What we have to account for is not only the relative lack of anachronisms in poems supposed to have been made through a period of at least four hundred years, but also the harmony of the _CHARACTERS_ in subtle details. Some of the characters will be dealt with later; meanwhile it is plain that Mr. Leaf, when he rejects both the idea of written texts prior to 600-540 B.C., and also the idea of a school charged with the duty of "maintaining a fixed standard," leaves a terrible task to his supposed editor of orally transmitted poems which, he says--if unpreserved by text or school--"must have ended by varying infinitely according to the caprice of their various reciters." [Footnote: _Companion to the Iliad, p. 21._] On that head there can be no doubt; in the supposed circumstances no harmony, no _unus_ color, could have survived in the poems till the days of the sixth century editor. Here, then, is another difficulty in the path of the theory that the _Iliad_ is the work of four centuries. If it was, we are not enabled to understand how it came to be what it is. No editor could possibly tinker it into the whole which we possess; none could steer clear of many absurd anachronisms. These are found by critics, but it is our hope to prove that they do not exist. NOTE THE LEGEND OF THE MAKING OF THE "ILIAD" UNDER PISISTRATOS It has been shown in the text that in 1892 Mr. Leaf thought the story about the making of the _Iliad_ under Pisistratus, a legend without authority, while he regarded the traditions concerning an Homeric school as sufficient basis for an hypothesis, "which we are bound to make in order to explain the possibility of any theory." In 1900 he entirely reversed his position, the school was abandoned, and the story of Pisistratus was accepted. One objection to accepting any of the various legends about the composing and writing out, for the first time, of the _Iliad_, in the sixth century, the age of Pisistratus, was the silence of Aristarchus on the subject. He discussed the authenticity of lines in the _Iliad_ which, according to the legend, were interpolated for a political purpose by Solon or Pisistratus, but, as far as his comments have reached us in the scholia, he never said a word about the tradition of Athenian interpolation. Now Aristarchus must, at least, have known the tradition of the political use of a disputed line, for Aristotle writes (_Rhetoric_, i. 15) that the Athenians, early in the sixth century, quoted _Iliad_, II. 558, to prove their right to Salamis. Aristarchus also discussed _Iliad_, II. 553, 555, to which the Spartans appealed on the question of supreme command against Persia (Herodotus, vii. 159). Again Aristarchus said nothing, or nothing that has reached us, about Athenian interpolation. Once more, Odyssey, II. 631, was said by Hereas, a Megarian writer, to have been interpolated by Pisistratus (Plutarch.) But "the scholia that represent the teaching of Aristarchus"