Distinct and separate, indeed, are the inquiries whether Greece might produce, at certain intervals of time, two great epic poets, selecting opposite subjects--and whether Greece produced a score or two of great poets, from whose desultory remains the mighty whole of the Iliad was arranged.

Even the ancients of the Alexandrine school did not attribute the Odyssey to the author of the Iliad.

The theme selected--the manners described--the mythological spirit--are all widely different in the two works, and one is evidently of more recent composition than the other.

But, for my own part, I do not think it has been yet clearly established that all these acknowledged differences are incompatible with the same authorship.

If the Iliad were written in youth, the travels of the poet, the change of mind produced by years and experience, the facility with which an ancient Greek changed or remodelled his pliant mythology, the rapidity with which (in the quick development of civilization in Greece) important changes in society and manners were wrought, might all concur in producing, from the mature age of the poet, a poem very different to that which he composed in youth.