It is, of course, quite possible, that in one particular or another, Homer may be in error, and the later tradition, it is also just possible, may be correct. But so, also, the evidence of an eye-witness in a court of justice may be erroneous, while by chance the merest hearsay may be true. This does not divert men from a careful classification of evidence according to its presumptive value, where they have purposes of utility, according to the common and limited sense of the term, in their view. In regard to the early Greek history, the practice has often been otherwise; partly in the works of scholars, and yet more, as we might expect, in the more popular forms of tuition. It has been to lump together the heterogeneous mass of traditions embodied in the literature of a thousand years. All that the sport of fancy and imagination had conceived--all that national, or local, or personal vanity had suggested--all that motives of policy had forged in history or religion--or so much of this aggregate as time has spared to us, has been treated without any systematic recognition of the different value of different orders of tradition. I admit that it is towards the close of the Greek literature that we find the principal professed inquirers into antiquity; and their aim and method may have redressed, in great part, any inequality between themselves and writers of the time of Thucydides or Plato. But nothing can cancel, nothing, it might almost be said, can narrow, the enormous interval, in point of authority, between Homer, who sang in the heroic age, and those who not only collected their materials, but formed their thoughts, after it was closed, and after its floating reminiscences had become subject to the incessant action of falsifying processes.
For a length of time the temper of our ancient histories was one of unquestioning reception. But where much was self-contradictory, all could not be believed. Under these circumstances, it was not unnatural that those writers who were full and systematic, should be preferred, rather than that the labour should be undergone of gathering gold in grains from the pages of Homer, of carefully collecting facts and presumptions singly from the text, and then again estimating the amount and effect of their bearings upon one another. Hence the Catalogues of Apollodorus, or the downright assertions of Scholiasts, have been allowed to give form to our early histories of Greece; and the authentic, but usually slighter notices of Homer, have received little attention, except where, in some detail or other, they might suit the argument which each particular writer happened to have in hand. Again, because Herodotus was by profession an historian and nothing else (at least, I can discern no better reason), more importance seems to be attached to his notices of prior ages than to the less formally presented notices of Homer, who, according to the statement of Herodotus himself, preceded him by four hundred years. I do not mean by this remark to imply that Herodotus and Homer are particularly at variance with one another, but only to illustrate what seems to me a prevailing source of error.