We have not the materials for a scientific knowledge of Homeric real property; and, with all our materials in Irish law books, how hard it is for us to understand the early state of such affairs in Ireland! But does any one seriously suppose that the knightly class of the _Iliad_, the chariot-driving gentlemen, held no more land--legally or by permitted custom--than the two Homeric swains who vituperate each other across a baulk about the right to a few feet of a strip of a runrig field? Whosoever can believe that may also believe that the practice of adding "lot" to "lot" began in the period between the finished composition of the _Iliad_ (or of the parts of it which allude to land tenure) and the beginning of the _Odyssey_ (or of the parts of it which refer to land tenure). The inference is that, though the fact is not explicitly stated in the _Iliad_, there were men who held more "lots" than one in Iliadic times as well as in the Odyssean times, when, in a solitary passage of the Odyssey, we do hear of such men in Crete. But whosoever has pored over early European land tenures knows how dim our knowledge is, and will not rush to employ his lore in discriminating between the date of the _Iliad_ and the date of the Odyssey. Not much proof of change in institutions between Iliadic and Odyssean times can be extracted from two passages about the ethna, or bride-price of Penelope. The rule in both _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ is that the wooer gives a bride-price to the father of the bride, ethna. This was the rule known even to that painfully late and un-Homeric poet who made the Song of Demodocus about the loves of Ares and Aphrodite. In that song the injured husband, Hephaestus, claims back the bride-price which he had paid to the father of his wife, Zeus. [Footnote: Odyssey, VIII. 318.] This is the accepted custom throughout the _Odyssey_ (VI. 159; XVI. 77; XX. 335; XXI. 162; XV. 17, &c.). So far there is no change of manners, no introduction of the later practice, a dowry given with the bride, in place of a bride-price given to the father by the bridegroom. But Penelope was neither maid, wife, nor widow; her husband's fate, alive or dead, was uncertain, and her son was so anxious to get her out of the house that he says he offered gifts _with_ her (XX. 342). In the same way, to buy back the goodwill of Achilles, Agamemnon offers to give him his daughter without bride-price, and to add great gifts (_Iliad_, IX. l47)--the term for the gifts is [Greek: mailia]. People, of course, could make their own bargain; take as much for their daughter as they could get, or let the gifts go from husband to bride, and then return to the husband's home with her (as in Germany in the time of Tacitus, _Germania_, 18), or do that, and throw in more gifts. But in Odyssey, II. 53, Telemachus says that the Wooers shrink from going to the house of Penelope's father, Icarius, who would endow (?) his daughter ([Greek: eednoosaito]) And again (_Odyssey_, I. 277; II.