If we had older and more certain testimony about the fact, and still more about the exact character, of the [Sidenote: _Probably Homeric in subject._] world-famous Pisistratean redaction of the Homeric and other poems, it would be necessary to reverse the order of this statement; and even as it is, the utmost critical caution may admit that it was probably with Homer that Greek criticism began. We shall find nothing so constantly borne out in the whole course of this history as the fact—self-evident, but constantly neglected in its consequences—that criticism is a vine which must have its elm or other support to fasten on. And putting aside all the endless and (from some points of view at least) rather fruitless disputes about the age, the authorship, and so forth, of Homer, we know, from what is practically the unanimous and unintentional testimony of the whole of Greek literature, that “Homer” and the knowledge of Homer were anterior to almost all of it. And it was impossible that a people so acute and so philosophically given as the Greeks should be soaked in Homer, almost to the same extent as that to which the English lower and middle classes of the seventeenth century were soaked in the Bible, without being tempted to exercise their critical faculties upon the poems. It was long, as we shall see, before this exercise took the form of strictly literary criticism, of the criticism which (with the provisos and limitations of the last chapter) we call æsthetic. It was once said that the three functions of criticism in its widest sense are to interpret, to verify or sanction, and to judge, the last being its highest and purest office. [Sidenote: _Probably allegoric in method._] But the other two commend themselves perhaps more to the natural man—they certainly commended themselves more to the Greeks—and we should expect to find them, as we do find them, earlier practised. The Pisistratean redaction, if a fact (as in some form or other it pretty certainly was), is an enterprise both bold and early in the one direction; there is no reason to doubt that many enterprises were made pretty early in the other; and not much to doubt that most of these experiments in interpretation took the allegorical form.