Mr. Verrall says that in Book x. "the wall is gone, as it does go and come throughout the fighting scenes of the _Iliad_." I have carefully re-read Books xi.-xv., in which the wall is of importance, and find no moment in which the wall is absent when, if present, it ought to be mentioned. It is true that Mr. Leaf infers that it was absent in a portion of the poem earlier than our present _Iliad_, but that is merely a conjecture of his own. He also says (Introduction to Book xiii.) that the _Aristeia of Idomeneus_ (xiii. 29-518) "altogether ignores the wall." The whole passage is occupied with fighting _within_ the wall, which the Trojans have entered _en masse_. The reader or listener knows that, and the poet has no sort of reason for mentioning the wall. But he remembers that the Trojan chariots, except that of Asius, stopped and were arrayed at the ditch, so (xiii. 535, 536), the wounded Deiphobus, like the stricken Hector later, is carried out of the fight "to the swift horses that waited for him behind the battle, with the charioteer and chariot," and is conveyed to Troy. The wall is never forgotten, though the description of simultaneous confused fighting at several points is not a model of lucid military history. So much for "the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible" wall. The alleged discrepancy in Book x., insisted on by Mr. Verrall, is an imaginary discrepancy; a thousand such would, collectively, be imponderable. We now turn to what Mr. Leaf calls "a crying contradiction, a contradiction perhaps the most patent in the _Iliad_, which can in no way be palliated." Mr. Leaf's point is that "the words (and acts) of Diomedes in vi. 123-143" are "in crying contradiction" with "the words of Athene in v. 124-132, and the subsequent victories of Diomedes over the gods."[4] In fact, Diomedes, in _Iliad_, vi. 123-129, doubts whether Glaucus, whom he has not encountered before, be a man or a god, and says that he will not, if the stranger be a god, fight against him. He then adds (130-143) the story of the punishment of Lycurgus by Zeus, when Lycurgus had beaten the Maenads, and driven Dionysus to seek refuge with Thetis. The whole passage is easily detachable, and may, Mr. Leaf says, be the work of "some pious revivalist; the Bacchic worship was unknown to the Achaean heroes." We cannot be certain that they did not know the _Thracian_ myth which Diomedes tells: this they might know, though they did not worship Dionysus, who, like Demeter, is scarcely alluded to in the _Iliad_[5]