Even in the Cyclic poems, of which only a few fragments and prose synopses remain, Helbig, and Monro, and every reader, find what Helbig calls ‘data absolutely opposed to the conventional style of the Epics’, of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. We find hero-worship, human sacrifice, gods making love in bestial forms, conspicuous ghosts of men duly burned, and so on. Now, if we believe with Mr. Verrall that ‘Homer’, so called, was a nebulous mass of old poetry, reduced into distinct bodies, such as _Iliad_, _Odyssey_, _Cypria_, _Aethiopis_, _Little Iliad_, _Nostoi_, and so on, for educational purposes, by learned Athenians, about 600-500 B.C., or if we suppose, with others, that the Ionians, for educational purposes, Bowdlerized _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, at an earlier date, we ask, Why were _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ expurgated; why were many ‘devices of the heathen’ cut out of them by ‘educationists’ who permitted these things to remain in the Cyclic poems? Was it because the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ alone were cut out of the mass, and selected for public recitation? If so, why was the selection made, and the expurgation done, in these two cases only? And do we know that the Cyclics were not recited? If so, why not? What was the use of them? Again, why was Hesiod not Bowdlerized? Hesiod certainly entered into public knowledge no less than Homer. Finally, if the taste of the seventh and sixth centuries were so pure and austere, why were the poets of the seventh and sixth centuries so rich in matters which the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ omit? In no Greek literature of any age do we find the clean austerity of Homer, for example, as regards sins against nature, the permanent blot on the civilization of historic Greece. The theory of educational expurgation in the eighth to the sixth centuries is impossible on all sides. The Cyclics and Hesiod were generally known, yet were not expurgated into harmony with the Homeric tone; the contemporary poets of these educational ages did not conform to the Homeric tone. Moreover, there is no ‘record’ evidence, with Mr. Verrall’s pardon, for all this editing by educationists. There is no inscription bearing witness to it--_that_, and that alone, would be ‘record’--there is only a late and shifting tradition that, about the time between the ages of Solon and the Pisistratidae, something indefinite was done at Athens for ‘Homer’. For how much of ‘Homer’? For all old epic poetry, or only for the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_? If for them alone, why for them alone?