assigned the poet to an earlier epoch. [239] Thucyd. i. 3. [240] See the statements and citations respecting the age of Homer, collected in Mr. Clinton’s Chronology, vol. i. p. 146. He prefers the view of Aristotle, and places the Iliad and Odyssey a century earlier than I am inclined to do,—940-927 B. C. Kratês, probably placed the poet anterior to the Return of the Hêrakleids, because the Iliad makes no mention of Dorians in Peloponnêsus: Eratosthenês may be supposed to have grounded his date on the passage of the Iliad, which mentions the three generations descended from Æneas. We should have been glad to know the grounds of the very low date assigned by Theopompus and Euphoriôn. The pseudo-Herodotus, in his life of Homer, puts the birth of the poet one hundred and sixty-eight years after the Trojan war. [241] Herodot. ii. 53. Hêrakleides Ponticus affirmed that Lykurgus had brought into Peloponnêsus the Homeric poems, which had before been unknown out of Ionia. The supposed epoch of Lykurgus has sometimes been employed to sustain the date here assigned to the Homeric poems; but everything respecting Lykurgus is too doubtful to serve as evidence in other inquiries. To place the Iliad and Odyssey at some periods between 850 B. C. and 776 B. C., appears to me more probable than any other date, anterior or posterior,—more probable than the latter, because we are justified in believing these two poems to be older than Arktinus, who comes shortly after the first Olympiad;—more probable than the former, because, the farther we push the poems back, the more do we enhance the wonder of their preservation, already sufficiently great, down from such an age and society to the historical times. The mode in which these poems, and indeed all poems, epic as well as lyric, down to the age (probably) of Peisistratus, were circulated and brought to bear upon the public, deserves particular attention. They were not read by individuals alone and apart, but sung or recited at festivals or to assembled companies. This seems to be one of the few undisputed facts with regard to the great poet: for even those who maintain that the Iliad and Odyssey were preserved by means of writing, seldom contend that they were read.