If so, there is no burden of proof incumbent upon those, who regard Homer as an historical authority. The presumptions are all in favour of their so regarding him. The question will, of course, remain--In what proportions has he mixed history with imaginative embellishment? And he has furnished us with some aids towards the consideration of this question. The immense mass of matter contained in the Iliad, which is beyond what the action of the poem requires, and yet is in its nature properly historical, of itself supplies the strongest proof of the historic aims of the poet. Whether, in the introduction of all this matter, he followed a set and conscious purpose of his own mind, or whether he only fed the appetite of his hearers with what he found to be agreeable to them, is little material to the question. The great fact stands, that there was either a design to fulfil, or, at least, an appetite to feed--an intense desire to create bonds and relations with the past--to grasp its events, and fasten them in forms which might become, and might make them become, the property of the present and the future. Without this great sign of nobleness in their nature, Greeks never could have been Greeks. I have particularly in view the great multitude of genealogies; their extraordinary consistency one with another, and with the other historical indications of the poems; their extension to a very large number, especially in the Catalogue, of secondary persons; I take again the Catalogue itself, that most remarkable production, as a whole; the accuracy with which the names of the various races are handled and bestowed throughout the poems; the particularity of the demands regularly made upon strangers for information concerning themselves, and especially the constant inquiry who were their parents, what was, for each person as he appears, _his_ relation to the past? and further, the numerous legends or narratives of prior occurrences with which the poems, and particularly the more historic Iliad, is so thickly studded. Even the national use of patronymics as titles of honour is in itself highly significant of the historic turn. Nay, much that touches the general structure of the poem may be traced in part to this source; for all the intermediate Books between the Wrath and the Return of Achilles, while they are so contrived as to heighten the military grandeur of the hero, are so many tributes to the special and local desires in each state or district for commemoration of their particular chiefs, which Homer would, of course, have to meet, as he itinerated through the various parts of Greece.