[47:2] I understand that Mr. W. Leaf, one of the highest English authorities, agrees generally with Fick on this problem. On the other hand, the Provost of Oriel, as he informs me, does not see his way to accept it. [48:1] Thus at the end of a famous epigram on Thermopylæ composed in Laconian Greek, and reformed into literary language, [Greek: chiliades tetores] remained, because [Greek: tessares] would not scan. Fick has now applied his theory to the early Lyric poets, and even printed a revised text of most of them in _Bezzenberger's Beiträge_, xi, xiii, and xiv, &c. I have criticised the newer developments of his theory in the third ed. of my _Greek Literature_. [48:2] Evelyn Abbott, _History of Greece_, i. 158 _seqq._ I cannot but suspect that the account of the diet of the Homeric chiefs--great meals of roast meat, and no fish--is a piece of deliberate archaism, which contradicts all we know of any historical Greeks from the earliest to the present days. The Greeks were probably never a meat-eating race, and even the early athletes trained on cheese (cf. my _Rambles and Studies_, p. 290). The poets knew all about fishing, for it appears in a simile, and yet in no case does fish, the great delicacy of Attic days, appear upon a Homeric table. [50:1] Holm gives a very ingenious solution of the difficulty, which is, I think, quite original. He thinks that the Æolic and Ionic settlers who were driven out by the Dorian immigration carried with them recollections and traditions of the splendour of the pre-Doric Mycenæ, Orchomenos, &c. In Asia Minor they sang of these old glories, clothing the old kings and heroes of the land, and the cities they had left, in the dress and manners of the Ionia of their own day. Thus their picture is true traditionally, for we know that the palaces of Greece were in the places they describe; their pictures of manners were also true, in another sense, of the society in which they actually lived.