More thoroughly silly questions have been asked about Homer than about any other man or topic. Did Homer exist? Was there one Homer or two Homers? Were the Homeric poems composed by a syndicate or by one man? and so on and so on. Only in thoroughly academic minds could such questions generate. Only minds dead to poetry and the modes of its composition would waste themselves on such mental trivialities, on such extravagant fantasies.

Of one thing we are sure, that the Odyssey and the Iliad are at once the first and the greatest of all European epics, that they were composed deliberately, and that they deal with the deeds of men who might have lived, or did actually live, in an age of which we are fortunate enough to know a good deal more than the mere historical outlines.

British scholars have tended to believe in a single author of the Iliad and Odyssey more perhaps from right feeling than on a sound basis of argument. In his article Mr Casson frankly begins by ‘begging two separate questions’—that Homer wrote the Odyssey and that he was a single poet. The first is not so welcome an answer as the second. Mr Casson is not of course concerned to argue about either and only mentions in passing one argument-the oblique method of description in ‘both’ the Iliad and the Odyssey. Examples of it he calls ‘hints’ that make it easy for him to disregard half the contro-versy about Homer. The purpose of his article is, however, different, to show that Homer visited Ithaka. The aim of the present one is not primarily to reply to his main thesis except by the way, but rather to supplement it and suggest in outline another point of view than that implied by him.

Much has been written about the revival of Celtic art in Britain during the last century of the Roman occupation, but so far evidence for similar movements in other parts of the Roman Empire has received but little attention from British archaeologists. Yet it is now nearly half a century since M. P. Gavault, a French archi- tect, excavated a 4th-5th century Christian church at Tigzirt on the Mediterranean coast west of Port Gueydon, and drew attention to the unclassical character of the ornamentation of the supports to the clerestory arches in the church. His suggestion was that the ornamentation was inspired by pre-Roman, Carthaginian originals, and implied a popular movement away from classical design.

Owing to the fog of War, and because I live abroad, I did not hear about the discovery in the Dordogne (September 1940) of Lescaux—a hitherto unknown painted cave of the utmost interest—until after my article ‘Palaeolithic Paintings-Magdalenian Period’ was in type (see ANTIQUITY, June 1942). Had I known of it, some modification in the treatment of my thesis would have been necessary. This new material, however, does not stultify the general trend of my argument; it tends rather to support it, if the scarcity of information I have is correct. No comprehensive survey of this new treasure-house of Palaeolithic art is yet available, but an article written by the L'Abbéenri Breuil for L'Academie des Belles Lettres leaves no doubt as to its outstanding importance. He says of it: ' Si l'Altamira est le Capitale de l'Art pariél, Lescaux est le Versailles '. I understand also that the L'Abbéwhose judgment in these matters is hors concours, inclines to the view that the Lescaux paintings, though of the highest quality, are late Aurignacian in date. They belong therefore to the period of climatic amelioration known as the Achen retreat, which separates the two final glacial advances Wiirm I and Würm II. This dating is borne out by the fact that the animals depicted belong much more to a ‘steppe and forest’ fauna than they do to a colder ‘tundra’ one. There are for example no mammoths and no reindeer, but there are many horses, a Considerable quantity of cattle (Aurochs ?) bisons, and a Saïga antelope—the head only, attached to a strange composite animal.