We shall speak of Epirus in its narrower sense. Its new and narrower frontiers were formed especially at the time when the great Pyrrhus became king of Epirus, and when the kingdom founded by him gained consistency. In later times it was of a still more limited extent. As those tribes, when they did speak Greek, spoke in the Doric dialect, they called themselves Ἀπειρῶται, as we see from their coins, both regal and republican. This form also remained the most familiar to the Romans, and has been preserved down to our own time in the word _apricots_ (_mala Apirotica_); in like manner, we find in Plautus _Alis_ and _Alii_ for _Elis_ and _Elii_. Later writers indeed used _Epirus_ and _Epiroticus_, but these are changes of the literary language, while the genuine and more ancient form continued to be used in the popular and spoken language. The Epirots must also have had a real national name of their own; and this name has been preserved by Mnaseas, a pupil of Aristarchus, in a scholion on the Odyssey. It was Siceli, like that of the Oenotrians in Italy, and of the inhabitants of Sicily. I have published a short essay on this subject in the _Rheinisches Museum_,[86] and have shown that the Siceli mentioned in the Odyssey must be those of Epirus, that the ancient grammarian is perfectly right in this respect, and that for this reason the last rhapsody of the Odyssey is of quite a different origin from the rest. Satisfactory results in the higher kind of criticism, regarding the age of authors, may be arrived at in many cases either by mere grammatical, or by mere historical philology, but it is infinitely better if both can be combined, and such is the case here, the one supporting the other. Bentley’s investigations on the Epistles of Phalaris and the Fables of Aesop are models of inquiries, in which historical and grammatical philology go hand in hand. Much that is excellent has already been done for the Homeric poems; but there is still much to be removed, and all the details must be treated of in connection with one another. I am not speaking here of that which has already been done by Wolf.