Fortunately, as a result of recent archaeological exploration we are now entitled to assume, what the ancient Greeks so naturally believed, that the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, the pioneer epics of European literature, are valuable historical documents for the period which preceded and followed the Trojan war. For our present purpose it does not very much matter whether the poems were composed by one great poet or by a number of rhapsodists, whether they were composed in Greece or in Asia Minor. The important thing is that they refer to actual places and events, to men and women who really lived and died. Just as Seebohm accepts the poem _Beowulf_ as sole evidence for early Scandinavian tribal custom, even though he describes[45] the poem as an ‘Anglian or Northumbrian recension of a story founded on Scandinavian tradition and designed for recital at some eighth-century royal court,’ so we see in the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ a genuine historical picture of Greece under the Achaean domination, even though these poems were not the work of contemporary hands, and contain certain passages and verses[46] which are clearly of later origin than that of the poems as a whole. It is only necessary for us here to refer to two recent works[47] of Dr. Leaf which furnish a cogent justification for this assumption. Professor Ridgeway, too, who has done so much to remove the veil of obscurity which has hung for so long over early Greece, has never wavered in his belief[48] in the historicity of Homer. We should indeed prefer to be wrong with Leaf and Ridgeway rather than to be right with such critics as Gilbert Murray[49] and Miss Harrison,[50] who see in the Homeric poems the culmination of centuries of literary work, which took final form and shape in the Athens of Solon and Peisistratus, in the atmosphere of the Persian rather than the Trojan war.