It is the same—it is perhaps even more the same—if we turn to the _Iliad_. The famous first words elicit naturally a good deal[84] of comment, which has some promise. Why did he begin with “wrath,” which is an ill-sounding word? For two reasons. First, that he might purify the corresponding part of the souls of his readers by the passions, &c. Secondly, that he might give his “praises of the Greeks” greater verisimilitude. Besides, this was the practical subject with which he was first to deal as in a kind of tragic prologue. Then there is an odd gradation of the states of wrath itself, from ὀργὴ to μῆνις. Next, an inquiry why the poet begins with the end of the war, and so forth. This, of course, is literary criticism of a sort, but on thin and threadbare lines enough; and there is not very much even of this. The scholiasts are far more at home with accentuation and punctuation; with the endless question of _athetesis_ (or blackmarking, as spurious); with such technical ticketings as at i. 366: “The trope is _anakephalaiosis_.[85] There are four kinds of narrative—homiletic, apangeltic, hypostatic,[86] and mixed”; or with such curiously unintelligent attempts to pin down poetic beauty as the note at i. 477 on ῥοδοδάκτυλος as a synecdoche, in which, by the way, even the colour-scheme seems to be misunderstood. Footnote 84: See Dindorf’s collection, enlarged with variants at the beginning of vol. v. by Maass. Footnote 85: _I.e._, “recapitulation.” Footnote 86: _I.e._, “in the nature of conversational address, regular history, or argument.” But it is often very difficult to translate these rhetorical terms exactly. _Hypostasis_ in particular is even more elusive in rhetoric than in theology. At the close of these remarks on the Scholiasts I must enter in a fresh form the _caveat_ which has perhaps been wearisomely iterated, but which it is better to repeat too often than to suppress even in a single place where its omission might mislead. I am not finding fault with these laborious and invaluable persons for not doing what they had not the least intention to do. I am not (Heaven forbid!) arguing for any superiority in the modern critic over the ancient. I am only endeavouring to show that the subjects to which modern literary critics—who, as it seems to me, stick to their business most closely, and abstain most from metabasis ἐς ἄλλο γένος—pay most attention, were precisely those to which ancient critics, as a matter of fact, paid least. And this it is not only the right but the duty of the historian to point out.