A theorist who believes that the Homeric poems are the growth of four changeful centuries, must present a definite working hypothesis as to how they escaped from certain influences of the late age in which much of them is said to have been composed. We must first ask to what manner of audiences did the poets sing, in the alleged four centuries of the evolution of the Epics. Mr. Leaf, as a champion of the theory of ages of "expansion," answers that "the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ are essentially, and above all, Court poems. They were composed to be sung in the palaces of a ruling aristocracy ... the poems are aristocratic and courtly, not popular." [Footnote: Companion to the _Iliad_, pp. 2,8. 1892.] They are not _Volkspoesie_; they are not ballads. "It is now generally recognised that this conception is radically false." These opinions, in which we heartily agree--there never was such a thing as a "popular" Epic--were published fourteen years ago. Mr. Leaf, however, would not express them with regard to "our" _Iliad_ and Odyssey, because, in his view, a considerable part of the _Iliad_, as it stands, was made, not by Court bards in the Achaean courts of Europe, not for an audience of noble warriors and dames, but by wandering minstrels in the later Ionian colonies of Asia. They did not chant for a military aristocracy, but for the enjoyment of town and country folk at popular festivals. [Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. p. xvi. 1900.] The poems were _begun_, indeed, he thinks, for "a wealthy aristocracy living on the product of their lands," in European Greece; were begun by contemporary court minstrels, but were continued, vastly expanded, and altered to taste by wandering singers and reciting rhapsodists, who amused the holidays of a commercial, expansive, and bustling Ionian democracy. [Footnote: _Companion to the Iliad_, p. II.] We must suppose that, on this theory, the later poets pleased a commercial democracy by keeping up the tone that had delighted an old land-owning military aristocracy. It is not difficult, however, to admit this as possible, for the poems continued to be admired in all ages of Greece and under every form of society. The real question is, would the modern poets be the men to keep up a tone some four or five centuries old, and to be true, if they were true, to the details of the heroic age? "It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that some part of the most primitive _Iliad_ may have been actually sung by the court minstrel in the palace whose ruins can still be seen in Mycenae." [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p. xv.] But, by the expansionist theory, even the oldest parts of our _Iliad_ are now full of what we may call quite recent Ionian additions, full of late retouches, and full, so to speak, of omissions of old parts.