Cauer remarks that the possibility of "interpolation" "began only after the fixing of the text by Pisistratus." [Footnote: _Grundfragen_, p. 205.] But surely if every poet and reciter could thrust any new lines which he chose to make into any old lays which he happened to know, that was interpolation, whether he had a book of the words or had none. Such interpolations would fill the orally recited lays which the supposed Pisistratean editor must have written down from recitation before he began his colossal task of making the _Iliad_ out of them. If, on the other hand, reciters had books of the words, they could interpolate at pleasure into _them_, and such books may have been among the materials used in the construction of a text for the Athenian book market. But if our theory be right, there must always have been a few copies of better texts than those of the late reciters' books, and the effort of the editors for the book market would be to keep the parts in which most manuscripts were agreed. But how did Athens, or any other city, come to possess a text? One can only conjecture; but my conjecture is that there had always been texts--copied out in successive generations--in the hands of the curious; for example, in the hands of the Cyclic poets, who knew our _Iliad_ as the late French Cyclic poets knew the earlier _Chansons de Geste_. They certainly knew it, for they avoided interference with it; they worked at epics which led up to it, as in the _Cypria;_ they borrowed _motifs_ from hints and references in the _Iliad_, [Footnote: Monro, _Odyssey_, vol. ii. pp. 350, 351.] and they carried on the story from the death of Hector, in the _AEthiopis_ of Arctinus of Miletus. This epic ended with the death of Achilles, when _The Little Iliad_ produced the tale to the bringing in of the wooden horse. Arctinus goes on with his _Sack_ of _Ilios_, others wrote of _The Return_ of _the Heroes,_ and the _Telegonia_ is a sequel to the Odyssey. The authors of these poems knew the _Iliad_, then, as a whole, and how could they have known it thus if it only existed in the casual _repertoire_ of strolling reciters? The Cyclic poets more probably had texts of Homer, and themselves wrote their own poems--how it paid, whether they recited them and collected rewards or not, is, of course, unknown. The Cyclic poems, to quote Sir Richard Jebb, "help to fix the lowest limit for the age of the Homeric poems. [Footnote: _Homer_, pp. 151, 154.] The earliest Cyclic poems, dating from about 776 B.C., presuppose the _Iliad_, being planned to introduce or continue it.... It would appear, then, that the _Iliad_ must have existed in something like its present compass as early as 800 B.C.; indeed a considerably earlier date will seem probable, if due time is allowed for the poem to have grown into such fame as would incite the effort to continue it and to prelude to it."