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?