Meanwhile Wolf started, not from discrepancies which could only exist in a mosaic of the lays of several distinct ages, but from _a priori_ reflections on the nature of the age and civilisation in which the epics began. Of that age and civilisation we have now some knowledge. Wolf had none. He reckoned that, granting the barbarism of the unknown age as he conceived it, and the abysm of time through which the poems passed before they reached the hands of competent grammarians,--the Alexandrians,--the texts of epics must necessarily have suffered terribly. If so, there necessarily must be many fatal discrepancies, --unless, indeed, the supposed Editorial Committee at Athens (600-530 B.C.) and the Alexandrian editors later harmonised the whole into the actual _unus color_. For the whole _did_ seem harmonious to Wolf, with merely a few roughnesses, and passages suspected even by the ancient grammarians. But Wolf's successors, hypnotised by his original _suggestion_ that, in the circumstances of the case, the poems _must_ be by many hands, have felt that, if so, they _must_ contain many fatal discrepancies, have hunted for, and have, of course, found them. Thus an unscientific and illogical method has long prevailed. Indeed, a method less scientific and less logical cannot be imagined. Critics already prepossessed by the suggestion of Wolf in favour of multiplex authorship, sedulously hunt, we repeat, through the poems for discrepancies in support of their case. They do what men have never done to any other long poetic work of imagination, they seek, with microscopic minuteness of inquiry, for inconsistencies in a fictitious narrative, composed not for analytic readers, but for a circle of listeners. When they find--or much more frequently imagine that they have found--such discrepancies, they proclaim them as proofs of multiplex authorship. Never have they as eagerly and carefully sought for such errors in long imaginative tales that are certainly known to be the work of one hand. Scientific method imperatively demands this investigation; but the critics do not listen. They have studied a work of pure literature with the desire to prove their own foregone conclusion, that the authorship of the _Iliad_ is multiplex, and that it is the growth of several disparate ages.