The Iliad
cautious Thucydides quoted without hesitation the Hymn to Apollo,[20]
the authenticity of which has been already disclaimed by modern
critics. Longinus, in an oft quoted passage, merely expressed an
opinion touching the comparative inferiority of the Odyssey to the
Iliad,[21] and, among a mass of ancient authors, whose very names[22]
it would be tedious to detail, no suspicion of the personal
non-existence of Homer ever arose. So far, the voice of antiquity seems
to be in favour of our early ideas on the subject; let us now see what
are the discoveries to which more modern investigations lay claim.
At the end of the seventeenth century, doubts had begun to awaken on
the subject, and we find Bentley remarking that “Homer wrote a sequel
of songs and rhapsodies, to be sung by himself, for small comings and
good cheer, at festivals and other days of merriment. These loose songs
were not collected together, in the form of an epic poem, till about
Peisistratus’ time, about five hundred years after.”[23]
Two French writers—Hedelin and Perrault—avowed a similar scepticism on
the subject; but it is in the “Scienza Nuova” of Battista Vico, that we
first meet with the germ of the theory, subsequently defended by Wolf
with so much learning and acuteness. Indeed, it is with the Wolfian
theory that we have chiefly to deal, and with the following bold
hypothesis, which we will detail in the words of Grote:—[24]
“Half a century ago, the acute and valuable Prolegomena of F. A. Wolf,
turning to account the Venetian Scholia, which had then been recently
published, first opened philosophical discussion as to the history of
the Homeric text. A considerable part of that dissertation (though by
no means the whole) is employed in vindicating the position, previously
announced by Bentley, amongst others, that the separate constituent
portions of the Iliad and Odyssey had not been cemented together into
any compact body and unchangeable order, until the days of
Peisistratus, in the sixth century before Christ. As a step towards
that conclusion, Wolf maintained that no written copies of either poem
could be shown to have existed during the earlier times, to which their
composition is referred; and that without writing, neither the perfect
symmetry of so complicated a work could have been originally conceived
by any poet, nor, if realized by him, transmitted with assurance to
posterity. The absence of easy and convenient writing, such as must be
indispensably supposed for long manuscripts, among the early Greeks,
was thus one of the points in Wolf’s case against the primitive
integrity of the Iliad and Odyssey. By Nitzsch, and other leading
opponents of Wolf, the connection of the one with the other seems to
have been accepted as he originally put it; and it has been considered
incumbent on those who defended the ancient aggregate character of the
Iliad and Odyssey, to maintain that they were written poems from the
beginning.
“To me it appears, that the architectonic functions ascribed by Wolf to
Peisistratus and his associates, in reference to the Homeric poems, are
nowise admissible. But much would undoubtedly be gained towards that
view of the question, if it could be shown, that, in order to
controvert it, we were driven to the necessity of admitting long
written poems, in the ninth century before the Christian æra. Few
things, in my opinion, can be more improbable; and Mr. Payne Knight,
opposed as he is to the Wolfian hypothesis, admits this no less than
Wolf himself. The traces of writing in Greece, even in the seventh
century before the Christian æra, are exceedingly trifling. We have no
remaining inscription earlier than the fortieth Olympiad, and the early
inscriptions are rude and unskilfully executed; nor can we even assure
ourselves whether Archilochus, Simonidês of Amorgus, Kallinus,
Tyrtæus, Xanthus, and the other early elegiac and lyric poets,
committed their compositions to writing, or at what time the practice
of doing so became familiar. The first positive ground which authorizes
us to presume the existence of a manuscript of Homer, is in the famous
ordinance of Solôn, with regard to the rhapsodies at the Panathenæa:
but for what length of time previously manuscripts had existed, we are
unable to say.
“Those who maintain the Homeric poems to have been written from the
beginning, rest their case, not upon positive proofs, nor yet upon the
existing habits of society with regard to poetry—for they admit
generally that the Iliad and Odyssey were not read, but recited and
heard,—but upon the supposed necessity that there must have been
manuscripts to ensure the preservation of the poems—the unassisted
memory of reciters being neither sufficient nor trustworthy. But here
we only escape a smaller difficulty by running into a greater; for the
existence of trained bards, gifted with extraordinary memory,[25] is
far less astonishing than that of long manuscripts, in an age
essentially non-reading and non-writing, and when even suitable
instruments and materials for the process are not obvious. Moreover,
there is a strong positive reason for believing that the bard was under
no necessity of refreshing his memory by consulting a manuscript; for
if such had been the fact, blindness would have been a disqualification
for the profession, which we know that it was not, as well from the
example of Demodokus, in the Odyssey, as from that of the blind bard of
Chios, in the Hymn to the Delian Apollo, whom Thucydides, as well as
the general tenor of Grecian legend, identifies with Homer himself. The
author of that hymn, be he who he may, could never have described a
blind man as attaining the utmost perfection in his art, if he had been
conscious that the memory of the bard was only maintained by constant
reference to the manuscript in his chest.”
The loss of the digamma, that _crux_ of critics, that quicksand upon
which even the acumen of Bentley was shipwrecked, seems to prove beyond
a doubt, that the pronunciation of the Greek language had undergone a
considerable change. Now it is certainly difficult to suppose that the
Homeric poems could have suffered by this change, had written copies
been preserved. If Chaucer’s poetry, for instance, had not been
written, it could only have come down to us in a softened form, more
like the effeminate version of Dryden, than the rough, quaint, noble
original.
“At what period,” continues Grote, “these poems, or indeed any other
Greek poems, first began to be written, must be matter of conjecture,
though there is ground for assurance that it was before the time of
Solôn. If, in the absence of evidence, we may venture upon naming any
more determinate period, the question at once suggests itself, What
were the purposes which, in that state of society, a manuscript at its
first commencement must have been intended to answer? For whom was a
written Iliad necessary? Not for the rhapsodes; for with them it was
not only planted in the memory, but also interwoven with the feelings,
and conceived in conjunction with all those flexions and intonations of
voice, pauses, and other oral artifices which were required for
emphatic delivery, and which the naked manuscript could never
reproduce. Not for the general public—they were accustomed to receive
it with its rhapsodic delivery, and with its accompaniments of a solemn
and crowded festival. The only persons for whom the written Iliad would
be suitable would be a select few; studious and curious men; a class of
readers capable of analyzing the complicated emotions which they had
experienced as hearers in the crowd, and who would, on perusing the
written words, realize in their imaginations a sensible portion of the
impression communicated by the reciter. Incredible as the statement may
seem in an age like the present, there is in all early societies, and
there was in early Greece, a time when no such reading class existed.
If we could discover at what time such a class first began to be
formed, we should be able to make a guess at the time when the old epic
poems were first committed to writing. Now the period which may with
the greatest probability be fixed upon as having first witnessed the
formation even of the narrowest reading class in Greece, is the middle
of the seventh century before the Christian æra (B.C. 660 to B.C.
630), the age of Terpander, Kallinus, Archilochus, Simonidês of
Amorgus, &c. I ground this supposition on the change then operated in
the character and tendencies of Grecian poetry and music—the elegiac
and the iambic measures having been introduced as rivals to the
primitive hexameter, and poetical compositions having been transferred
from the epical past to the affairs of present and real life. Such a
change was important at a time when poetry was the only known mode of
publication (to use a modern phrase not altogether suitable, yet the
nearest approaching to the sense). It argued a new way of looking at
the old epical treasures of the people as well as a thirst for new
poetical effect; and the men who stood forward in it, may well be
considered as desirous to study, and competent to criticize, from their
own individual point of view, the written words of the Homeric
rhapsodies, just as we are told that Kallinus both noticed and
eulogized the Thebaïs as the production of Homer. There seems,
therefore, ground for conjecturing that (for the use of this
newly-formed and important, but very narrow class), manuscripts of the
Homeric poems and other old epics,—the Thebaïs and the Cypria, as well
as the Iliad and the Odyssey,—began to be compiled towards the middle
of the seventh century (B.C. 1); and the opening of Egypt to Grecian
commerce, which took place about the same period, would furnish
increased facilities for obtaining the requisite papyrus to write upon.
A reading class, when once formed, would doubtless slowly increase, and
the number of manuscripts along with it; so that before the time of
Solôn, fifty years afterwards, both readers and manuscripts, though
still comparatively few, might have attained a certain recognized
authority, and formed a tribunal of reference against the carelessness
of individual rhapsodes.”[26]
But even Peisistratus has not been suffered to remain in possession of
the credit, and we cannot help feeling the force of the following
observations—
“There are several incidental circumstances which, in our opinion,
throw some suspicion over the whole history of the Peisistratid
compilation, at least over the theory, that the Iliad was cast into its
present stately and harmonious form by the directions of the Athenian
ruler. If the great poets, who flourished at the bright period of
Grecian song, of which, alas! we have inherited little more than the
fame, and the faint echo, if Stesichorus, Anacreon, and Simonidês were
employed in the noble task of compiling the Iliad and Odyssey, so much
must have been done to arrange, to connect, to harmonize, that it is
almost incredible, that stronger marks of Athenian manufacture should
not remain. Whatever occasional anomalies may be detected, anomalies
which no doubt arise out of our own ignorance of the language of the
Homeric age, however the irregular use of the digamma may have
perplexed our Bentleys, to whom the name of Helen is said to have
caused as much disquiet and distress as the fair one herself among the
heroes of her age, however Mr. Knight may have failed in reducing the
Homeric language to its primitive form; however, finally, the Attic
dialect may not have assumed all its more marked and distinguishing
characteristics—still it is difficult to suppose that the language,
particularly in the joinings and transitions, and connecting parts,
should not more clearly betray the incongruity between the more ancient