In the first volume of this provocative book it was argued that, like the French chansons de geste, the Homeric poems were composed in a society with keen political and material interests, which are reflected at many points in the story, and may be identified with those of Ionian and Aeolian cities of Asia Minor, in the centuries from the eighth to the sixth. Further, that the parts of the poems which contain the simplest and probably the earliest sections of the narratives may be isolated, and present a consistent picture of this world in the early middle of the eighth century, when the Troad—including the site of the later Novum Ilium at Hissarlik—was occupied by the Thracian barbarians of the ‘Seventh City’; when Greek settlers were only in precarious occupation of the shores of the Hellespont, and their minstrels were preoccupied with the wars of occupation; while those of Chios were fascinated by the lands of the far west, newly opened by the sailors of Chalcis and Corinth. The poems of this earlier period—of the ‘first Homer’—form about a quarter of our two epics.

If this presentation of the matter be accepted, it is clearly the next question, under what political and social circumstances were the rest of the poems composed, and eventually combined with the original Wrath of Achilles and Return of Odysseus?

What is it that prompts an author to write? Or, supposing some initial stimulus towards writing in general exists, what governs an author's choice of theme and his treatment of it? What does he try to do through his writing, and what does he find writing offers him? No doubt the final answers to these questions belong to psychology and metaphysics rather than literature, but at any rate various approaches can be made with firm and familiar ground still underfoot. One may say, for example, with Dr. Johnson that ‘no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money’ and there is no need to look far into the literary history of Rome to find men writing to earn their living or improve their circumstances in life. Livius Andronicus was a slave and taught and wrote his way to freedom; Plautus worked in a mill until he had bettered himself by his plays. The same is likely to have been true of Caecilius, another slave, and Terence, if manumitted early in life for personal reasons, would not have been enabled without his writing to maintain his closeness to wealthy and influential men—so much so that the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy has an earlier counterpart through his association with Scipio Africanus and Laelius. Ennius is another such, an obscure southern Italian whose qualities were recognized by M. Porcius Cato and got him an entry to Rome. True, Ennius did trace his descent from Messapus, the eponymous Boeotian king of Messapia, but as with Callimachus and Battus one does not know how serious the claim was: in hard cash at any rate it seems to have been worth little, for he lived in Rome simply enough writing and teaching until further patronage came.

One of the less known but by no means of the less voluminous or peculiar among the Greek writers of the imperial age was Publius Aelius Aristides of the second century, Roman citizen, Greek landowner and rhetorician, and unique in surviving literature as a nervous hypochondriac and lifelong devotee of Asclepius. The details of his career, as recorded in his own writings and in Philostratus' Lives of the Sophists, have been conveniently set forth with full references by André Boulanger in his exhaustive, but very readable, study, Aelius Aristide. Only the framework can be indicated here, to be filled in at certain points with the extraordinary experiences which befell Aristides after illness had altered the course of his life. These are described at length and in great confusion in his Hieroi Logoi, written to glorify Asclepius, which perhaps they do; of Aristides they give a picture which deserves greater fame than it enjoys. Their testimony is of particular value because they have not been selected and edited by an interested priesthood, but are the remnants of a collection which bears all the marks of individual sincerity and private eccentricity.

Aristides was born in A.D. 118 on his family's estate at Laneum in Mysia, near Hadrianutherae. His father Eudaemon, who died in his childhood, was a philosopher and priest of Zeus, and evidently a man of wealth and refinement. As a boy he was sent to study under the famous grammaticus, Alexander of Cotiaeum, who was later tutor to Marcus Aurelius, and by him instructed most thoroughly in the poets, orators, historians, and philosophers.

The following is the rule about rhetorical questions in O.O. which is given in most authoritative grammars:

Questions in the indicative in O.R., if they are part of a continuous report of a speech, are put in the infinitive, if they are of the first or third person; in the subjunctive, if they are of the second person, i.e. cur fngio? becomes cur se fugere? cur fugis? becomes cur Me fugeret? and cur fugit? becomes cur ilium fugere?

But this rule is based merely on statistics. It is useful as a rough ruleof-thumb for Latin composition, but as a guide to the interpretation of Latin literature it is worse than useless, because it not only leaves an untidy litter of exceptions to puzzle the learner in many passages of Caesar and Livy, but, like so many grammar-book rules, it obscures the fact that syntactical constructions as well as words and inflexions come into use only as channels for the expression of particular notions in the human mind. The interaction upon one another of habitual methods of expression does cause exceptions to any rule that can be drawn up, and consequently the best accounts, such as are given by Kuhner-Stegmann (ii, pp. 537 ff.) and Riemann, Syntaxe latine (pp. 446–8), are too complicated to be of much use to a schoolboy. Nevertheless, an author's choice of construction is normally determined by the notion which he wishes to express, and it is of the utmost importance that a student should be made to understand that linguistic phenomena are the audible or visible results of a people's effort to think and to express living ideas, and not merely a collection of objective data which can be reduced only to statistical rules.