ABSTRACT
JL h e first half of this essay took shape in 1931 as a course of six Ballard Mathews lectures in University College, Bangor. They should have been published forthwith; but other interests and duties intervened, and though I continued to lecture at Oxford on “Homeric Archaeology” till 1943 and gave the Charles Eliot Norton lectures in America for the Archaeological Institute in 1937-8, I published nothing in this field except a few reviews, the substance of which is incorporated here, and a study of Homeric Art in the Annual o f the British School at Athens XLV (1950). Meanwhile the course of Homeric criticism has been rapid and many sided, stimulated chiefly, as heretofore, by literary comparisons and archaeological discoveries, but also by cross-lights from the most unlikely sources. Consequently it has not been so easy as before to detect and for mulate main lines of progress. It has taken a really epoch-making achievement, like the interpretation of the Minoan Script, anticipated in Evans’ address to the Hellenic Society in 1912, to force all scholars to take stock of their methods and achievements, and to fall back on fundamental studies in epic poetry.
