There is one hero of the Cyclic Ionian poems, at least of the _Cypria_, whose story illustrates the depth and width of the gulf which severs Ionia from the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. The _Cypria_, like the Attic traditions used by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and the Sophists, such as Gorgias, displays a strange hatred of Homer's favourite hero, the taker of the city, Odysseus. He, in most of the plays where he appears, is a peculiarly mean character: in the _Iliad_ he is as noble and resolute as he is sagacious: in the _Odyssey_ he is _ruse_, because his desperate situation, alone in a throng of foes, requires cunning. Only Agamemnon once, in one of his tempers, accused Odysseus of "evil wiles" _(Iliad_, iv. 339). Professor Mahaffy has offered an explanation of "the degradation of Odysseus" (and of other Homeric heroes) "in Greek literature" very different from that which I shall venture to suggest.[1] Mr. Mahaffy thinks that "the Attic standard of morality, the standard of Aeschylus and Euripides ... was higher and not lower than that of the Ionic court poets, and that the degradation of the Homeric heroes was partly owing to a moral advance, and not a moral decay, in the Greek nation." But what has Homer to do with the morality of Ionic court poets, about whom we have no information, unless the Cyclic poets were court poets? In Mr. Mahaffy's opinion, the Sicilian Epicharmus began the attacks on "Odysseus the Knave." "At all epochs and among all Greeks, lying and dishonesty were prominent vices." Certainly they were in historic times. Traitors were too well known to historic Greece, but Homer seems never to have heard of treachery. Odysseus has his ruses in the _Odyssey_, and therefore, Mr. Mahaffy thinks, the Greeks, knowing their own weak point, falseness, attacked it through Odysseus. Epicharmus began the assault, Pindar followed Epicharmus, and, in the Nemean Odes, vii. viii., belittled Odysseus (all in the interests of honesty), while Sophocles in the _Philoctetes_ carries on the crusade. It did not occur to Mr. Mahaffy that the crusade began, long before Epicharmus and Pindar, in the Ionian _Cypria_. In the Nemean Odes, vii. viii., Pindar naturally belittled Odysseus, to whom were awarded the arms of Achilles, which the hero, Aias, desired to win. Athens always claimed Aias as a friend and ally, wherefore, and in pursuance, as we shall see, of the feud of Palamedes, Attic poets favoured Aias and maligned his successful rival. They also backed Philoctetes against these "tyrants," the Atridae; they had no grudge against Achilles, though they could not represent his chivalry. Mr. Mahaffy does not mention Palamedes at all, does not see that the Athenians take up the Ionian grudge, and is "somewhat impatient of all the fashionable enthusiasm about Homer's grace, and refinement, and delicacy of feeling."