That lucidity and accuracy in Homer’s expressions, to which we are so often beholden, may stand us yet further in good stead. Two γενεαὶ had passed, not of men at large, but of _the_ men οἵ οἱ πρόσθεν ἅμα τράφεν ἠδ’ ἐγένοντο, of those who were bred and born with him, of his contemporaries. Now this proves that by γενεὴ Homer does not mean the full duration of human life, but that average interval between the successions of men, which general experience places at about thirty years. For if Homer had meant by γενεὴ the whole time required for the dying out of a generation, Nestor could not have outlived two generations of contemporaries. In this sense, his contemporaries were manifestly not two generations, but one, or little more. But if the Poet meant the usual interval at which child succeeds to, or rather follows upon, father, the expression is clear; for the meaning is, that he had seen two of these terms of years, or successions, pass over those who were born at the same time with himself. And in fact this sense of the term γενεὴ is much closer to its etymology than any other. We may, then, on the whole, pretty safely assume it to be a term of years, having the number thirty, so to speak, for its pivot. And thus the three decades of the war become yet more inadmissible as historical expressions, because they are under the strongest suspicion of being poetically employed in order to make up the γενεὴ, so far at least as they and it can be considered to approximate to an actual number at all. In full conformity with this reasoning, it has been shown by Mure, that the events of the third decade, with their times, instead of ten years only, make up eight years and seven months[829]: and he proceeds in the same direction with the foregoing argument so far, at least, as to observe, that the decades and their arrangement are conceived ‘in a mixed spirit of hyperbole and method,’ which commonly marks the genius of heroic romance[830]. [829] Lit. Greece, i. 460. ii. 139. [830] Ibid. ii. 138.