Now this view of Homer’s mode of chronology will serve, I think, to explain some difficulties that have heretofore led to much of needless perplexity. If I am right, it will follow that we must not adopt these decades as a guide to determine arithmetically the order of events, because Homer has never conceived them arithmetically, but has conceived them rather as we conceive millions or billions. Hence they are more justly to be viewed as a drapery thrown loosely over his action, than as a rigid framework into which it must at all costs be made to fit. Let us apply this to various cases; and among them to those of Telemachus and Neoptolemus respectively. Ulysses left Telemachus a mere child, νέον γεγαῶτ’ ἐνὶ οἴκῳ[831]. He comes back and finds him not a full man, for if he had been a full man, he would have been guilty of a rooted cowardice beyond excuse, which there is no sign that Homer meant to impute to him; but yet he was approaching manhood. Still he is contemptuously called νέος παῖς[832] by Antinous. Upon the whole, the case of Telemachus would perhaps, according to the analogy of the poems, best fall in with an absence of not more than fifteen years, though it does not absolutely exclude nineteen. Here there may be a slight, yet there is not a glaring, discrepancy. But in another case, that of the number of the days for which Telemachus was absent, Mure has shown how little Homer cares to follow the lapse of time, in a case where it does not essentially touch the general order of the poem, with the precision that he observes in everything that he treats historically[833]. I cannot treat this as a difficulty with respect to the question of authorship, or admit it to be one: it is his childlike and indeterminate but poetical habit of handling numbers for effect, just as a painter handles colour. On the other hand, in the case of Argus, on whom dark death laid hold[834], [831] Od. xii. 112, 144. [832] Od. iv. 665. [833] Mure, Hist. Lit. Greece, vol. i. p. 437. [834] Od. xvii. 327. αὐτίκ’ ἰδόντ’ Ὀδυσῆα ἐεικοστῷ ἐνιαυτῷ,