That, however, which enables me with great confidence at once to urge Homer’s historical authority, and yet to decline recognising him as a chronologist at all, is the fact, that he nowhere founds his history at all in chronology, or in the numbering of events by years, more than he numbers distances by miles, but that he arranges the succession of occurrences by the γενεαὶ or succession of human generations. On these generations we must look as the real time-keeping organism of his works: and the time with its elastic periods, although indeterminate in its details, is kept by him most accurately and effectually as a whole; so that his generations, which are dispersedly recorded in various parts of the poems, always tally when they meet. This is not the place for the proof of the assertion: I only refer to it, because it may help to dispel the illusion apt to possess the mind with respect to Homer’s decades. We, with our definite numerical ideas, may naturally consider that if an author of our own day had said a war lasted in preparation, action, and return, each ten years, and if it was afterwards found perhaps to have lasted (say) only for ten years altogether or little more, such an author would have proved himself unworthy of belief: he would have broken faith with us. But Homer does not break faith with us in using numbers poetically; they belong to his pictorial and not to his historical apparatus, and in connection with this pictorial apparatus it is that he constantly employs them. I doubt if there is any exception to be made to the broad assertion, that, unless in the single case of the war, with the preceding and following decades, Homer never applies number to narrative. And yet the poems are full of independent narratives. Of all these, very few indeed are left unfixed in date; and in every case the date, when found, is found, of course with a certain margin, by means of the order of generations. ~_Difficulties of the literal interpretation._~