Note 51:1 — Chapter II

When once composed, they could be easily enough remembered by trained guilds of reciters. It is therefore the composition, and the transmission as large unities, which imply, in my opinion, that use of writing which the poets avoid attributing to the society they depict as one of the past. If we could determine the date of the first fluent use of writing in Ionia, I think we could also determine the date of the creation of the Iliad as an artistic whole. At the same time I think it right to caution the reader, that he need not assume lapidary inscriptions to mark the first stage. This has been very justly pointed out by Mr. E. Abbott, and it is here most important; for we have no extant inscription on stone which can be surely attributed to a date earlier than 600 B.C., and I am convinced that had such use of writing been in common use earlier, we should long since have found evidence of it. Probably the first writing seen and learned by the Greeks was that of the Phœnician traders, who kept their accounts either on papyrus or perhaps on wood. Thus the Iliad may have been composed with the aid of writing, and yet there may have been no contemporary records on stone.