The foregoing remarks on the Wolfian hypothesis respecting the text of the Iliad, tend to separate two points which are by no means necessarily connected, though that hypothesis, as set forth by Wolf himself, by W. Müller, and by Lachmann, presents the two in conjunction. First, was the Iliad originally projected and composed by one author, and as one poem, or were the different parts composed separately and by unconnected authors, and subsequently strung together into an aggregate? Secondly, assuming that the internal evidences of the poem negative the former supposition, and drive us upon the latter, was the construction of the whole poem deferred, and did the parts exist only in their separate state, until a period so late as the reign of Peisistratus? It is obvious that these two questions are essentially separate, and that a man may believe the Iliad to have been put together out of preëxisting songs, without recognizing the age of Peisistratus as the period of its first compilation. Now, whatever may be the steps through which the poem passed to its ultimate integrity, there is sufficient reason for believing that they had been accomplished long before that period: the friends of Peisistratus found an Iliad already existing and already ancient in their time, even granting that the poem had not been originally born in a state of unity. Moreover, the Alexandrine critics, whose remarks are preserved in the Scholia, do not even notice the Peisistratic recension among the many manuscripts which they had before them: and Mr. Payne Knight justly infers from their silence that either they did not possess it, or it was in their eyes of no great authority;[269] which could never have been the case if it had been the prime originator of Homeric unity. [269] Knight, Prolegg. Homer, xxxii. xxxvi. xxxvii. That Peisistratus caused a corrected MS. of the Iliad to be prepared, there seems good reason to believe, and the Scholion on Plautus edited by Ritschl (see Die Alexandrinische Bibliothek, p. 4) specifies the four persons (Onomakritus was one) employed on the task. Ritschl fancies that it served as a sort of Vulgate for the text of the Alexandrine critics, who named specially other MSS. (of Chios, Sinôpê, Massalia, etc.) only when they diverged from this Vulgate: he thinks, also, that it formed the original from whence those other MSS. were first drawn, which are called in the Homeric Scholia αἱ κοιναὶ, κοινότεραι (pp. 59-60). Welcker supposes the Peisistratic MS. to have been either lost or carried away when Xerxês took Athens (Der Epische Kyklus, pp. 382-388). Compare Nitzsch, Histor. Homer. Fasc. i. pp. 165-167; also his commentary on Odyss. xi. 604, the alleged interpolation of Onomakritus; and Ulrici, Geschichte der Hellen. Poes. Part i. s. vii. pp. 252-255.