This is the nearest we can come to any certainty with regard to the
author. But whether he wrote the Tales six thousand years ago, as we
believe, or whether they were written for him within these ten years,
they are incontestably the most ancient work in the world; and though
there is little imagination, and still less invention in them; yet there
are so many passages in them exactly resembling Homer, that any man
living would conclude they were imitated from that great poet, if it was
not certain that Homer borrowed from them, which I shall prove two ways:
first, by giving Homer's parallel passages at the bottom of the page;
and secondly, by translating Homer himself into prose, which shall make
him so unlike himself, that nobody will think he could be an original
writer: and when he is become totally lifeless and insipid, it will be
impossible but these Tales should be preferred to the Iliad; especially
as I design to put them into a kind of style that shall be neither verse
nor prose; a diction lately much used in tragedies and heroic poems, the
former of which are really heroic poems from want of probability, as an
antico-moderno epic poem is in fact a meer tragedy, having little or no
change of scene, no incidents but a ghost and a storm, and no events but
the deaths of the principal actors.
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