Whatever the date at which the Iliad and the Odyssey received their final form, the common view that they belong to a period somewhere between 850 and 700 B.C. is substantially correct. They represent the culmination of a long period of poetic development and picture so to speak on one canvas scenes and deeds from many centuries. Yet the composite life is wrought by poetic art into one splendid whole, so that the ordinary reader, in antiquity as today, was unconscious of the variety and contradictions in the poems; only the analytic mind of the scholar detects the traces of the varied materials which the epic poet made his own. It is important that we should realize the fact that the Homeric poems made the impression of a consistent unity upon the popular mind in antiquity, for the influence of these epics through the recitations of rhapsodes at great public festivals and through their use in school was enormous. The statement of Herodotus, with which I began, was very largely true. These poems were composed to be recited at the courts of princes in Ionia for the entertainment of the nobles at the banquet or after the feast was over. This purpose naturally influenced the poet in depicting life and religion, for the incidents chosen, the adventures recounted, all the life represented, of necessity had to be consonant with the interests and life of the bard’s audience. His lays were for the ears of men who had not yet lost the consciousness that they were in a new land, who knew that they were living in stirring times, and who feeling the spirit of adventure still fresh within them responded joyously to tales of heroic combat. This fact explains in part why it is that we find so little that is primitive or savage in Homer. Such elements were deliberately left out by the bard as unsuited to his audience; he chose to neglect them, not because of any antagonism toward them, but because they did not agree with his artistic aim. Again, the antiquity of the themes, even at the time of composition, made a freedom and picturesqueness of treatment possible, which a narrative of contemporaneous events could never have possessed. Furthermore since the peoples of Ionia, on migrating from the mainland of Greece, had left behind their sacred places and had carried with them their gods, severed from their ancient homes, the epic poet could treat religion with a liberty and could exercise a freedom of selection among the divinities, could use his poetic imagination to modify forms and to emphasize certain attributes, as he never could have done if singing for a people long resident in an ancient home where their gods had been localized and fixed in character time out of mind. A poet singing of Hera in the Argolid would have found himself bound by the traditions of the Heraeum where the goddess had been domiciled from prehistoric time, but the Homeric bard in Ionia was under no such limitation.