The Pisistratean editor is accused of a similar error. "No doubt he was an Asiatic Greek, completely ignorant of the Peloponnesus." [Footnote: _Iliad_. Note to XI. 756, and to the _Catalogue_, II. 615-617.] It is something to know that Pisistratus employed an editor, or that his editor employed a collaborator who was an Asiatic Greek!
Meanwhile, nothing is less secure than arguments based on the _Catalogue_. We have already shown how Mr. Leaf's opinions as to the date and historical merits of the _Catalogue_ have widely varied, while M. Bérard appears to have vindicated the topography of Nestor. Of the _Catalogue_ Mr. Allen writes, "As a table, according to regions, of Agamemnon's forces it bears every mark of venerable antiquity," showing "a state of things which never recurred in later history, and which no one had any interest to invent, or even the means for inventing." He makes a vigorous defence of the _Catalogue,_ as regards the dominion of Achilles, against Mr. Leaf. [Footnote: _Classical Review,_ May 1906, pp. x94-201.] Into the details we need not go, but it is not questions of Homeric topography, obscure as they are, that can shake our faith in the humorous portrait of old Nestor, or make us suppose that the sympathetic mockery of the poet is the sycophantic adulation of the editor to his statesman employer, Pisistratus. If any question may be left to literary discrimination it is the authentic originality of the portrayal of Nestor.
Though comparison is the method of Science, the comparative study of the national poetry of warlike aristocracies, its conditions of growth and decadence, has been much neglected by Homeric critics. Sir Richard Jebb touched on the theme, and, after devoting four pages to a sketch of Sanskrit, Finnish, Persian, and early Teutonic heroic poetry and _SAGA,_ decided that "in our country, as in others, we fail to find any true parallel to the case of the Homeric poems. These poems must be studied in themselves, without looking for aid, in this sense, to the comparative method." [Footnote: _Homer_, p. 135.] Part of this conclusion seems to us rather hasty. In a brief manual Sir Richard had not space for a thorough comparative study of old heroic poetry at large. His quoted sources are: for India, Lassen; for France, Mr. Saintsbury's Short History of _FRENCH LITERATURE_ (sixteen pages on this topic), and a work unknown to me, by "M. Paul"; for Iceland he only quoted _THE Encyclopedia BRITANNICA_ (Mr. Edmund Gosse); for Germany, Lachmann and Bartsch; for the Finnish _Kalewala,_ the _ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA_ (Mr. Sime and Mr. Keltie); and for England, a _PRIMER OF ENGLISH LITERATURE_ by Mr. Stopford Brooke.