Note 240 — Chapter XXI · GRECIAN EPIC.—HOMERIC POEMS.

See the statements and citations respecting the age of Homer, collected in Mr. Clinton’s Chronology, vol. i. p. 146. He prefers the view of Aristotle, and places the Iliad and Odyssey a century earlier than I am inclined to do,—940-927 B. C.

Kratês, probably placed the poet anterior to the Return of the Hêrakleids, because the Iliad makes no mention of Dorians in Peloponnêsus: Eratosthenês may be supposed to have grounded his date on the passage of the Iliad, which mentions the three generations descended from Æneas. We should have been glad to know the grounds of the very low date assigned by Theopompus and Euphoriôn.

The pseudo-Herodotus, in his life of Homer, puts the birth of the poet one hundred and sixty-eight years after the Trojan war.