It is impossible to argue against a critic's subjective sense of what is likely. Possibly that sense is born of the feeling that the Cretan linear script, for example, or the Cyprian syllabary, looks very odd and outlandish. The critic's imagination boggles at the idea of an epic written in such scripts. In that case his is not the scientific imagination; he is checked merely by the unfamiliar. Or his sense of unlikelihood may be a subconscious survival of Wolf's opinion, formed by him at a time when the existence of the many scripts of the old world was unknown. Our own sense of probability leads us to the conclusion that, in an age when people could write, people wrote down the Epic. If they applied their art to literature, then the preservation of the Epic is explained. Written first in a prae-Phoenician script, it continued to be written in the Greek adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet. There was not yet, probably, a reading public, but there were a few clerkly men. That the Cretans, at least, could write long before the age of Homer, Mr. Arthur Evans has demonstrated by his discoveries. Prom my remote undergraduate days I was of the opinion which he has proved to be correct, starting, like him, from what I knew about savage pictographs. [Footnote: Cretan _Pictographs_ and _Prae-Phoenician_ Script. London, 1905. Annual of British _School_ of Athens, 1900-1901, p. 10. Journal of _Hellenic Studies,_ 1897, pp. 327-395.] M. Reinach and Mr. Evans have pointed out that in this matter tradition joins hands with discovery. Diodorus Siculus, speaking of the Cretan Zeus and probably on Cretan authority, says: "As to those who hold that the Syrians invented letters, from whom the Phoenicians received them and handed them on to the Greeks, ... and that for this reason the Greeks call letters 'Phoenician,' some reply that the Phoenicians did not [blank space] letters, but merely modified (transposed 3) the forms of the letters, and that most men use this form of script, and thus letters came to be styled 'Phoenician.'" [Footnote: Diodorus Siculus, v. 74. _L'Anthropologie,_ vol. xi. pp. 497-502.] In fact, the alphabet is a collection of signs of palaeolithic antiquity and of vast diffusion. [Footnote: Origins of the Alphabet. A. L. Fortnightly Review, 1904, pp. 634-645] Thus the use of writing for the conservation of the Epic cannot seem to me to be unlikely, but rather probable; and here one must leave the question, as the subjective element plays so great a part in every man's sense of what is likely or unlikely. That writing cannot have been used for this literary purpose, that the thing is impossible, nobody will now assert.