close, it may be said that all generations had believed Troy was actually Troy, and Homer in the main Homer; neither taking the one for a fable, or (quaintest of all dreams) for a symbol of solar phenomena, nor resolving the other into a multiform assemblage of successive bards, whose verses were at length pieced together by a clever literary tailor. … After slighter premonitory movements, it was Wolf that made, by the publication of his 'Prolegomena' in 1795, the serious attack. … Wolf maintained that available writing was not known at, or till long after, the period of their composition; and that works of such length, not intrusted to the custody of written characters, could not have been transmitted through a course of generations with any approach to fidelity. Therefore they could only be a number of separate songs, brought together at a later date." _W. E. Gladstone, Homer (Literature Primers), chapters 1-2._ {1661} "Homeric geography is entirely pre-Dorian. Total unconsciousness of any such event as the Dorian invasion reigns both in the Iliad and Odyssey. … 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." _A. M. Clerke, Familiar Studies in Homer, chapter 1._ "It is … in the discoveries of Dr. Schliemann that we have the impulse which seems to be sending the balance over towards the belief in the European instead of in the Asiatic origin of the poems. We now know that at the very point which Homer makes the chief royal city of Greece there did, in fact, exist a civilisation which did, in fact, offer just the conditions for the rise of a poetry such as the Homeric—a great city 'rich in gold,' with a cultivation of the material arts such as is wont to go hand in hand with the growth of poetry. … See GREECE: MYCENÆ AND ITS KINGS.