He also says: "In its actual working up, however, our _Iliad_ has reached a further stage of development than the ordinary run of poetic chronicles, if I may use the term." Moreover, "we happen to know that there was an old chronicle poem which both contained a catalogue of the ships[2] and also narrated at length the assembling of the fleet at Aulis--the so-called _Cypria_ or Cyprian verses. Our Catalogue has in all probability been taken from there."[3] Here we are told that our Iliad derives some passages and the Catalogue from an old chronicle poem, the Cypria, and from several other named epics, "the Little Iliad, and the Sack of Ilion, the so-called Aethiopis," while, "in actual working up, our Iliad has reached a further stage of development than the ordinary run of poetic chronicles...." It was natural that, on hearing how the Iliad borrowed from an old chronicle poem, the Cypria, I should think that the _Cypria_ was regarded as an old chronicle poem _complete in itself_ before it was borrowed from by the _Iliad_. The chronicle poem of events so mythical and remote could not resemble a monastic chronicle in receiving additions from contemporary history. This remark also applies to the other poems with names, _Sack of Ilion,_ and so on, and with contents which must be definitely known, if it be known that the _Iliad_ borrowed from them, or seems to have borrowed from them. One could not but be convinced, then, that these old _books_ which lent, were supposed to be earlier finished than the book, the _Iliad,_ which borrowed from them. But Mr. Murray also said, and here the prospect wavers: "The truth is that these various books or masses of tradition were growing up side by side for centuries. All the great books were growing up together, and passages could be repeated from any one to any other."[4]