I now positively retract my former opinion that Ilium was inhabited up to the ninth century after Christ, and I must distinctly maintain that its site has been desolate and uninhabited since the end of the fourth century. But Troy was not large. I am extremely disappointed at being obliged to give so small a plan of the city; nay, I had wished to be able to make it a thousand times larger, but I value truth above everything, and I rejoice that my three years' excavations have laid open the Homeric Troy, even though on a diminished scale, and that I have proved the Iliad based upon real facts. Homer is an epic poet, and not an historian; so it is quite natural that he should have exaggerated everything with poetic licence. Moreover, the events he describes are so marvellous that many scholars have long doubted the very existence of Troy, and have considered the city to be a mere invention of the poet's fancy. I venture to hope that the civilised world will not only not be disappointed that the city of Priam has shown itself to be scarcely a twentieth part as large as was to be expected from the statements of the Iliad, but that, on the contrary, it will accept with delight and enthusiasm the certainty that Ilium did really exist, that a large portion of it has now been brought to light, and that Homer, even though he exaggerates, nevertheless sings of events that actually happened. Homer can never have seen Ilium's Great Tower, the surrounding wall of Poseidon and Apollo, the Scæan Gate of the palace of King Priam, for all these monuments lay buried deep in heaps of rubbish, and he could have made no excavations to bring them to light. He knew of these monuments only from hearsay and tradition, for the tragic fate of ancient Troy was then still in fresh remembrance, and had already been for centuries in the mouth of all minstrels. * * * * * JULIUS CÆSAR Commentaries on the Gallic War