This very curious turn in the arrangement of the Hesiodic Ages, and especially the insertion, in a regular figurative series taken from the metals, of a completely heterogeneous passage, calls for explanation; and I venture to suggest that this passage should be construed as disclosing to us that brilliant halo, which the Homeric poems had cast over an age still recent, so as not only to hold it above the one that followed, but also to raise it even above that which had preceded it; above the age of Bellerophon, of Tantalus, of Sisyphus, of Minos, and even of Hercules. The splendour of the fame of heroes really depended on the Bard. The great Bard of Greece had lifted Achilles and Ulysses to a height surpassing that of the older Heroes, who remained unsung by him; and he had promised Menelaus, in the Fourth Odyssey[113], that very seat in the regions of the blest, to which allusion is here made by Hesiod. While the apparent poetic solecism of this passage is thus accounted for, it becomes, at once, both an emphatic testimony to the immense power exercised by the verse of Homer, and a distinct declaration by Hesiod of the wide social interval, by which he was himself separated from the heroic period; a declaration entirely accordant with the internal evidence of the poems of Hesiod generally, and amounting by implication to the double statement from this poet, that Homer belonged to the heroic age, and that he himself did not belong to it. The tradition of Hellen and his sons, then, exhibits one of the cases in which we must take our choice between the testimony of Homer, and what are apparently the inventions of the later Greeks. Another of these cases, which will be my second and last illustration, relates to Helen of Troy. It has been much disputed whether this celebrated character is to be regarded as historical or fictitious. A writer of no less judgment and authority than the Bishop of St. David’s, adopts the latter alternative, upon various grounds. The strongest among them all, in his view, is, that ‘in the abduction of Helen, Paris only repeats an exploit, also attributed to Theseus[114].’ This exploit, the Bishop thinks, was known to Homer, as he introduces Æthra, the mother of Theseus, in the company of Helen at Troy. And other writers have further developed these ideas, by finding absurdity in the Homeric tale of Helen, on the ground that she must have been eighty years old when the supposed abduction by Paris took place.