There is no sufficient ground, I think, for denying all entire recitation previous to Solôn, and we only interpose a new difficulty, both grave and gratuitous, by doing so. To sustain the inference, that Peisistratus was the first architect of the Iliad and Odyssey, it ought at least to be shown that no other long and continuous poems existed during the earlier centuries. But the contrary of this is known to be the fact. The Æthiopis of Arktinus, which contained nine thousand one hundred verses, dates from a period more than two centuries earlier than Peisistratus: several other of the lost cyclic epics, some among them of considerable length, appear during the century succeeding Arktinus; and it is important to notice that three or four at least of these poems passed currently under the name of Homer.[266] There is no greater intrinsic difficulty in supposing long epics to have begun with the Iliad and Odyssey than with the Æthiopis: the ascendency of the name of Homer and the subordinate position of Arktinus, in the history of early Grecian poetry, tend to prove the former in preference to the latter. [266] The Æthiopis of Arktinus contained nine thousand one hundred verses, as we learn from the Tabula Iliaca: yet Proklus assigns to it only four books. The Ilias Minor had _four_ books, the Cyprian Verses _eleven_, though we do not know the number of lines in either. Nitzsch states it as a certain matter of fact, that Arktinus recited his own poem _alone_, though it was too long to admit of his doing so without interruption. (See his Vorrede to the second vol. of the Odyssey, p. xxiv.) There is no evidence for this assertion, and it appears to me highly improbable. In reference to the Romances of the Middle Ages, belonging to the Cycle of the Round Table, M. Fauriel tells us that the German _Perceval_ has nearly twenty-five thousand verses (more than half as long again as the Iliad); the _Perceval_ of Christian of Troyes, probably more; the German _Tristan_, of Godfrey of Strasburg, has more than twenty-three thousand; sometimes, the poem is begun by one author, and continued by another. (Fauriel, Romans de Chevalerie, Revue des Deux Mondes, t. xiii. pp. 695-697.) The ancient unwritten poems of the Icelandic Skalds are as much lyric as epic: the longest of them does not exceed eight hundred lines, and they are for the most part much shorter (Untersuchungen über die Geschichte der Nördischen Heldensage, aus P. A. Müller’s Sagabibliothek von G. Lange, Frankf. 1832, Introduct. p. xlii.).