Now a poet is an _artist_, like another, and he, too--no less than the vase painter or engraver of gems--in dealing with legends of times past, represents (in an uncritical age) the arms, utensils, costume, and the religious, geographical, legal, social, and political ideas of his own period. We shall later prove that this is true by examples from the early mediaeval epic poetry of Europe. It follows that if the _Iliad_ is absolutely consistent and harmonious in its picture of life, and of all the accessories of life, the _Iliad_ is the work of a single age, of a single stage of culture, the poet describing his own environment. But Helbig, on the other hand, citing Wilamowitz Moellendorff, declares that the _Iliad_--the work of four centuries, he says--maintains its unity of colour by virtue of an uninterrupted poetical tradition. [Footnote: _Homerische Untersuchungen_, p. 292; _Homerische Epos_, p. I.] If so, the poets must have archaeologised, must have kept asking themselves, "Is this or that detail true to the past?" which artists in uncritical ages never do, as we have been told by Helbig. They must have carefully pondered the surviving old Achaean lays, which "were born when the heroes could not read, or boil flesh, or back a steed." By carefully observing the earliest lays the late poets, in times of changed manners, "could avoid anachronisms by the aid of tradition, which gave them a very exact idea of the epic heroes." Such is the opinion of Wilamowitz Moellendorff. He appears to regard the tradition as keeping the later poets in the old way automatically, not consciously, but this, we also learn from Helbig, did not occur. The poets often wandered from the way. [Footnote: Helbig, _Homerische Epos,_ pp. 2, 3.] Thus old Mycenaean lays, if any existed, would describe the old Mycenaean mode of burial. The Homeric poet describes something radically different. We vainly ask for proof that in any early national literature known to us poets have been true to the colour and manners of the remote times in which their heroes moved, and of which old minstrels sang. The thing is without example: of this proofs shall be offered in abundance. Meanwhile, the whole theory which regards the _Iliad_ as the work of four or five centuries rests on the postulate that poets throughout these centuries did what such poets never do, kept true to the details of a life remote from their own, and also did not. For Helbig does not, after all, cleave to his opinion. On the other hand, he says that the later poets of the _Iliad_ did not cling to tradition. "They allowed themselves to be influenced by their own environment: _this influence betrays ITSELF IN THE descriptions of DETAILS_.... The rhapsodists," (reciters, supposed to have altered the poems at will), "did not fail to interpolate relatively recent elements into the oldest parts of the Epic." [Footnote: _Homerische Epos,_ p. 2.]