But it is not so; the serious, laborious authors of the long Cyclic poems do such un-Homeric things as these; the gay, irresponsible strolling singers of a lay here and a lay there--lays now incorporated in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_--scrupulously avoid such faults. They never even introduce a signet ring. These are difficulties in the theory of the _Iliad_ as a patchwork by many hands, in many ages, which nobody explains; which, indeed, nobody seems to find difficult. Yet the difficulty is insuperable. Even if we take refuge with Wilamowitz in the idea that the Cyclic and Homeric poems were at first mere protoplasm of lays of many ages, and that they were all compiled, say in the sixth century, into so many narratives, we come no nearer to explaining why the tone, taste, and ideas of two such narratives--Illiad and Odyssey--are confessedly distinct from the tone, taste, and ideas of all the others. The Cyclic poems are certainly the production of a late and changed age? [Footnote: For what manner of audience, if not for readers, the Cyclic poems were composed is a mysterious question.] The _Iliad_ is not in any degree--save perhaps in a few interpolated passages--touched by the influences of that late age. It is not a complex of the work of four incompatible centuries, as far as this point is concerned--the point of legend, religion, ritual, and conception of heroic character. CHAPTER III HYPOTHESES OF EPIC COMPOSITION Whosoever holds that the Homeric poems were evolved out of the lays of many men, in many places, during many periods of culture, must present a consistent and logical hypothesis as to how they attained their present plots and forms. These could not come by accident, even if the plots are not good--as all the world held that they were, till after Wolf's day--but very bad, as some critics now assert. Still plot and form, beyond the power of chance to produce, the poems do possess. Nobody goes so far as to deny that; and critics make hypotheses explanatory of the fact that a single ancient "kernel" of some 2500 lines, a "kernel" altered at will by any one who pleased during four centuries, became a constructive whole. If the hypotheses fail to account for the fact, we have the more reason to believe that the poems are the work of one age, and, mainly, of one man.