Amazing to say, none of these "more primitive phases of belief," none of the recrudescent savage magic, was intruded by the late Ionian poets into the Iliad which they continued, by the theory. Such phases of belief were, indeed, by their time popular, and frequently appeared in the Cyclic poems on the Trojan war; continuations of the _ILIAD_, which were composed by Ionian authors at the same time as much of the _ILIAD_ itself (by the theory) was composed. The authors of these Cyclic poems--authors contemporary with the makers of much of the _ILIAD_--_were_ eminently "un-Homeric" in many respects. [Footnote: _Cf_. Monro, _The Cyclic Poets; Odyssey_, vol. ii, pp. 342-384.] They had ideas very different from those of the authors of the _Iliad_ and _ODYSSEY_, as these ideas have reached us. Helbig states this curious fact, that the Homeric poems are free from many recent or recrudescent ideas common in other Epics composed during the later centuries of the supposed four hundred years of Epic growth. [Footnote: _Homerische Epos_, p. 3.] Thus a signet ring was mentioned in the _Ilias Puma_, and there are no rings in _Iliad_ or _Odyssey_. But Helbig does not perceive the insuperable difficulty which here encounters his hypothesis. He remarks: "In certain poems which were grouping themselves around the _Iliad and _Odyssey, we meet data absolutely opposed to the conventional style of the Epic." He gives three or four examples of perfectly un-Homeric ideas occurring in Epics of the eighth to seventh centuries, B.C., and a large supply of such cases can be adduced. But Helbig does not ask how it happened that, if poets of these centuries had lost touch with the Epic tradition, and had wandered into a new region of thought, as they had, examples of their notions do not occur in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. By his theory these poems were being added to and altered, even in their oldest portions, at the very period when strange fresh, or old and newly revived fancies were flourishing. If so, how were the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, unlike the Cyclic poems, kept uncontaminated, as they confessedly were, by the new romantic ideas?