[51:1] When once composed, they could be easily enough _remembered_ by trained guilds of reciters. It is therefore the composition, and the transmission as large unities, which imply, in my opinion, that use of writing which the poets avoid attributing to the society they depict as one of the past. If we could determine the date of the first fluent use of writing in Ionia, I think we could also determine the date of the creation of the _Iliad_ as an artistic whole. At the same time I think it right to caution the reader, that he need not assume lapidary inscriptions to mark the first stage. This has been very justly pointed out by Mr. E. Abbott, and it is here most important; for we have no extant inscription on stone which can be surely attributed to a date earlier than 600 B.C., and I am convinced that had such use of writing been in common use earlier, we should long since have found evidence of it. Probably the first writing seen and learned by the Greeks was that of the Phoenician traders, who kept their accounts either on papyrus or perhaps on wood. Thus the _Iliad_ may have been composed with the aid of writing, and yet there may have been no contemporary records on stone.
§ 27. We may now pass from so-called legend to so-called early history. All students, from Thucydides downward, have held that shortly after the state of things described in Homer, important invasions and consequent dislocations of population began throughout Greece, so that what meets us in the dawn of sober history differs widely from what Homer describes. These various movements have their mythical name,--the return of the Heracleidæ; and their quasi-historical,--the invasion of Boeotia and Phocis by the Thessalians, and the invasion and conquest of Peloponnesus by the Dorian mountaineers. The pressure so produced drove waves of settlers to Asia Minor, where the coasts and islands were covered with Greek cities,--Æolian, Ionian, and Dorian. But these cities always claimed to be colonies from Greece, and told of mythical founders who led them to the East.
[Sidenote: Late authorities for the details.]
We have no early account of these Asiatic settlements. Their traditions were not apparently discussed critically till the time of Ephorus, the pupil of Isocrates, who lived close to Alexandrian days; and we know part of what he said from quotations in Strabo and from the account given, rather irrelevantly, by Pausanias in the book on Achaia in his _Tour_, which was not composed till our second century. The metrical geography attributed to Scymnus of Chios[54:1] gives us some additional facts; but on the whole we may say that our account of all this early history is derived from late and very theoretical antiquarians. They did not hesitate to put these events into the tenth or eleventh century before Christ, but on what kind of evidence we shall presently discuss.