Sir Richard then takes the point on which we have already insisted, namely, that the Cyclic poets of the eighth century B.C. live in an age of ideas, religions, ritual, and so forth which are absent from the _Iliad_ [Footnote: Homer, pp. 154, 155.] Thus the _Iliad_ existed with its characteristics that are prior to 800 B.C., and in its present compass, and was renowned before 800 B.C. As it could not possibly have thus existed in the _repertoire_ of irresponsible strolling minstrels and reciters, and as there is no evidence for a college, school, or guild which preserved the Epic by a system of mnemonic teaching, while no one can deny at least the possibility of written texts, we are driven to the hypothesis that written texts there were, whence descended, for example, the text of Athens. We can scarcely suppose, however, that such texts were perfect in all respects, for we know how, several centuries later, in a reading age, papyrus fragments of the _Iliad_ display unwarrantable interpolation. [Footnote: Monro, _Odyssey_, vol. ii. pp. 422-426.] But Plato's frequent quotations, of course made at an earlier date, show that "whatever interpolated texts of Homer were then current, the copy from which Plato quoted was not one of them." [Footnote: _Ibid_., p. 429] Plato had something much better. When a reading public for Homer arose--and, from the evidences of the widespread early knowledge of reading, such a small public may have come into existence sooner than is commonly supposed--Athens was the centre of the book trade. To Athens must be due the prae-Alexandrian Vulgate, or prevalent text, practically the same as our own. Some person or persons must have made that text--not by taking down from recitation all the lays which they could collect, as Herd, Scott, Mrs. Brown, and others collected much of the _Border Minstrelsy_, and not by then tacking the lays into a newly-composed whole. They must have done their best with such texts as were accessible to them, and among these were probably the copies used by reciters and rhapsodists, answering to the MS. books of the mediaeval _jongleurs._ Mr. Jevons has justly and acutely remarked that "we do not know, and there is no external evidence of any description which leads us to suppose, that the _Iliad_ was ever expanded" (_J. H. S_, vii. 291-308). That it was expanded is a mere hypothesis based on the idea that "if there was an _Iliad_ at all in the ninth century, its length must have been such as was compatible with the conditions of an oral delivery,"--"a poem or poems short enough to be recited at a single sitting." But we have proved, with Mr. Jevons and Blass, and by the analogy of the Chansons that, given a court audience (and a court audience is granted), there were no such narrow limits imposed on the length of a poem orally recited from night to night.