[15] _Ibid._ ix. 381. Mr. Leaf attributes the lines to "some person with a dull chronological mind," who remembered that Thebes in Greece had been left in ruins by the war of the Epigonoi. "He forgot, however, that Egypt is elsewhere unknown to the _Iliad_." If a place is unknown because no one has occasion to mention it, unknown is Thebes to the _Iliad_. But to say that a poet familiar with Crete never heard of Egypt; that Egypt was rediscovered between the dates of composition of _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, is arbitrary. We might as well say that Shakespeare, who never mentions tobacco, never heard of the weed, or that no Biblical author ever saw a cat (out of the Apocrypha). [16] B. S. A. viii. 174. [17] See Hogarth, _Ionia and the East_, pp. 83-86. [18] _Ibid._ pp. 112-115. CHAPTER III HOMERIC POLITY. THE OVER LORD As Homer conceives the period of his heroes, they live in a perfectly well known stage of society, illustrated in later northern Europe by the French _Chansons de Geste_; by the most ancient Irish stories in prose mixed with verse; and even to some extent by the Arthurian romances. Every prince has his castle and town or towns, his lands, pasturage, tilth, and orchards; he is, in the Irish phrase, a _righ_. He is surrounded by the γέροντες,--in Irish the _flaith_, the gentry or squires, who held "rich lands remote from towns," and possessed war-chariots.[1] The princes and gentry with war-chariots alone take notable individual parts in the fighting, whether they fight mounted or dismounted. It is the gentry who offer a rich demesne, vineland and tilth, to Meleager, imploring him to take part in their war.[2] It appears to me that the gentry themselves held land in severalty, perhaps contrary to the old letter of the law, and in possession rather than in property. The question of Homeric land tenure, as of all early land tenure before written records, is very obscure. There existed "common fields" certainly; but were they common property, each freeman having no more than his strip; separated, we know, from that of others by a longitudinal "balk" or boundary? We hear of men wrangling across the balk, "with measures in their hands, in _a common field_, striving for their right within scanty space."[3] Such quarrels were common in the Scotland of the eighteenth century, under the "run-rig" system of common fields; but then the men were tenants. They may have been free-holders in Homer's time, each with his assured "lot" (κλὴρος)[4] The Irish tribal free man had a right to one of these lots, which were redistributed by rotation, but many lots came gradually into the hands of each of the _flaith_, squires, (γέροντες), who were rich in cattle, and let out the cattle to poor lease-holders, for returns of rent in kind. A mail in Homer might have no lot,[5] and yet employ hinds, and be a cultivator. He must have been a tenant farmer.