This is not very satisfactory, and the Pisistratean hypothesis is much less useful to a theorist than the former hypothesis of an Homeric school, for the Pisistratean hypothesis cannot explain the harmony of the characters and the details in the _Iliad_, nor the absence of such glaring anachronisms as the Cyclic poets made, nor the general "pre-Odyssean" character of the language and grammar. By the Pisistratean hypothesis there was not, what Mr. Leaf in 1892 justly deemed essential, a school "to maintain a fixed standard," throughout the changes of four centuries, and against the caprice of many generations of fresh reciters and irresponsible poets. The hypothesis of a school _was_ really that which, of the two, best explained the facts, and there is no more valid evidence for the first making and writing out of our _Iliad_ under Pisistratus than for the existence of a Homeric school. The evidence for the _Iliad_ edited for Pisistratus is examined in a Note at the close of this chapter. Meanwhile Mr. Leaf now revives Wolf's old theory to account for the fact that somehow "a single version" (of the Homeric poems) "came to be accepted." His present theory, if admitted, does account for the acceptation of a single version of the poems, the first standard _written_ version, but fails to explain how "the caprice of the different reciters" (as he says) did not wander into every variety of anachronism in detail and in diction, thus producing a chaos which no editor of about 540 A.D. could force into its present uniformity. Such an editor is now postulated by Mr. Leaf. If his editor's edition, as being _written_, was accepted by Greece, then we "understand how a single version came to be accepted." But we do not understand how the editor could possibly introduce a harmony which could only have characterised his materials, as Mr. Leaf has justly remarked, if there was an Homeric school "to maintain a fixed standard." But now such harmony in the picture of life as exists in the poems is left without any explanation. We have now, by the theory, a crowd of rhapsodists, many generations of uncontrolled wandering men, who, for several centuries, "Rave, recite, and madden through the land," with no written texts, and with no "fixed body to maintain a standard." Such men would certainly not adhere strictly to a stereotyped early tradition: _that_ we cannot expect from them. Again, no editor of about 540 B.C. could possibly bring harmony of manners, customs, and diction into such of their recitals as he took down in writing.