The conclusion at which we arrive is that the _Iliad_, as a whole, is the work of one age. That it has reached us without interpolations and _lacunae_ and _remaniements_ perhaps no person of ordinary sense will allege. But that the mass of the Epic is of one age appears to be a natural inference from the breakdown of the hypotheses which attempt to explain it as a late mosaic. We have also endeavoured to prove, quite apart from the failure of theories of expansion and compilation, that the _Iliad_ presents an historical unity, unity of character, unity of customary law, and unity in its archaeology. If we are right, we must have an opinion as to how the Epic was preserved. If we had evidence for an Homeric school, we might imagine that the Epic was composed by dint of memory, and preserved, like the Sanskrit Hymns of the Rig Veda, and the Hymns of the Maoris, the Zunis, and other peoples in the lower or middle stage of barbarism, by the exertions and teaching of schools. But religious hymns and mythical hymns--the care of a priesthood--are one thing; a great secular epic is another. Priests will not devote themselves from age to age to its conservation. It cannot be conserved, with its unity of tone and character, and, on the whole, even of language, by generations of paid strollers, who recite new lays of their own, as well as any old lays that they may remember, which they alter at pleasure. We are thus driven back to the theory of early written texts, not intended to meet the wants of a reading public, but for the use of the poet himself and of those to whom he may bequeath his work. That this has been a method in which orally published epics were composed and preserved in a non-reading age we have proved in our chapter on the French Chansons _de Geste_. Unhappily, the argument that what was done in mediaeval France might be done in sub-Mycenaean Greece, is based on probabilities, and these are differently estimated by critics of different schools. All seems to depend on each individual's sense of what is "likely." In that case science has nothing to make in the matter. Nitzsche thought that writing might go back to the time of Homer. Mr. Monro thought it "probable enough that writing, even if known at the time of Homer, was not used for literary purposes." [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. p. xxxv.] Sir Richard Jebb, as we saw, took a much more favourable view of the probability of early written texts. M. Salomon Reinach, arguing from the linear written clay tablets of Knossos and from a Knossian cup with writing on it in ink, thinks that there may have existed whole "Minoan" libraries--manuscripts executed on perishable materials, palm leaves, papyrus, or parchment. [Footnote: _L'Anthropologie_, vol. xv, pp. 292, 293.] Mr. Leaf, while admitting that "writing was known in some form through the whole period of epic development," holds that "it is in the highest degree unlikely that it