heavy tolls. The Hellespont was also in early times the natural outlet for Thracian trade, so that, if a market at Troy were established, it would naturally be a rendezvous for merchants from the Balkan countries. Mr Leaf sketches an imaginary picture of the annual summer fair, after which 'Priam and his retainers sat down to feast through the winter months on the toll they had taken' from the traders who had gathered under their walls. Troy thus appears in a new and unfavourable light. We have to think of her as a parasite; and no power is more offensive than one which, contributing nothing to the work of the world, exploits and feeds on the labours of others. To the Achæans the barrier which the watchmen of the Hellespont set up against free trade with the Euxine became intolerable, and the Trojan War was the inevitable result. The Lycian merchants were indeed in the same position as the Achæans, in regard to Black Sea traffic, yet they were the principal and the closest allies of the Trojans in the war. But their power too was threatened by the Achæans, who were already in possession of Rhodes, and they had therefore a good reason for making common cause with Priam.

Mr Leaf has made out a strong case for his hypothesis:

'Given the known data-the Hellespont an essential economic necessity to Greece, but blocked by a strong fort, and the expansion of Greece to the Euxine at the beginning of the historical period-there must have been a point at which that fort was taken by the Greeks. And it must have been taken much in the way which Homer describes, by a process of wearing down. A war of Troy therefore is a necessary deduction from purely geographical conditions; and the account of it in Homer agrees with all the probabilities of the case.'

The theory obviously involves divination, but it is arrived at by logical inferences, it accounts for the principal data, and it may well contain an important part of the truth.

Under Mr Leaf's analysis the Trojan Catalogue assumes a significance which would not easily have been

predicted. It preserves a tradition of the peoples with whom the Achæans did business at the fair of Troy; it was essentially a contemporaneous document,' and has survived in something very like its original form.' It certainly contains a record which could not have been invented after the twelfth century. Thus it seems to supply a strong ground for the view, probable on other and more general grounds, that the material of the Iliad was derived from the poems of Achæan minstrels who sang to the generations immediately succeeding the fall of Troy. There is indeed one feature of the Catalogue on which Mr Leaf has not touched and which seems to detract from its realism. We mean the names of the leaders. It is obvious that the chief of the Pæonians, for instance, could not have been called Pyraichmes, or the chief of the Paphlagonians Pylaimenes. Contrast these and others with the name of the Lycian Sarpedon, which obviously rests on genuine tradition. Were they inventions of Homer or of an old Achæan singer?

In his second work Mr Leaf undertakes to do for the geography of Greece what he has done in his first for that of Troy and her confederacy. In the interval between the appearance of the two books he seems to have revised his views about the Achæans, though he does not expressly say so. In 'Troy' he represented them as the original makers of Greece, who, descending from the north towards the beginning of the second millennium, occupied the peninsula, at that time entirely in the hands of the non-Hellenic Pelasgians. In 'Homer and History,' on the contrary, he sees that they are later comers; they find a Greek-speaking race already in Greece, partly dominated by rulers who had come over from Crete and introduced Minoan civilisation. They were part of the flood of incomers from the north, whose first wave had overwhelmed Greece and passed on to Knossos' about B.C. 1400, and from that time were the ruling tribe in Greece, though they did not occupy all the country. Thus we have four instead of two peoples on the scene-the Pelasgians,* the pre-Achæan Greeks,

* As to the Pelasgians Mr Leaf propounds an ingenious theory which does not commend itself to us. Until we have some decisive proof to the contrary we must regard Pelasgoi as a distinctly non-Greek name.

the Minoan rulers, and the Achæans. This view is unquestionably nearer to the truth, but we think that Mr Leaf is still inclined to place the conquests of the Achæans too early. We have not sufficient data to enable us to say who were the destroyers of Cnossus. The Achæans were probably pressing forward in Northern Greece in the fourteenth century, but for the date of the conquest of the Peloponnesus our sole evidence points to the thirteenth. For, according to the tradition upon which Mr Leaf himself builds, Pelops, who gave his name to the peninsula, was its conqueror, and Pelops was the grandfather of Agamemnon; so that, if we place the Trojan War at the beginning of the twelfth century, we cannot date his reign before the first half of the thirteenth. In any case we can agree that, two generations before the war, the Achæans were the ruling power in Greece, as we find them represented in Homer. Mr Leaf conceives them as a small military caste, 'perhaps only a few thousands all told'; and he works out an interesting parallel between their position and that of the Normans in South Italy. He might have found another illustration, still nearer, in the conquest of Greece itself by the Franks, Lombards, and Venetians after the Fourth Crusade.

In examining Homer's view of the geography of Achæan Greece the essential thing is to determine the value of the Catalogue of the Achæan ships. Mr Leaf has submitted it to a merciless analysis, and it may safely be said that the combined forces of the unitarians will never rehabilitate the Catalogue as a document of significance for the Mycenæan age. It was composed by a Boeotian in the interests of Boeotia, which had taken no part in the Trojan War. Probably it was a work of the Hesiodic period and need not be later than 800 B.C., for Mr Allen has recently brought forward very forcible arguments for assigning to Hesiod a date a hundred years prior to that which is usually accepted. When we sweep away the Catalogue, we obtain from the rest of the Iliad and the Odyssey a consistent political map for 1200 B.C. Agamemnon was the head of an Achæan empire which embraced not only the Peloponnesus but

*

*In the Journal of Hellenic Studies,' vol. xxxv, pp. 85, sqq. (1915).