due either to the accidents of compilation or to the need for adaptation to suit the varying tastes of readers in different parts of the Greek world. Perhaps the strongest proof of composite authorship is to be found in the different stages of civilisation and religion which are discernible in different parts of the poetry, and the marked inconsistencies in certain of the leading characters. It is also very significant that Mount Olympus, the dwelling of the gods, is at one time the snow-clad mountain in the north which still bears that name, and in other and later passages is a bright and gladsome region, free from rain or snow or stormy wind. It is now generally agreed that the nucleus of the _Iliad_ was a series of ancient lays concerning Achilles, derived from Northern Greece, and moulded by Æolic art, while the remainder of the poem and the bulk of the _Odyssey_ were of a considerably later date, and came from an Ionic source. The poems as a whole were probably touched up and put into their present form by some one living on the coast of Asia Minor (perhaps at Smyrna, the meeting-place of Æolic and Ionic traditions), who sang of the glories of a by-gone age with the patriotic pride of a colonial. Whether his name was Homer is a different question, for it is quite possible the word may have been, as some maintain, a common term, meaning “compiler.” It is well to remember that the “blind bard who dwelt in rocky Chios,” so often identified with Homer since Thucydides set the example, is merely the description applied to himself by the writer of the Hymn to the Delian Apollo, whom no one now believes to have been the author of the _Iliad_ or the _Odyssey_. We know that the Great Unknown, whoever he may have been, was succeeded by the Homeridæ of Chios, and these again, by the Rhapsodes or professional reciters, whom we come across in the pages of Plato and Xenophon.