It is not easily conceivable that Homer was ignorant of any of these things; probably they existed in certain strata of society in his age. But he ignores them. They are not to be mentioned to his audience. No incest or cannibalism, in _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, is reported concerning ‘Atreus’ line’, though later poets do not hesitate to use the traditional materials from the fossiliferous strata of myth wherein these survivals were plentiful. Pindar knew tales of divine cannibalism, but merely referred to them as unworthy of his verse. Homer must have been familiar with the savage cosmogonic legends, almost identical with those of the Maori of New Zealand, which Hesiod does not scruple to state openly; but about such things Homer is silent. Here I must explain that though to ‘Homer’ early historic Greece attributed the great body of ancient epic poetry, I am speaking only of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. I wish I could keep clear of the complex ‘Homeric Question’, but this is hardly possible. Everybody knows that, since the appearance of Wolf’s famous Prolegomena to the _Iliad_, at the end of the eighteenth century, the world has been of opposite opinions as to the origin of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. Poets, and almost all who read the poems, as other literature is read, ‘for human pleasure,’ hold that at least the mass of these epics is by one hand, and, of course, is of one age. On the other side, the immense majority of scholars and special students who have written on the subject maintain (with endless differences in points of detail) that the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ had their beginning in a brief early ‘kernel’, and are now a mosaic of added lays and interpolations, contributed by many hands, in many places, through at least four changeful centuries of various cultures. How the poems came to have what even Wolf recognized as their _unus color_, the harmony of their picture of institutions, customs, rites, costume, and belief, is variously explained. By some critics the harmony is denied. They try to pick out proofs of many various stages in institutions, customs, beliefs, arms, and armour, and so forth. As a rule these critics, however scholarly, have not been, and are not, comparative students of early literature, of anthropology, archaeology, and mythology. Their microscopic research finds but few and minute variations from the normal in such things as burial, bride-price, houses, armour, and so forth. If they studied other early poetic literature--say the Icelandic sagas and the oldest Irish romances--they would learn that minute variations in such matters of life occur in every stage of civilization; that every house, every funeral, every detail of marriage laws and other laws, is not precisely on the pattern of every other, and that mythology and ideas about the future life are especially various and even self-contradictory, at any given period. For these reasons I agree with Wolf that harmony, _unus