There is only one mention of writing in Homer. The Greek tragedians knew well that writing was, as far as Homer shows, very rare in the heroic age. But some of the heroes and heroines write whenever they have occasion. There is no archaistic convention. As I have shown in _Homer and his Age_, ancient poets and artists had, no more than Shakespeare, our modern habit of attending to "local colour" as historically known to us by research. Perhaps it may be urged in reply, that early mediaeval epic poets were much less conservative than early Greeks. They altered, for example, the assonant _laisses_ of the early _chansons_, and did them into rhyme, while Greece for epic purposes never deserted the hexameter. But I can give a fair parallel to the Greek non-observance of a convention in the Irish epic cycles. The poets of the ancient Irish cycle of Fian ought, by the theory of convention, to have made their heroes use war-chariots like the heroes of the elder saga of Cuchullin. But they follow no such convention; their heroes ride or fight on foot, because such was the nature of war in their own later time. The same reasoning applies throughout. I cannot believe that the makers of our epics, working in the early historic age, omitted mention of cavalry, coined money, periodical games, or anything else known to them, because they found no such matter in more ancient lays concerning and composed in a previous age. We have seen that the old "non-Homeric" epics were, as their fragments prove, full of non-Homeric usages. No "stylistic convention" forbade mention of these usages.