As the oldest Achaean poetry must necessarily have been pure from the usages and beliefs of the conquered races, as the Achaean or Northern spirit ignored what, according to Mr. Murray, it actually persecuted,[11] we need not attribute this ignoring of such beliefs and practices to expurgation in a later age. The Ionians, as soon as we meet them in the dawn of actual history and in the "Cyclic" poems, are believers in ghosts, worshippers of heroes, and they practise purification by blood. People do not expurgate from older poetry the things consecrated by their own law and religion and celebrated in their own poems: things which could not be present, too, in the old poems of the uncontaminated Achaeans. Yet Mr. Murray appears, if I understand him, to incline to a theory that hero-worship, for example, was distasteful to the Ionian cult of the Delian Apollo, and perhaps for that reason was, in early historic times, expurgated from the _Iliad_. But certainly, given Homeric ideas about the dead, who could not help or hinder, hero-worship did not and could not exist in Homeric society and poetry. Moreover, if the Achaean spirit did "prune away or ignore" such ghostly matters, the Delian expurgators could find nothing here to expurgate. As to blood-purification, Apollo himself was purified, and, in art, holds the purifying pig above the homicide. So purification was "Apolline," and what was Apolline was safe from Apolline expurgation. I now collect passages on the expurgators from Mr. Murray's writings. EXPURGATION "The middle and later generations of the Homeric poets ... were mainly responsible for the work of expurgation." "Homer has cut out" certain stories of human sacrifice, cannibalism, and "mutilations of the Hesiodic gods" "for their revoltingness" (p. 122). "Homer, if we may use that name to denote the authors of the prevailing tone of the _Iliad_" (p. 131). So far the "expurgations" appear to have been done mainly by the Homeric poets themselves "in the middle and later generations." Yet, as to superstitions, the first uncontaminated Achaean poets must have been the purest of all. It is admitted that the poets did not in the same way "expurgate" the "Cyclic" epics. "If the educational use of the _Iliad_ began in Ionia as early as the eighth century, which is likely enough, we can hardly help supposing that it had some share in these processes of purification with which we have been dealing" (p. 133). Here it appears that, probably by the eighth century, the _Iliad_ was a distinct poem, recognised as such, and subject to processes of purification from which the _Cypria_, for example, and other "Cyclic" poems escaped.