[262] Plato, Hipparch. p. 228. Wolf and William Müller occasionally speak as if they admitted something like an Iliad and Odyssey as established aggregates prior to Peisistratus; but for the most part they represent him or his associates as having been the first to put together Homeric poems which were before distinct and self-existent compositions. And Lachmann, the recent expositor of the same theory, ascribes to Peisistratus still more unequivocally this original integration of parts in reference to the Iliad,—distributing the first twenty-two books of the poem into sixteen separate songs, and treating it as ridiculous to imagine that the fusion of these songs, into an order such as we now read, belongs to any date earlier than Peisistratus.[263] [263] “Doch ich komme mir bald lächerlich vor, wenn ich noch immer die Möglichkeit gelten lasse, dass unsere Ilias in dem gegenwärtigen Zusammenhange der bedeutenden Theile, und nicht blos der wenigen bedeutendsten, jemals vor der Arbeit des Pisistratus gedacht worden sey.” (Lachmann, Fernere Betrachtungen über die Ilias, sect. xxviii. p. 32; Abhandlungen Berlin. Academ. 1841.) How far this admission—that for the _few most important_ portions of the Iliad, there _did_ exist an established order of succession prior to Peisistratus—is intended to reach, I do not know; but the language of Lachmann goes farther than either Wolf or William Müller. (See Wolf, Prolegomen. pp. cxli-cxlii, and W. Müller, Homerische Vorschule, Abschnitt vii. pp. 96, 98, 100, 102.) The latter admits that neither Peisistratus nor the Diaskeuasts could have made any considerable changes in the Iliad and Odyssey, either in the way of addition or of transposition; the poems as aggregates being too well known, and the Homeric vein of invention too completely extinct, to admit of such novelties. I confess, I do not see how these last-mentioned admissions can be reconciled with the main doctrine of Wolf, in so far as regards Peisistratus.