Abstract
This paper presents two kinds of new evidence for dating the ballad "Southeast Fly the Peacocks". The Japanese scholar Takagi Mazakau has shown that the tonal prosody of Recent Style poetry began to take shape during the end of the 5th century and the beginning of the 6th. The present author shows that lines 1-10, 236-249, and 342-355 of the ballad by and large conform to Resent Style prosody, and therefore could not have been written earlier than 450 A. D.
The second part of the paper discusses ten grammatical or lexical items. It was shown that these items, as used in the ballad, contain innovative features unattested elsewhere before the middle of the 3rd century. The overall conclusion is that the "Southeast Fly the Peacocks" was written during the 5th or 6th century, about two centuries later than the traditional date of 196～219 A. D.
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