accepted as a true picture of what came under his personal observation. It is, indeed, as Mr. Freeman says, ‘so different from the map of Greece at any later time that it is inconceivable that it can have been invented at any later time.’[9] Since, however, it affords the Greek race no Asiatic standing ground, it follows of necessity that Homer was a European. Footnote 4: _Die Homerische Odyssee in der ursprünglichen Sprachforme wiedergestellt_, 1883. Footnote 5: _English Historical Review_, January, 1886. Footnote 6: _Iliad_, ii. 868. Footnote 7: _Ib._ xiii. 685. Footnote 8: _Od._ xix. 177. Footnote 9: _Historical Geography_, p. 25. This same consideration helps to determine the age in which he lived. Homeric geography is entirely pre-Dorian. Total unconsciousness of any such event as the Dorian invasion reigns both in the Iliad and Odyssey. Not a hint betrays acquaintance with the fact that the polity described in them had, in the meantime, been overturned by external violence. A silence so remarkable can be explained only by the simple supposition that when they were composed, the revolution in question had not yet occurred. Other circumstances confirm this view. Practical explorations have shown pre-Hellenic Greece to have been the seat of a rich, enterprising, and cultivated nation. They have hence removed objections on the score of savagery, inevitably to be encountered, formerly urged against pushing the age of Homer very far back into the past. The life carried on at Mycenæ, in fact, twelve or thirteen centuries before the Christian era, was in many respects more refined than that depicted in the poems. It was known to their author only after it had lost something of its pristine splendour. But the Mycenæan civilisation of his experience, if a trifle decayed, was complete and dominant; and this it never was subsequently to the Dorian conquest. To have collected, however, into an imaginary organic whole the fragments into which it had been shattered by that catastrophe, would assuredly have been a task beyond his powers. Nothing remains, then, but to admit that he lived in the pre-Dorian Greece which he portrayed. Moreover, the state of seething unrest ensuing upon the overthrow of the Mycenæan order must have been absolutely inconsistent with the development of a great school of poetry. If Homer, then, was a European—as appears certain—the inference is irresistible that he flourished before the society to which he belonged was thrown by foreign invaders into irredeemable disarray—that is, at some section of the Mycenæan epoch.