He shows all such arguments to be very inconclusive; though the grounds upon which he himself maintains identity of age between the two appear to me not at all more satisfactory (p. 327): we can infer nothing to the point from the mention of Telemachus in the Iliad. Welcker thinks that there is a great difference of age, and an evident difference of authorship, between the two poems (Der Episch. Cyclus, p. 295). O. Müller admits the more recent date of the Odyssey, but considers it “difficult and hazardous to raise upon this foundation any definite conclusions as to the person and age of the poet.” (History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, ch. v. s. 13.) On the whole, the balance of probabilities seems in favor of distinct authorship for the two poems, but the same age,—and that age a very early one, anterior to the first Olympiad. And they may thus be used as evidences, and contemporary evidences, for the phenomena of primitive Greek civilization; while they also show that the power of constructing long premeditated epics, without the aid of writing, is to be taken as a characteristic of the earliest known Greek mind. This was the point controverted by Wolf, which a full review of the case (in my judgment) decides against him: it is, moreover, a valuable result for the historian of the Greeks, inasmuch as it marks out to him the ground from which he is to start in appreciating their ulterior progress.[315] [315] Dr. Thirlwall has added to the second edition of his History of Greece a valuable Appendix, on the early history of the Homeric poems (vol. i. pp. 500-516); which contains copious information respecting the discrepant opinions of German critics, with a brief comparative examination of their reasons. I could have wished that so excellent a judge had superadded, to his enumeration of the views of others, an ampler exposition of his own. Dr. Thirlwall seems decidedly convinced upon that which appears to me the most important point in the Homeric controversy: “That before the appearance of the earliest of the poems of the Epic Cycle, the Iliad and Odyssey, even if they did not exist precisely in their present form, had at least reached their present compass, and were regarded each as a complete and well-defined whole, not as a fluctuating aggregate of fugitive pieces.” (p. 509.) This marks out the Homeric poems as ancient both in the items and in the total, and includes negation of the theory of Wolf and Lachmann, who contend that, as a total, they only date from the age of Peisistratus. It is then safe to treat the poems as unquestionable evidences of Grecian antiquity (meaning thereby 776 B. C.), which we could not do if we regarded all congruity of parts in the poems as brought about through alterations of Peisistratus and his friends.