Here is the real difficulty. Cyclic poets of the eighth and seventh centuries had certainly lost touch with the Epic tradition; their poems make that an admitted fact. Yet poets of the eighth to seventh centuries were, by the theory, busily adding to and altering the ancient lays of the _Iliad_. How did _they_ abstain from the new or revived ideas, and from the new _genre_ of romance? Are we to believe that one set of late Ionian poets--they who added to and altered the Iliad--were true to tradition, while another contemporary set of Ionian poets, the Cyclics--authors of new Epics on Homeric themes--are known to have quite lost touch with the Homeric taste, religion, and ritual? The reply will perhaps be a Cyclic poet said, "Here I am going to compose quite a new poem about the old heroes. I shall make them do and think and believe as I please, without reference to the evidence of the old poems." But, it will have to be added, the rhapsodists of 800-540 B.C., and the general editor of the latter date, thought, _we_ are continuing an old set of lays, and we must be very careful in adhering to manners, customs, and beliefs as described by our predecessors. For instance, the old heroes had only bronze, no iron,--and then the rhapsodists forgot, and made iron a common commodity in the _Iliad_. Again, the rhapsodists knew that the ancient heroes had no corslets--the old lays, we learn, never spoke of corslets--but they made them wear corslets of much splendour. [Footnote: The reader must remember that the view of the late poets as careful adherents of tradition in usages and ideas only obtains _sometimes_; at others the critics declare that archaeological precision is _not_ preserved, and that the Ionic continuators introduced, for example, the military gear of their own period into a poem which represents much older weapons and equipments.] This theory does not help us. In an uncritical age poets could not discern that their genre of romance and religion was alien from that of Homer. To return to the puzzle about the careful and precise continuators of the _Iliad_, as contrasted with their heedless contemporaries, the authors of the Cyclic poems. How "non-Homeric" the authors of these Cyclic poems were, before and after 660 B.C., we illustrate from examples of their left hand backslidings and right hand fallings off. They introduced (1) The Apotheosis of the Dioscuri, who in Homer (_Iliad_, III. 243) are merely dead men (_Cypria_). (2) Story of Iphigenia _Cypria_. (3) Story of Palamedes, who is killed when angling by Odysseus and Diomede (Cypria).