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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Myths and Myth-Makers by John Fiske: remaining books injure the symmetry of this plot by
unnecessarily prolonging the duration of the Wrath, while the
embassy to Achilleus, in the ninth book, unduly anticipates
the conduct of Agamemnon in the nineteenth, and is therefore,
as a piece of bungling work, to be referred to the hands of an
inferior interpolator. Mr. Grote thinks it probable that these
books, with the exception of the ninth, were subsequently
added by the poet, with a view to enlarging the original
Achilleis into a real Iliad, describing the war of the Greeks
against Troy. With reference to this hypothesis, I gladly
admit that Mr. Grote is, of all men now living, the one best
Myths and Myth-Makers |
