It is in the Cyclic poems that we should naturally seek for materials to enlarge, expound, or correct Homer. But there is not a line or a notice remaining of any one of them, which would justify our assigning to them any historical authority sufficient to qualify them for such a purpose. Their reputed authors, from Arctinus downwards, all belong to periods within the dates of the Olympiads[93]. They all bear marks of having been written to fill the gaps which Homer had left unoccupied, and so to enter into a partnership, if not with his fame, yet with his popularity; with the popularity, of which his works, as we can well judge from more recent experience, would be sure to shed some portion upon all compositions ostensibly allied with them, and which then, as now, presented the most cogent inducements to imitators who had their livelihood to seek by means of their Muse. Homer, without doubt, gave an immense addition of celebrity and vogue to the subject of the Trojan war, much as Boiardo and Ariosto did to the whole circle of the romances of which Orlando is the centre. One of these poems, the Ἰλίου Πέρσις, is a simple expansion, as Mure has observed[94], of the third lay of Demodocus in the Eighth Odyssey[95]. They seem to bear the mark of being, not composed first-hand from actions of men, but from a stock of compositions in which heroic actions had already been enshrined; so little do they appear to have been stamped with the individuality which denotes original design. And accordingly the usual manner of quoting them is not as the certain works of a given person, but the form of citation is (ὁ γράψας τὴν μικρὰν Ἰλιάδα, ὁ ποιήσας τὰ Κύπρια ἔπη), the writer of the little Iliad, the composer of the Cyprian Songs, and the like. Heyne[96] holds even the commencement of the Cyclic poems to have been at least a century after the date of the Iliad and Odyssey.