I think he would have created out of his own imagination the life he pictures for his brazen-coated Achaeans.  It does not follow, with any great poet, that he is bothering much with historical or other accuracies, or sticking very closely even to tradition.  Enough that the latter should give him a direction; as Poet-creator, he can make the details for himself.  Homer’s imagination would have been guided, I take it, by two conditions:  what he saw of the life of his semi-barbarous Greek country men; and what he knew of civilization in Egyptianized Crete.  He was consciously picturing the life of Greeks; but Greeks in an age traditionally more cultured than his own.  Floating legends would tell him much of their heroic deed, but little of their ways of living.  Such details he would naturally have to supply for himself.  How would he go to work?  In this way, I think.  The Greeks, says he, were in those old ages, civilized and strong, not, as now, weak, disunited and half barbarous.  Now what is strength like, and civilization?  Why, I have them before me here to observe, here in Crete.  But Crete is Egyptianized; I want a Greek civilization; culture as it would appear if home-grown among Greeks.—­I do not mean that he consciously set this plan before himself; but that naturally it would be the course that he, or anyone, would follow.  Civilization would have meant for him Cretan civilization:  the civilization he knew:  that part of the proposition would inhere in his subconsciousness.  But in his conscious mind, in his intent and purpose, would inhere a desire to differentiate the Greek culture he wanted to paint, from the Egyptianized culture he knew.  So I think that the conditions of life he depicts were largely the creation of his own imagination, working in the material of Greek character, as he knew it, and Cretan-Egyptian culture as he knew that.  He made his people essentially Greeks, but ascribed to them also non-Greek features drawn from civilized life.

One sees the same thing in the old Welsh Romances:  tales from of old retold by men fired with immense racial hopes, with a view to fostering such hopes in the minds of their hearers.  The bards saw about them the rude life and disunion of the Welsh, and the far greater outward culture of the Normans; and their stock in trade was a tradition of ancient and half-magical Welsh grandeur.  When they wrote of Cai—­Sir Kay the Seneschal—­that so subtle was his nature that when it pleased him he could make himself as tall as the tallest tree in the forest, they were dealing in a purely celtic element:  the tradition of the greatness of, and the magical powers inherent in, the human spirit; but when they set him on horseback, to ride tilts in the tourney ring, they were simply borrowing from, to out do, the Normans.  Material culture, as they saw it, included those things; therefore they ascribed them to the old culture they were trying to paint.