Flinders Petrie’s careful comparisons, that one class of vases, adorned with linear patterns, goes back to about 1400 B.C., while those exhibiting naturalistic designs were freely manufactured in 1100. The culminating period, however, of pre-Hellenic fictile art is placed considerably earlier, in 1500-1400 B.C., and there are indications that its development had occupied several previous centuries. Mr. Petrie, indeed, finds himself compelled to believe that the Græco-Libyan league was already active in or before the year 2000 B.C. Achæan predominance may, then, very well have boasted a millennium of antiquity when the Dorians crossed the Gulf of Corinth. Its subversion drove many of the leading native families over the Ægean, where they found seats already doubtless familiar to them through their own and their ancestors’ maritime and piratical adventures, and the colonising impulse once given, did not soon cease to promote the enlargement of the Greek domain. But the mass of the Achæan people lived on in their old homes, in a state of subjection resembling that of the Saxons in England after the Norman Conquest. They were designated ‘Periœci’ by their Dorian rulers. Footnote 2: Flinders Petrie, _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, vols. xi. p. 271; xii. p. 199. Footnote 3: Schuchhardt and Sellers, _Schliemann’s Excavations_, p. 268. Archæological discoveries have thus shown the largeness of the historical issues embraced in the Homeric Question; they also afford the possibility, and still more, the promise, of satisfactorily answering it. The problem is threefold. It includes the consideration of where, when, and how the great Epics were composed. Seven cities— Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodos, Argos, Athenæ—