When the Greeks did entertain a moral objection to anything, to adelphic marriage, for example: if Homer mentioned such an union, among the Phaeacians, I can easily believe that a palliative explanation might be later inserted. Thus, in _Odyssey_, vii. 54, Alcinous and Arete are "of the self-same parents." Later, a genealogy makes them uncle and niece. This, for what I know, may be a later palliative interpolation. But it is all one to Homer. He follows a well-known _Märchen,_ a tale of No Man's Land, as in his mention of the adelphic marriages of the sons and daughters of Aeolus. Adelphic unions are capital offences in savage customary law; one has no reason to suppose that the Homeric Achaeans were more lax than savages, or no less depraved by Egyptian influences than the Ptolemy and Berenice of Theocritus.[17] I am following Mr. Murray's examples of expurgation. The spirit of the battles in the _Iliad_ "is chivalrous," he says. "No enemy is ever tortured" (as Sinon is in Quintus Smyrnaeus). Yet mediæval professors of chivalry never mutilated, I think, foes (not being rebels) slain in fair field. Homer's men did, I have shown; and nobody expurgated the melancholy facts. As to cruelty to living foes, Euripides and Sophocles make Achilles drag the living Hector behind his chariot, while Homer makes it plain that Hector is stone dead.[18] One can only say that Homer shows better taste than the tragedians. If this good taste is due to late expurgators, if, in a Homeric lay, Achilles did drag the living Hector, one can only wish that Sophocles and Euripides had been on the moral level of the expurgators. Whoever _they_ were, their taste was vastly superior to that of the tragedians. I would attribute the better taste to Homer. The odious tale may be of Ionian invention: the Ionian poet makes Odysseus a child murderer. In the _Tain Bo Cualgne_, Ferdiad drags a very odious dead man at his chariot wheels, not a living man. Homer was probably, indeed certainly, on a higher level of taste than the ancient Irish epic-makers: on this point they are at one with him. The great tragedians preferred a more horrible story--not, of course, because they approved of such proceedings. In King Lear, Shakespeare has horrors undreamed of in his sources, in _Märchen_ and chronicles. He followed a French story in Sidney's _Arcadia_, and pleased "the groundlings." To "groundlings" Homer did not sing: Sophocles and Euripides wrote for the cultured Pit of Athens. For that reason, or because they found their story in some unknown source, and liked the horrible, they made Achilles torture a living enemy.