It is no longer possible to doubt that the world which the poems describe was one which really existed in the place where they put it. Even in details the poems have received striking illustration from the remains of Mykenai. … It appears that we may date the oldest part of the Iliad at least to some time before the Dorian invasion, which, according to the traditional chronology, took place about 1000 B. C. … But the poems can hardly be much earlier than the invasion; for there are various signs which indicate that the civilisation which they depict had made some advance beyond that of which we find the material remains in the 'shaft tombs,' discovered by Dr. Schliemann in the Acropolis of Mykenai. And the date of these has now been fixed by Mr. Petrie, from comparison with Egyptian remains, at about 1150. We can therefore hardly be far wrong, if the poems were composed in Achaian Greece, in dating their origin at about 1050 B. C. There still remains the question of the historical basis which may underlie the story of the Iliad. The poem may give us a true picture of Achaian Greece and its civilisation, and yet be no proof that the armies of Agamemnon fought beneath the walls of Troy. But here again the discoveries of recent years, and notably those of Schliemann at Hissarlik, have tended on the whole to confirm the belief that there is a historic reality behind the tale of Troy. … The hypothesis that the Iliad and Odyssey are the work of more than one poet … is one which has been gaining ground ever since it was seriously taken up and argued at length by Wolf in his famous 'Prolegomena,' just a century ago. But it has from the first encountered strong opposition, and is still regarded, in England at least, as the heretical view." _W. Leaf, Companion to the Iliad, introd._ "It seems clear that the author or authors of the Iliad and Odyssey lived long before the time when Æolian, Ionian, Dorian, were the three great tribal names of Greece, and far from the coast on which these three names were attached to successive portions of territory. If we are to decide the ancient controversy about the birthplace of Homer, we must turn away from Asia, and set ourselves to consider the claims of three districts of Greece proper: Thessaly, the home of the chief hero and the most ancient worship; Bœotia, the ancient seat of the Muses, and the first in the very ancient (if not actually Homeric) muster-roll of the ships; and Argolis, the seat of Achæan empire." _D. B. Monro, Homer and the Early History of Greece (English Historical Review, January, 1886)._