In what precedes I have made no reference to the Homeric poems, and the omission may be thought strange. But Homeric illustrations of the presence of the Phoenicians in Greece will occur to every one, while both the Iliad and the Odyssey in their existing form are too modern to be quoted without extreme caution. A close investigation of their language shows that it is the slow growth of generations; AEolic formulae from the lays first recited in the towns of the Troad are embodied in Ionic poems where old Ionic, new Ionic, and even Attic jostle against one another, and traditional words and phrases are furnished with mistaken meanings or new forms coined by false analogy. It is difficult to separate the old from the new, to say with certainty that this allusion belongs to the heroic past, this to the Homer of Theopompus and Euphorion, the contemporary of the Lydian Gyges. The art of Homer is not the art of Mykenae and of the early age of Phoenician influence; iron is already taking the place of bronze, and the shield of Akhilles or the palace of Alkinous bear witness to a developed art which has freed itself from its foreign bonds. Six times are Phoenicia and the Phoenicians mentioned in the Odyssey, once in the Iliad;[46] elsewhere it is Sidon and the Sidonians that represented them, never Tyre.[47] Such passages, therefore, cannot belong to the epoch of Tyrian supremacy, which goes back, at all events, to the age of David, but rather to the brief period when the Assyrian king Shalmaneser laid siege to Tyre, and his successor Sargon made Sidon powerful at its expense. This, too, was the period when Sargon set up his record in Cyprus, "the isle of Yavnan" or the Ionians, when Assyria first came into immediate contact with the Greeks, and when Phoenician artists worked at the court of Nineveh and carried their wares to Italy and Sardinia. But it was not the age to which the relics of Mykenae, in spite of paradoxical doubts, reach back, nor that in which the sacred bull of Astarte carried the Phoenician maiden Europa to her new home in the west. A. H. SAYCE, in _Contemporary Review_. FOOTNOTES: [24] See E. Curtins: Die griechische Goetterlehre vom geschichtlichen Standpunkt, in _Preussische Jahrbucher_, xxxvi. pp. 1-17. 1875. [25] _Contemporary Review_, January, 1878. [26] See Fouque's Mission Scientifique a l'ile de Santorin (Archives des Missions 2e serie, iv. 1867); Gorceix in the Bulletin de l'Ecole francaise d'Athenes, i. [27] See, for example, Di Cesnola's _Cyprus_, pp. 401, 402. [28] _Gazette Archeologique_, ii-. 1, 3. [29] See Schliemann's Mycenae and Tiryns, pl. 273. [30] Given by La Marmora in the Memorie della Reale Academia delle Scienze di Torino (1854), vol. xiv., pl. 2, fig. 63. [31] Given in the Monumenti d. Instituto Romano, 1876. [32] Schliemann: Mycenae and Tiryns, p. 530.