The further question remains as to the united or divided authorship of these antique monuments, regarded as separate wholes. Are they twin-productions, or did they spring up independently, favoured by the same prevailing climate, from a soil similarly prepared? The answer may be left to the dispassionate judgment of any ordinary, uncritical reader. Supposing his mind, _per impossibile_, a blank on the point, it would certainly not occur to him to attribute the two poems to a single individual. They are probably as unlike in style as, under the circumstances, it was possible for them to be. A great deal, indeed, belongs to them in common. They were rooted in the same traditions; they arose under the same sky and in the same ideal atmosphere; the inexhaustible storehouse of their legendary raw material was the same. Strictly analogous conditions of politics and society are depicted in them; they were addressed to similarly constituted audiences; their verses were constructed on the same rhythmical model. Moreover, the author of one was familiar with the grand example set him by the other. Yet the temper and spirit of each are profoundly different. In the Iliad, a magnificent ardour prevails; the singer is aflame with his theme; his words glow; vivid impressions crowd upon his mind; it takes all the power of his genius to restrain their riotous audacity and marshal them into orderly succession. The author of the Odyssey, on the other hand, is in no danger of being swept away by the impetuosity of his thoughts. He is always collected and at leisure; he has even _esprit_, which implies a low mental temperature; he can stand by with a smile, and look on, while his characters unfold themselves; his passion never blazes; it is smouldering and sustained, like that of his protagonist. Numerous small discrepancies, besides, seem to betray a personal diversity of origin. So Iris, the frequent, indeed the all but invariable messenger of the gods in the Iliad, drops into oblivion in the Odyssey, and is replaced by Hermes; Charis is the wife of Hephæstus in the Iliad, Aphrodite in the Odyssey; Neleus has twelve sons in the Iliad, three in the Odyssey; Pylos is a district in the Iliad, a town in the Odyssey; the oracle of the Dodonæan Zeus is located in Thessaly in the Iliad, in Epirus in the Odyssey, and so on.[14] The Odyssey, moreover, is obviously junior to the Iliad. It gives evidence of an appreciable development of the arts of life relatively to their state in the rival poem; the processes of verbal contraction have advanced in the interval; the ethical standard has become more refined; while formulaic and other expressions common to both are unmistakably ‘in place,’ as geologists say, in the Iliad, ‘erratic,’ or ‘transported,’ in the Odyssey. Footnote 14: See an article on the ‘Doctrine of the Chorizontes,’ in the _Edinburgh Review_, vol. 133.