If the _Cypria_ be earlier than the _Iliad_, yet presupposes the _Iliad_ (about Palamedes it does not), I presume it may also borrow from the _Iliad_; whereas, previously, the _Iliad_ was mainly credited with the borrowings from the Cyclics. Perhaps we are intended to understand that "had we seen these poems before they were made," we would find that they all borrowed from each other. My mind is not metaphysical enough to conceive what the poems were "before they were made." To me it seems that they must, before they were made, have been mere masses of materials, traditions, legends, lays of unknown extent, and _Märchen_ that had no original connection with definite places and persons. There was no _Cypria_, no _Iliad_, no _Little Iliad_, no _Aethiopis_ before these poems were made. We should not, I think, speak of any unmade poem in the making as borrowing matter from another poem which, by our theory, is also still unmade. We can only speak of the poets as selecting, each for himself, from the same mass of materials. If we conceive one poem to have been made before another, then the author or authors of that other may borrow from the earlier work. Thus, when the _Cypria_ or other Cyclic poems coincide in topic with the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, that may be (1) because the authors work out hints given in these finished poems; or (2) the authors may have had recourse to the same "masses of tradition" as were open to the author of the _Iliad_. But the Cyclic poets do not often appear to know Achaean traditions, of the Trojan affair outside of our Homer. We have shown that Palamedes was not originally an Achaean of the Achaeans, but a culture hero. The legend of Telephus, with its sympathetic magic, is wholly un-Achaean; so is Iphigeneia; so are the sons of Theseus; so is the Attic Nemesis. As we shall show in an Appendix, Mr. Murray accounts for the non-Achaean elements so conspicuous in the Cyclic poems, by the theory that they once also appeared in the lays whence our _Iliad_ arose, but were expurgated by the clear Hellenic spirit of Greece in the sixth century, because these lays alone were recited at Panionian and Panathenaean festivals. Our own conclusion is that the Muses befriended Homer when they permitted the fragments of the Cyclic poems to escape the tooth of time. For these fragments suffice to prove that the Ionian poets could take up an Achaean theme, but in a score of ways, in their epics, betrayed themselves as non-Achaean. Their poems are not sections cut out of an Achaean mass of lays, and our Homer is not a similar section, is not Cyclic. It has now been proved, I think, that in no point or trait of life, religion, legends, armour, tactics, rites, taste, poetic method, or anything else, is Homer affected by Ionian influences. The _Iliad_, and mainly the _Odyssey_, are entirely distinct in all their contents from Ionian work. They are much older, and are the fruit of the brief-lived flower of Achaean culture.[44]