These opinions are very different from those expressed by Mr. Leaf in 1886. He cannot now give "even an approximate date for the composition of the _Catalogue_" which, we conceive, must be the latest thing in Homer, if it was composed "for that portion of the whole Cycle which, as worked up in a separate poem, was called the _Kypria_" for the _Kypria_ is obviously a very late performance, done as a prelude to the _Iliad_. I am unable to imagine how this mutilated passage of Diogenes, even if rightly restored, proves that Dieuchidas, a writer of the fourth century B.C., alleged that Pisistratus made a collection of scattered Homeric poems--in fact, made "a standard text." The Pisistratean hypothesis "was not so long ago unfashionable, but in the last few years a clear reaction has set in," says Mr. Leaf. [Footnote: _Iliad_, i. p. XIX.] The reaction has not affected that celebrated scholar, Dr. Blass, who, with Teutonic frankness, calls the Pisistratean edition "an absurd legend." [Footnote: Blass, Die _Interpolationen_ in der _Odyssee_, pp. I, 2. Halle, 1904.] Meyer says that the Alexandrians rejected the Pisistratean story "as a worthless fable," differing here from Mr. Leaf and Wilamowitz; and he spurns the legend, saying that it is incredible that the whole Greek world would allow the tyrants of Athens to palm off a Homer on them. [Footnote: Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii. 390, 391. 1893.] Mr. T. W. Allen, an eminent textual scholar, treats the Pisistratean editor with no higher respect. In an Egyptian papyrus containing a fragment of Julius Africanus, a Christian chronologer, Mr. Allen finds him talking confidently of the Pisistratidae. They "stitched together the rest of the epic," but excised some magical formulae which Julius Africanus preserves. Mr. Allen remarks: "The statements about Pisistratus belong to a well-established category, that of Homeric mythology.... The anecdotes about Pisistratus and the poet himself are on a par with Dares, who 'wrote the _Iliad_ before Homer.'" [Footnote: _Classical Review_ xviii. 148.] The editor of Pisistratus is hardly in fashion, though that is of no importance. Of importance is the want of evidence for the editor, and, as we have shown, the impossible character of the task allotted to him by the theory. As I suppose Mr. Leaf to insinuate, "fashion" has really nothing to do with the question. People who disbelieve in written texts must, and do, oscillate between the theory of an Homeric "school" and the Wolfian theory that Pisistratus, or Solon, or somebody procured the making of the first written text at Athens in the sixth century--a theory which fails to account for the harmony of the picture of life in the poems, and, as Mr. Monro, Grote, Nutzhorn, and many others argue, lacks evidence.