ion,
division; the very idea of unity seems a bugbear to him, a mighty
delusion which he must demolish or die. Specially is his wrath directed
against Book First, probably because it contains the three unities
above mentioned, all of which he assails and rends to shreds in his own
opinion.

The entire Introduction (lines 1-88) he tears from its present place
and puts it before the Fifth Book, where it serves as the prelude to
the Calypso tale. The rest of the Telemachiad is the work of another
poet. Indeed the rest of the First Book (after the Introduction) is not
by the same man who produced the Second Book. Then the Second Book is
certainly older than the First, and ought somehow to be placed before
it. The real truth is, however, that the First Book is only a
hodge-podge made out of the Second Book by an inferior poet, who took
thence fragments of sentences and of ideas and stitched them together.
In the Invocation Kirchhoff cuts out the allusion to the oxen of the
Sun (lines 6-9) as being inconsistent with his theory.

After disposing of the Introduction in this way, Kirchhoff takes up the
remaining portion of the First Book, which he tears to pieces almost
line by line. In about forty separate notes on different passages he
marks points for skepticism, having in the main one procedure: he hunts
both the Iliad and the Odyssey through, and if he finds a line or
phrase, and even a word used elsewhere, which he has observed here, he
at once is inclined to conclude that the same must have been taken
thence and put here by a foreign hand. Every reader of Homer is
familiar with his habit of repeating lines and even entire passages,
when necessary. All such repetitions Kirchhoff seizes upon as signs of
different authorship; the poet must have used the one, some redactor or
imitator the other. To be sure we ought to have a criterion by which we
can tell which is the original and which is the derived; but such a
criterion Kirchhoff fails to furnish, we must accept his judgment as
imperial and final. Once or twice, indeed, he seems to feel the
faultiness of his procedure, and tries to bolster it, but as a rule he
speaks thus: "The following verse is a formula (repetition), and
_hence_ not the property of the author." (_Die Homerische Odyssee_, p.
174.)

Now such repetitions are common in all old poetry, in the ballad, in
the folk-song, in the _Kalevala_ as well as in the Homeric poems.
Messages sent are repeated naturally