greatest, and perhaps also the least known, of all poets. After so many ages, all the details of his life are still an object of doubt, and even his existence is a problem. Some represent him as a native of Egypt, the son of Damasgoras and Echras, whilst his nurse, a daughter of Horus, priest of Isis, was a prophetess; according to these persons, he played in his cradle with nine turtle doves, and the first accents of his voice resembled the warbling of nine different kinds of birds. Others give him an origin still more illustrious, and seek to ennoble the birth of the poet on whom the far higher distinction of genius had conferred immortality. But whilst his admirers compose for him these splendid genealogies, and even make him descended in the right line from Apollo himself, his detractors see in him only a wretched mendicant, who begged from town to town; a plagiarist, who strolled about through the world in quest of the authors who had, before his time, written on the war of Troy; a man of slender parts, easily vanquished in the poetical contest with Hesiod, and other poets. The most celebrated and the least ridiculous of these pretended histories is that which, notwithstanding the doubts and conjectures of several learned men, continues to be attributed to Herodotus; probably because there is something piquant in the notion that the father of history had written the life of the father of poetry. But, however this may be, since Strabo has not disdained to cite as an authority this historical romance, nor the learned Larcher to translate it, we conceive it necessary to exhibit a rapid analysis of its contents.

A certain Menalippus, by birth an Athenian, but settled at Cumae in Ionia, having married the daughter of a citizen called Homyes, had by her a daughter named Critheis, who after the death of her parents passed under the guardianship of Cleonax, the friend of her father. This Cleonax abused the trust which had been reposed in him, and Critheis became pregnant by her guardian. But the latter, being anxious to conceal the condition of his ward, sent her to Smyrna, where she gave birth to Homer, whom she called Meliogenes (from the river Meles, on the banks of which he was born), and where also she was reduced to the necessity of spinning wool for subsistence. After this misfortune, Phemius, who taught literature and music with credit at Smyrna, having frequent occasion to see Critheis, who resided near him, conceived a passion for the lady, married her, and adopted her child. Homer, having become an orphan by the death of Phemius, succeeded to the fortune and the school of his adoptive father, and in the capacity of teacher soon acquired great reputation. But a shipmaster called Mentes, a lover of learning and poetry, having become acquainted with Homer, persuaded the poet to abandon the school at Smyrna, and to accompany him in his voyages. Homer, who already meditated the Iliad, and wished to acquire personally the knowledge of different countries, particularly those which he might have occasion to describe, eagerly embraced the opportunity thus offered; and, during several voyages, he failed not to treasure up in his mind whatever he deemed worthy of being remembered. After having visited Italy and Spain, he landed on the island of Ithaca, where he learned many particulars respecting Ulysses; he also visited Egypt, whence he brought into Greece the names of the gods of that country, with the chief ceremonies of their worship; and having finished his travels, he returned to Smyrna, and there completed his Iliad. It was his intention to remain in that place; but public favour having abandoned him, he left the ungrateful country, and wandered through several cities in Asia Minor, reciting his verses, and experiencing in turn good and evil fortune. At length he established himself at Chios, where he opened a school, acquired some property, married, became the father of two daughters, and was at last struck with blindness. It was in this retreat that he composed the Odyssey; but being desirous to pass into Greece, that he might display his genius upon a larger theatre, he died on his passage, at Ios, one of the Sporades, the inhabitants of which raised on the sea-shore a tomb to his memory.

If in all this narrative there be little that is true, it contains nothing which shocks in the recital; and if, in fact, it be merely a romance, it has at least a certain degree of verisimilitude. Of all the cities which disputed the honour of having given birth to Homer, Smyrna and Chios are those which supported their pretensions by proofs apparently the most plausible. The citizens of Chios boasted of possessing, in the family of the Homeridae, the descendants of this illustrious poet, in honour of whom they had struck a medal, representing Homer, and the river Meles, on the banks of which he is said to have been born. But, amidst so many different opinions, the most probable seems to be that Homer first saw the light near Smyrna; that his life was wandering, like that of the poets of his time; that, in the course of his travels, he visited the Greek cities, composing hymns for the festivals of the gods, and reciting his poems in the religious and public assemblies; that he lost his sight, a deprivation which he felt acutely, and deplored with mournful pathos; and that he lived for some time at

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1 Varro reckons seven of them, in a distich which Aulus Gellius (lib. iii. c. 2) has preserved.

Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodes, Argos, Athens,

Orbis de patria certat, Homere, tua.

2 Leo Allatius distinguishes the Homeridae from the Homerietae, a kind of itinerant singers, or minstrels, who recited in public the verses of Homer; but this is a vain dispute of words, and Allatius is here evidently influenced by a desire to ensure to Chios, where he himself was born, the preference over the other cities of Greece which disputed the honour of having given birth to the great poet. Homer. Chios, and died, at an advanced age, in the small island of Ios. But if he was reduced to indigence, and sometimes compelled to beg an asylum during his life, the Smyrneans, Ptolemy Philopator, and others, consecrated temples to him after his death, and the Argives paid him divine honours.

The epoch in which this great poet was born is not less obscure than the history of his life. If we may believe some Greek writers, he was contemporary with the siege of Troy, and had actually witnessed the events which he celebrated in song. But others place his birth at an epoch nearer to ours by eighty, a hundred, and even upwards of three hundred years. Velleius Paternus, who wrote towards the close of the reign of Tiberius, or about the year 37 of our era, affirms that nine hundred and fifty years had elapsed between the age of Homer and his own time. Pliny and Juvenal, who flourished under Vespasian and Domitian, reckon nearly a thousand years; and Solinus, with some degree of confidence, assigns the epoch of the death of Homer by fixing it in the seventy-second year after the capture and destruction of Troy. According to the Arundelian marbles, he flourished in the tenth century before Christ, whilst other authorities assign the eighth as the period to which he belonged. In this conflict, or rather chaos, of different opinions, the learned Larcher, whose judgment is an authority in matters of chronology, gives a calculation from which it follows that Homer must have been born 884 years before our era; and this epoch appears more reconcileable with the details of the brilliant and sumptuous arts of a refined luxury, which he sometimes retraces, and which appear but little compatible with the rudeness of an age approximating more closely to the time of the Trojan war. The age of Homer indeed is pretty clearly indicated by the following considerations: 1. At the funeral of Patroclus, Achilles celebrates almost all the games which were subsequently in use at Olympia in the most refined period of Greece. 2. The arts of casting in bas-relief, and of engraving on metals, had already been invented, as is proved, amongst other things, by the shield of Achilles; but neither Homer nor Moses makes any mention of painting. 3. The delicious gardens of Alcinous, the magnificence of his palace, and the sumptuousness of his table, prove that the Greeks had already learned to admire luxury and splendour. 4. The Phoenicians had already introduced ivory, purple, and incense from Arabia (as in the description of the grotto of Venus in the Odyssey), byssus or fine linen (perhaps cotton), and rich robes. 5. The carriage in which Priam goes to seek Achilles is made of cedar; and the grotto of Calypso is fragrant with that odoriferous wood. 6. The voluptuous baths of Circe indicate a great advancement in luxury. 7. The young slaves of the suitors are described as beautiful, graceful, and fair-haired, such precisely as the fastidiousness of modern times requires as servants. 8. Men dress their hair as carefully as women; a habit with which Hector and Diomed reproach Paris. 9. The Homeric heroes eat nothing but roast meat, the most simple mode of cookery, demanding only a brazier; and this custom continued in sacrifices. Boiled meat came into use afterwards. 10. Lastly, Homer seems to have lived in an age when the strict heroic or feudal right had fallen into disuse in Greece, and popular liberty had begun to appear; for his heroes contract marriages with foreign women, bastards succeed to their fathers' thrones, and many other circumstances unite to show that the heroic or feudal right had expired. From all these authorities, then, we incline to the opinion of those who place the age of Homer long subsequent to that of the Trojan war, though probably not so late as the reign of Numa, with whom he is thought by some to have been contemporary.

But the admitted difficulty, or rather impossibility, of arriving at anything positive in this respect, induced several writers to fly to the opposite extreme; and whilst some assigned bases to the Homeric chronology which they considered as certain, others called in question the very existence of Homer himself; and supported their opinion with what they deemed incontestable authorities and unanswerable reasonings. The boldest and most singular of these paradoxes is that of Jacob Bryant, who does not, it is true, deny the existence of Homer, but who makes him a native of Thebes in Egypt. In the view of this learned person, Homer was a superstitious poet, who, after having grown old on the banks of the Nile, purloined the poems of the ingenious Phantasia deposited amongst the archives of the temple of Isis. According to him, the events of the Iliad and Odyssey were, in the original, mere reminiscences of Egyptian annals; but the adroit plagiarism, it seems, transported the scene into the Troad, and disguised under Greek names the gods and heroes of the monarchy of the Pharaohs. Nor was this a solitary extravagance. A learned Dutchman, Cresius, discovered, in the Odyssey, the history of the Israelites under the patriarchs, and detected the capture of Jericho in the Iliad; whilst another went still further, and gravely maintained that Homer and Hesiod were natives of Belgium. But the hypothesis of Wolf is one of a far higher order; and the weight of such a name must always command a serious consideration of those opinions to which its sanction is deliberately attached.

This distinguished critic and scholar, to whom we are indebted for the best edition of Homer which has yet appeared, attempts, in his Prolegomena ad Homerum, to prove that the author of the Iliad and Odyssey is an imaginary being; in Homer he sees a rhapsodist, and nothing more, a minstrel who laid the foundations of that fabric which his successors from age to age slowly raised until it obtained the elevation, symmetry, and unity which we now admire in its general structure. This sceptical hypothesis had not the merit of novelty; but it made little or no impression upon the learned until it borrowed from the talent and erudition of Wolf all the authority necessary to excite general attention, and to call for rigorous examination. Two Frenchmen, of no great distinction, Hedelin and Perrault, are supposed to have led the way in questioning the personal existence of Homer as the author of the Iliad, and to have first suggested some hints of a theory respecting the composition of that poem, which have since been developed with profound learning and wonderful talent by Wolf and Heyne. Hedelin's book, entitled Conjectures Académiques, ou Dissertations sur l'Iliade, was published in 1715; and that of Perrault appeared not long afterwards, under the title of Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes. Hedelin had the exquisite judgment to compare the rhapsodies to the chansons du Pont-Neuf, and to maintain that the Iliad was made up "ex tragediis et variis canticis de trivio, mendicorum et circulatorum," in the manner of these Parisian ballads. Not long afterwards Bentley expressed a similar opinion respecting the history and compilation of the Iliad. "Homer," says he, "wrote a sequel of songs and rhapsodies to be sung by himself, for small earnings and good cheer, at festivals and other days of merriment: the Iliad he made for the men, and the Odysseus for the other sex. These loose songs were not collected together in the form of an epic poem till about five hundred years after." But a still bolder theory was promulgated in the Scienza Nuova of Giambattista Vico, the second and complete edition of which appeared at Naples in 1730; a work which, from its enigmatic style and form, is one of the most obscure books of modern times, but which was intended by its author to form a Novum Organon of politico-historical knowledge. Vico's uncompromising reasoning a priori—which, borrowing no assistance from history, will let no history stand in its way—is not likely to make any one convert to his whole system. But parts of it have of late years been adopted or approved by very distinguished writers; and, in regard to the Homeric poems, he has sketched, with sufficient clearness, the outline of the very theory which is developed with so much ability and force in Wolf's Prolegomena ad Homerum. Vico, in fact, distinctly asserts that the Iliad and the Odyssey were first constructed by the Pisistratidae—“Ch' i Pisistratidi...disposero e divisero, o fecero disporre e dividere i poemi d'Omero nell'Iliade e nell'Odissea; onde s'intenda, quanto innanzi dovevano essere state confusa congerie di cose, quando è infinita la differenza degli stili dell'uno e dell'altra poema.” He expresses a suspicion that the Homer of the Odyssey belonged to the west, and the Homer of the Iliad to the north-east of Greece; and, in his Discoveria del vero Omero, he seems to intimate an opinion that Homer himself is an ideal personage, but that his poems are, if we may so express it, the collective voice of the heroic age, in which all history was poetry, and all poetry founded on history. “E certamente,” says this modern Heraclitus, “se, come della guerra Trojana, cosi di Omero, non fossero certi garn vestigi rimasti, a tante difficoltà si direbbe ch'Omero fosse stato fino un poeta d'idea, il quale non fu particolar uomo in natura. Ma tali difficoltà, est insieme mente i poemi di lui pervenutici sembrano farci cotal forza da affermarlo per la metà, che quest'Omero sia egli stato un'idea; ovvero carattere eroico di uomini Greci, in quanto essi narravano cantando la loro storia.”

The substance of this theory, as stated by Wolf and Heyne, is, that whether any such person as Homer ever existed or not, the Iliad and the Odyssey were not composed entirely by him or by any other person, but are compilations, methodised by successive editors, of minstrelsies, the effusions of various poets of the heroic age, and all having one common subject or theme; namely, the war of Troy, and the exploits and adventures of the Grecian chiefs engaged in it. The question as to whether

The blind old man of Scio's rocky isle ever lived or not, does not enter as an essential ingredient into the theory so ably elucidated by Wolf and Heyne. That Homer lived and Homer sung, is indeed denied by both, as it had previously been by Giambattista Vico; but, even if the fact of his personal existence were admitted to the fullest extent desired by his unitarian admirers, the material question as to the dispersion of the separate books or rhapsodies, and their reincorporation, or rather their primary construction, into one uniform whole, would still remain to be settled. The theory of which we have traced the origin and development may no doubt appear at first view startling and paradoxical; but, however unlike to any thing of which we may have heard, and however impossible it may be thought in the age in which we now live, there are arguments in its favour, which, with all unprejudiced inquirers, will ever save it from neglect or contempt, and which, in any view, merit the most serious consideration. Of these we shall now proceed to lay a condensed abstract before our readers.

Wolf, Heyne, and their numberless followers in Germany, contend that the argument derived from the apparently undoubting belief of the earliest as well as the greatest writers of Greece, after the Homeric age, and from the general consent of mankind in the same faith ever since, proves a great deal too much: That, besides the Iliad, Odyssey, Batrachomyomachia, Hymns, and Epigrams, at least twenty other poems were, in former times, ascribed to Homer: That many passages of these poems which are still preserved, contain variations from, and even direct contradictions of, the tenor of the Iliad: That, in the age of Herodotus, the Cyprian verses, and the Epigoni, were commonly considered as Homeric poems: That Thucydides quotes the Hymn to Apollo exactly in the same tone in which he quotes or speaks of the Iliad: That nevertheless the general opinion now is that these hymns are not by the author of the Iliad: That Plato expels Homer from his republic, on account, amongst many others, of a well-known passage in the Odyssey: That nevertheless many of the ancients, as well as moderns, who admitted the genuineness of the Iliad, doubted or denied that of the Odyssey: That there is nothing in this weakness of critical discernment, even when imputed to Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plato, which should surprise a Hellenist, seeing that, in the times of republican independence, the investigation of the genuineness of the national compositions formed no part of scientific criticism, much less of the general duties of the philosopher and historian: That as Herodotus and Thucydides quote Homer merely as an historical authority, so Plato censures him for moral or political reasons; and hence a reference to his poems was equally necessary for both purposes, whether the common belief as to their origin were well founded or the contrary: That, in modern Europe, at the period of the revival of letters, this branch of criticism became of paramount importance, and conferred the greatest benefits on awakening learning, by rescuing the genuine relics of ancient Greece and Rome from the mass of fiction and interpolation which had been accumulated on them during seven centuries of barbarism: That, in fact, the early Greeks knew no literature but their own; and, considering how little attention even we, with our different habits and capabilities, ever paid to the mere external history of our earliest works, until a very recent period, we have no reason to think unaccountable that a chronicler, historian, or philosopher of ancient Greece, should either never have doubted, or but hinted doubts, as to the genuineness of a body of popular poetry, supposed to be of Asiatic growth, and of an antiquity open to nothing but conjecture.

The Wolfian hypothesis rests also upon grounds of external probability. “It is further said,” observes Mr Coleridge, “that the art of writing, and the use of manageable materials, were entirely, or all but entirely, unknown in Greece and its islands at the supposed date of the composition of the Iliad and Odyssey; that, if so, these poems could not have been committed to writing during the time of their composition; that, in a question of comparative probabilities, like this, it is a much grosser improbability

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1 Niebuhr is largely indebted to the Scienza Nuova for its views of the early history and real character of the Roman state; whilst the praiseworthy labours of Michelet promise to extend the fame and influence of this singular work farther than the enigmatical obscurity of the original Italian would ever admit of. (See Principes de la Philosophie de l'Histoire, traduits de la ‘Scienza Nuova’ de J. B. Picé, par Jules Michelet, Paris, 1827.)

2 Scienza Nuova, lib. ii. p. 373.

3 Scienza Nuova, lib. iii. c. 7. Mr Coleridge has placed at the end of his account of the origin and preservation of the Homeric poems a translation of Vico's treatise on the discovery of the true Homer.

4 These were, Amazonia, Thebaid, Arachnomachia, Geranomachia, Ifigenia, Epigoni, Epithalamia, Epicichlidæ, Copra, Ithas Minor, &c. &c.

5 A. xi. 467.

6 Jam vero non modo nullum tale in Homero extat testimonium rei vel vestigium, nullum ne tenuissimorum quidem initiorum legitimi scripturæ vel Cadmel munera indicium, sed, quod longe maxim momenti est, contraria etiam omnia. Nusquam vocabulum librī, neque scribendi, neququam lectionis, nusquam litterarum: nil in tot millibus versuum ad lectionem, omnia ad auditionem com- that even the single Iliad, amounting, after all curtailments and expurgations, to upwards of 15,000 hexameter lines, should have been actually conceived and perfected in the brain of one man, with no other help but his own and others' memory; than that it should in fact be the result of the labours of several distinct authors; that if the Odyssey be counted, the probability is doubled; that if we add, upon the authority of Thucydides and Aristotle, the Hymns and Margites, not to say the Batrachomyomachia, that which was improbable becomes morally impossible; that all that has been so often said as to the fact of as many verses or more having been committed to memory, is beside the point in question, which is not whether 15,000 or 30,000 lines may not be learnt by heart from print or manuscript, but whether one man can originally compose a poem of that length, which, rightly or not, shall be thought to be a model of symmetry and consistency of parts, without the aid of writing materials; that, admitting the superior probability of such an achievement in a primitive age, we actually know nothing similar or analogous; and that it so transcends the common limits of intellectual power, as at least to merit, with as much justice as the opposite opinion, the character of improbability."

This is undoubtedly a strong case; nor is it easy to see how the force of the argument urged by Wolf and his followers can be resisted, unless the facts upon which it mainly depends be disproved. We may be powerfully impressed with the grandeur and unity displayed in the Iliad; this impression may be strengthened by more frequent study of the general effect of the poem; and we may feel reluctant to abandon the ancient faith, with which so many interesting recollections and associations are entwined: But, as long as the external facts remain unrefuted, "the internal evidence of the unity of design" will never prevail over the conclusion deduced from them. Mr Milman, indeed, seems to think, that, on the general question of the origin of letters, the mass of authorities collected with great industry, and the arguments urged with equal ingenuity by Kreuser, in some degree endanger Wolf's hypothesis as to the recent introduction of writing into Greece; that is, scarcely prior to the time of Solon. But he admits it to be "undoubtedly embarrassing that, if writing was common in the days of Homer, no allusion, except in one doubtful passage," should be found, in either of the great poems, to an art, which might at first sight appear to be necessarily mingled up with all the transactions of war or pacification, of public and private life." Besides, the precise fact, whether alphabetical characters were absolutely unknown in Greece in the age of Homer, is declared by Heyne to be immaterial to the argument; because, whether known or not, it is certain that down to a period later by two centuries than the latest date assigned as the era of Homer, there were no materials which a Greek author could have employed for the ordinary purposes of composition. It is of no avail to prove that some Greeks had the art of carving on marble or on wood; nor is the difficulty removed by presenting a blind poet with a pen of iron and some plates of lead. If there be any weight in the objection, that no one person could have composed the Iliad and the Odyssey by the force of mere mental retention alone, nothing will ever dispose of it except a demonstration that the poet had some manageable substance upon which to write. The main point, as Mr Coleridge has most justly observed, is not whether poems of such length might not be preserved by memory, when once composed, but whether they could have been constructed in the mind of the bard, without the assistance of letters and writing materials, to record the fleeting thoughts which passed in quick succession, and were succeeded by others hurrying forward in unceasing and inexhaustible rapidity. The preservation of poems by memory, when once composed, and their oral transmission from age to age, may at once be conceded, because it leaves unimpaired the force of the argument founded upon the moral impossibility of any one person having both composed and retained in his mind, as well as communicated to others, as many as thirty thousand verses.

The more sagacious and candid of those who maintain the unity and authorship of Homer have accordingly felt and acknowledged the force of Wolf's argument. It is indeed admitted by Milman, one of the ablest of his opponents, that even Kreuser's argument in favour of the early introduction of letters and writing into Greece leaves the main question undecided; and, besides, Kreuser himself is a follower of Wolf upon the fundamental point in dispute. In an essay read to the academy of Berlin, the author, M. de Merian, adopts the same position as Wolf; he denies to Homer the use of writing materials, but says the poet might have done very well without them. This, however, is cutting the knot, not resolving it. The material issue is, Could the poet do at all without them? Of the cases cited by M. Merian, one is not in point, and the other is unsupported by authority. After many irrelevant instances of learning by heart from book or recitation, he alleges the example of the Italian improvisatori, and that of Tasso, who, he says, composed four hundred stanzas of his Giuramento Liberato, equal to 3200 verses, without ever writing them down. The story, however, is not authenticated by any kind of evidence; and unless there be Tasso's own word for it, who will believe that he never tried one of these stanzas in a written form? Besides, it is well known that, during many years of learned leisure, Tasso meditated and arranged the plan of his poem, of which he drew up numerous sketches; so that these four hundred stanzas were, at most, but the filling up of a picture, the outline of which had already been prepared. As for the improvisatori, it is sufficient to observe that, with a tolerable stock of common-places in their heads, and with a language on their tongues, one half of which rhymes to the other, these people may, with a little practice and a very small exertion of skill, pour forth verses, as they are called, to almost any extent. But what, we would ask, has such a trick as this to do with the mental composition and correction of thirty thousand hexameters of the Iliad and Odyssey? Cesarotti, it is true, talks gravely of Macpherson's Ossian, which he translated, as an instance of poetry of considerable extent, composed by a poet to whom writing was unknown. This, however, is producing one hypothesis which,

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1 Coleridge, General Introduction to Homer, pp. 38, 39. London, 1834; second edition.

2 In his Vorfrage über Homeros.

3 "The silence of Homer," says Mr Milman, "after all the only extant authority for the Homeric age, is the great difficulty, if indeed he is silent, and if the fatal characters, the επιστολαί λόγων of the letter of Bellerophon, were but symbolic or hieroglyphic signs." (Quarterly Review, vol. xlv. p. 141.) to say the least of it, is doubtful, to prove another the truth of which is denied. In fact, all unprejudiced critics are pretty well agreed as to the history and character of the English Ossian; and it is now generally understood and believed, that Macpherson treated the legendary poems ascribed to the Celtic bard, much in the same fashion as the Pisistratide are supposed to have done, in the case of those attributed to Homer, fusing a number of detached fragments into one mass, filling up interstices and vacuities with a sort of cement prepared by himself, and thus imparting to the whole (as in Temora) an unity, which certainly could not have been predicated of the materials with which he worked. The Ossian of Macpherson is, in truth, an instance in point against the principle stated by Cesarotti, or rather in favour of its opposite. In the affecting narrative of the imprisonment of Silvio Pellico, we are indeed informed that he and his friend Maroncelli, during their confinement, composed many thousand verses, without the use of writing materials, and with nothing but the power of memory upon which to rely for the preservation of their compositions. This is no doubt one of the best authenticated instances of the power of memory in composition which is anywhere to be found. But still, before even this can be admitted as a pertinent example, it will be necessary to see the verses so composed, and to determine the relation which they bear to the poetry of the Iliad and the Odyssey; for it is evident that the point in dispute cannot be affected by the mere fact of any number of loose lines having been composed under circumstances so extraordinary, by men entirely separated from the living and active world. Improvisation by itself is nothing. The question is, could a couple of epics, possessing all the qualities requisite in the very highest species of poetry, have been composed and preserved without the aid of writing materials? This is the real issue. Milton was struck with blindness as well as Homer; but the verses which he dictated, after he had been deprived of his sight, were immediately committed to writing by faithful and devoted amanuenses. Would they ever have been heard of, if Milton had been as destitute and helpless as Homer is represented to have been?

Further, it is urged that the artificial construction of the plots of the Iliad and Odyssey, so commonly relied on as an argument for the unity of these poems, is in fact a complete demonstration that their present form cannot be genuine. That the cyclic poets who were contemporary with Homer, or followed in the order of time his age, all composed their works on a plan the very reverse of that which the critics praise so highly in the Iliad and Odyssey, is established by the censure of Horace, and the testimony of all antiquity. This may be seen, as well from the poem of Quintus Smyrnæus, which is founded on the Ethiopis, Ilias Parva, and the Ilii Excidium of Arctinus and Leches, as from the epiphanies of many other old cyclic poems still preserved in the fragments of the Chrestomathia of Proclus, if such evidence be not superfluous. The authors of the Dionysiacs, Thebaid, Epigoniads, Naupactica, Genealogies, and other works of that sort, never dreamed of rushing in medias res, as it is said that Homer does; never laid distant trains for future catastrophes; never carried on parallel lines of narrative; never concerned themselves about the critical canon of a beginning, a middle, and an end. They uniformly commence ab oreo, and conclude when the war or the pedigree is at an end. They have no hero in favour of whose dramatic superiority all others are depressed; they have no single primary action, relieved by episodes; they are ignorant of concealments, recognitions, windings-up, and all other cognate artifices. One story follows another, in the order of mere history, just as in the Indian and Persian epics, in the northern Eddas, in the Spanish poem of the Cid, and in the early chronicles of every nation with which we are acquainted; the skill and fire of the poet are shown, not in the artifice of grouping a multitude of figures into one picture, but in raising admiration by the separate beauty of each successive image or delineation. They tell the tale as the tale had been told to them, leaving out nothing. Now, if the Iliad and the Odyssey, such as we actually have them, were previously in existence, or if any poems so constructed were publicly known, soon after the latest date assigned to Homer, how are we to account for the undeniable fact that this splendid example did not find a single imitator amongst the contemporaries or the followers of Homer for centuries afterwards? It can scarcely be said that no poet arose of sufficient genius to effect this. The names of many of the old heroic poets were celebrated in the best ages; and to rival the plots must certainly have been found an easier task than to equal, far less excel, the poetry of the Homeric epics. Some attempt of this sort might at least have been expected; and what the lowest poetaster now does first, and sometimes does best, could not certainly exceed the powers of Hesiod and the authors of the Theogonia. Yet we meet with nothing of the kind. "Quintus Smyrnæus, or Calaber," says Mr Coleridge, "composed his books as a supplement to the unfinished Iliad. We may not rate Quintus very highly as a poet; but have we any right to set him down for such a heavy fool as to have ventured upon the completion of a divine poem, which Aristotle had declared absolutely perfect in its plot, if the numerous examples of former writers of supplements had not been lying before his eyes? Suppose, for a moment, that the Iliad handed down to us had ended, as surely it might have ended, in the death of Hector, and the return of Achilles in triumph to the Grecian camp; and that the substance of the last two books had been added by Quintus in the beginning of his supplement; should we have commended him the more for sagaciously detecting the want of finish, and the premature termination of the narrative? And is it not possible that Aristotle might have lauded the plot of the Iliad nothing the less, if the catalogue of the ships and troops had never been inserted?"

Upon the whole, then, Homer, according to this hypothesis, was the ideal or heroic character of the Greek people, relating its own history. This is the general deduction from all the reasonings of Wolf and his followers, who contend that every thing which is absurd and improbable in Homer, as hitherto conceived, becomes appropriate and even necessary in the Homer thus supposed. 1. In reference to the uncertainty respecting the country of Homer, they observe, that if the people of Greece contended amongst themselves for the honour of having given birth to him, and if all claimed him as a citizen, it was because they were themselves Homer. 2. The poverty and blindness of Homer were those of the rhapsodists, who, being blind (whence their Ionian name of ἐπάγον), had the more powerful memories. 3. Homer composed the Iliad in his youth, that is to say, in the infancy of Greece, when she was all burning with sublime passions, with pride, resentment, and revenge. Greece, therefore, in her infancy, would admire

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Maroncelli nel suo sotterraneo aveva composti molti versi d'una gran bellezza. Me li andava recitando, e ne componeva altri. Io pare me componeva, e li recitava. E la nostra memoria esercitavasi a ritenere tutto ciò. Mirabile fu la capacità, che acquistammo di porre lunghe produzioni a memoria, rimarle e tornarle a linare infinite volte, e ridurle a quel segno medesimo di possibile finezza che avremmo attenuto scrivere. Maroncelli compose così a poco a poco, e ritenne in mente parecchie migliorie di versi lirici ed epici. Io feci la tragedia de Leoniero da Dertona e varie altre cose." (Le mie Prigioni, c. 75.) Homér. Achilles, the type or hero of force. 4. But Homer composed the Odyssey in his old age, when the passions of the Greeks began to be cooled by reflection, the mother of prudence. Greece would, therefore, naturally admire Ulysses, the type or hero of wisdom. In the youth of Homer, the pride of Agamemnon, the insolence and violence of Achilles, pleased the Greeks; in his old age they had begun to take pleasure in the delights of Calypso, the voluptuousness of Circe, the songs of the Sirens, and the sports of the suitors of Penelope. 5. The individual character of Homer having thus disappeared, the poet, or rather the poetry, becomes at once justified from all critical censures respecting the lowness of the thoughts, the grossness of the manners, the barbarism of the comparisons, the idioms, the licenses of versification, the discrepancy of dialects, and finally, for having elevated men to the rank of gods, and degraded gods below the level of men. 6. To Homer is assigned the privilege of having alone possessed the faculty of inventing the poetical fictions of Aristotle and the heroic characters of Horace; the privilege of an incomparable eloquence in his savage similes, his terrible pictures of the dying and the dead, and his sublime delineation of the passions, with the merit of a style at once simple, grand, and picturesque. All these qualities belonged to the heroic age of Greece. 7. Homer is henceforth assured of three immortals; of having been the founder of civilisation in Greece, the father of all the other poets, and the source of the different systems of philosophy afterwards promulgated in his country; titles which could not possibly belong to Homer such as the world has hitherto imagined him. The Homer of the schools could not be regarded as the founder of Greek civilisation, because, from the epoch of Deucalion and Pyrrha, that civilisation had been commenced by the institution of marriage. He could not be regarded as the father of poets, because Orpheus, Amphion, Linus, and Musaeus, to whom some chronologers add Hesiod, had flourished before his time. According to Cicero, there were many heroic poets prior to Homer; and Eusebius names Philammon, Thamyris, Democodous, Epimenes, Aristeas, and others. Nor, finally, could he be the source of the Greek philosophy; for the philosophers did not derive their doctrine from, but engrained them upon, the Homeric fables. Homer only afforded to the philosophers an occasion of meditating on the highest truths of metaphysics and morals, giving them, in addition, great facility in illustrating their speculations.

The more we read the more we admire the two immortal poems of Homer, and the less are the generality of persons inclined to doubt that they were conceived by one and the same mind; whilst the infinite art by which the innumerable parts are connected and arranged forms perhaps the most remarkable feature in the Iliad and Odyssey, as well as the best argument for the unity of their authorship, and the individuality of Homer. In these poems, according to Mr Milman, "there is nothing of the elaborate art of a later age; it is not a skilful compiler arranging his materials so as to produce the most striking effect; the design and the filling up appear to be evidently of the same hand; there is the most perfect harmony in the plan, the expression, the versification; and we cannot, by any effort, bring ourselves to suppose that the separate passages, which form the main interest of the poem, the splendid bursts, or more pathetic episodes, were originally composed without any view to their general effect; in short, that a whole race of Homers struck, as it were by accident, all these glorious, living fragments, which lay in a kind of unformed chaos, till a later and almost mightier Homer commanded them to take form, and combine themselves into a connected and harmonious whole." Another circumstance to which the advocates of the unity and authorship of Homer attach very great importance, is the perfect consistency of the characters in the different parts of the poem. It is quite inconceivable, they think, that there should have been a sort of conventional character assigned to different heroes by the minstrels of Greece. "To take Mr Coleridge's illustration of the ballads on Robin Hood," says Mr Milman; "in all these, bold Robin is still the same frank, careless, daring, generous, half-comic adventurer: So Achilles may have been by prescription,

Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer; Ajax heavy and obstinate, Ulysses light and subtle; but can we thus account for the finer and more delicate touches of character, the sort of natural consistencies, which perpetually identify the hero, or even the female, of one book, with the same person in another?"

Some of those persons who have written upon the same side of the question as Mr Milman, and indeed Mr Milman himself, are inclined to doubt whether the poems of Homer, consistent and harmonious as they now appear, could have been preserved by tradition alone; and an able French critic has condemned the opinion "qui, en admettant qu'Homère soit l'auteur de l'Iliade et de l'Odyssée, veut qu'il en avait jamais écrit un seul vers, et que restés, en dépôt, dans sa mémoire, il les allait réciter de ville en ville, afin d'obtenir de la pitié et de l'admiration publique, les secours que sollicitait sa profonde indigence. Supposons," adds the same writer, "que la tradition orale ait seule conservé deux poèmes aussi étendus, pendant le long espace de temps écoulé entre Homère et les premières éditions connues; attribuer aux rhapsodes une portion considérable de ses ouvrages, c'est franchir toutes les bornes d'une critique raisonnable. Comment se flatter, d'ailleurs, d'avoir fait une découverte échappée aux critiques de l'antiquité les plus célèbres, et qui ont apporté un soin si religieux à la révision des poèmes d'Homère, depuis Aristote jusqu'à cet Aristarque, dont le nom est devenu synonyme de critique par excellence?" All this, however, seems to be more plausible than sound. For, in the first place, if the art of writing was unknown in Greece in the age of Homer, or at least confined to carving on wood, or engraving on stone or metal, it follows that, for a certain period, the poems of Homer must have been preserved by oral tradition, because there practically existed no other method by which they could be handed down from one age to another. If it be impossible that two poems so extensive could have been preserved by oral tradition, then it is at least equally so that they could have been composed at the period to which they are commonly referred. Secondly, it is no argument whatever against a discovery in criticism to tell us that, if it were well founded, it could not have escaped the most celebrated critics of antiquity, from Aristotle to Aristarchus, who had applied themselves, with religious care, to the revision of Homer. This kind of argument, if sound, would cut down almost every discovery. Bacon discovered and explained the method of reasoning by induction, which had escaped

1 To the praise here bestowed on Homer, may be subjoined that of having been the most ancient historian of paganism who has come down to our times. "His poems," says Mr Coleridge, "are two great treasure-houses, in which the manners of the first ages of Greece are preserved. But the lot of the Homeric poems has been similar to that of the laws of the Twelve Tables. On the one hand, the world has ascribed those laws to the Athenian legislator, from whom, it is said, they passed to Rome, whilst no one has seen in them the history of the common law of the heroic tribes of Latium; on the other, the world has believed the poems of Homer to have been the work of the rare genius of an individual, instead of discovering in them the history of the common law of the heroic people of Greece." (General Introduction, p. 98.)

2 Quarterly Review, xlv. p. 154. Aristotle and all his successors; Newton discovered the law of gravitation, which, in its application to explain the motions of the heavenly bodies, and connect the whole solar system, had never been so much as suspected even by the most illustrious of his predecessors; Young, with rare sagacity, found out the method of interpreting the Egyptian writings, monumental and civil, which so many persons had, through a long tract of ages, sought for in vain. But were it now to be said, in objection to these discoveries, as M. Durivier has said in opposition to the hypothesis of Wolf and his followers, how could their authors flatter themselves with having found out what so many illustrious men had failed to discover? The answer would be, that each of these discoveries must be judged of by the direct evidence produced in support of it; that the increase of knowledge is progressive; and that, with regard to the particular case in question, the science of criticism is, in a great measure, one of modern growth.

To this succinct analysis of the different opinions entertained respecting Homer, succeeds naturally the critical history of his works. He had composed, or at least the ancients attributed to him, a large number, of which a catalogue may be found in the Bibliotheca Graeca of Fabricius, and in the Chrestomathia of Proclus. Of the greater part there remain only the titles, about which even the learned are not always agreed. We should doubtless have little to regret in the loss of the Batrachomyomachia, a burlesque production, in which, with the exception of some details and verses, we find no traces of the genius and style of Homer; or in that of the Hymns, which are twenty-four in number, amongst which two or three have been supposed to belong to Homer. On this subject the reader may consult two critical letters of Rhunken, in his second edition of the Hymn to Ceres, Leyden, 1782; Mitterichler, Ilgen, Matthiae, and Hermann, have also published editions of these Hymns, which are valuable for the critical accuracy of the text, and the conjectures as to their supposed dates and authors. The epigrams and smaller poems bear no stamp of authenticity, and hence we may dispense with entering into any particular statement concerning them. It is in the Iliad and the Odyssey alone where we must seek for, and where we will find, the genius of Homer in all its force, and in all its splendour and originality.

If we can credit the statements of Ælian and Plutarch, it was Lycurgus, the celebrated Lacedaemonian lawgiver, who first collected, in Ionia, the scattered fragments of the poems of Homer, united them together, and introduced them into the Peloponnesus. But the glory of arranging them in the order in which they have reached us was, it seems, reserved for Pisistratus, who brought them to Athens, and for his son Hipparchus, who ordained that they should be recited annually during the Panathenaic festival. This fact, related in the Hipparchus, a dialogue attributed to Plato, is confirmed by the authority of Cicero, who concedes to Pisistratus, seconded by the poet-philosopher Solon, the merit of having put into order the verses of Homer, which he found in a state of confusion. After the edition of Hipparchus may be mentioned that which Aristotle revised by the advice of Alexander, and which the conqueror, an enlightened friend of letters, deposited in the precious casket which he had found amongst the treasures of Darius. But notwithstanding the authority of Plutarch, who sometimes placed too much reliance on memoirs evidently unworthy of confidence, this famous edition of the casket had, according to Strabo, been revised by Calisthenes and Anaxarchus, and was only presented to Alexander by his illustrious instructor. It is possible, however, that a second revision, enriched with the remarks of Aristotle himself, may have been made under the eyes of the Macedonian conqueror. Before Aristotle, Cynethus of Chios, Stesimbrotus, Theagenes, and Antimachus of Colophon, had already undertaken to comment on the text of Homer. The scholia of Venice, published by the learned Villoison, leave no doubt whatever as to this fact. We have not the same certainty respecting the editions of Cassander king of Macedonia, and Ptolemy Evergetes II, king of Egypt, whatever may have been said by Athenaeus, Casaubon his learned interpreter, and the second Burmann. But it was the school of Alexandria, which began to give truly classical editions of the works of Homer; Zenodotus of Ephesus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, Aristarchus, and Crates, occupied themselves not only with the revision, but also with the critical explanation of the text; and Aristarchus is said to have first divided the Iliad and the Odyssey each into twenty-four books, a division which appears so natural and judicious that it has been constantly adopted ever since. So much for the Greek editors of Homer; let us now pass on to his interpreters.

At their head stands Didymus, a grammarian of Alexandria, who flourished under the reign of Augustus. He had enriched several poems with his commentaries; but the scholia on the Iliad and Odyssey printed with his name are evidently not his, and are neither of the same epoch nor by the same hand; in fact, he is often cited in them himself, and mention is made of writers who flourished at a subsequent period. With regard to their literary merit, the remarks, purely grammatical, are only simple glosses on the text; but those which relate to the subject-matter are not without ability, and may be consulted with advantage. This compilation, extracted partly from Didymus, and partly from various other commentators whose names are not mentioned, contains what are usually called the lesser scholia. Those on the Iliad were published, for the first time, at Rome, in 1517, folio, and those on both poems united, at Venice, in 1528, in two vols. 8vo. Soon afterwards, that is, from 1542 to 1550, appeared the great work of Eustathius on Homer, which was printed at Rome, in four vols. folio, and included the beautiful table of Devaris. This work, which is merely a compilation from the scholiasts and commentators who had preceded the learned archbishop of Thessalonica, presents nevertheless an immense repertory of literary and grammatical erudition. But it could have been wished that a more severe criticism had directed this vast compilation, or that an able and practised hand had made from it a judicious extract, which might have put into circulation riches almost unknown, or only accessible to the small number of persons who are profoundly skilled in the Greek language. The same observation may be applied to the valuable scholia discovered and published at Venice by Villoison.

We shall not attempt here to give a detail of the numerous editions of Homer. His works complete, including the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Batrachomyomachia, and the Hymns, were printed for the first time at Florence, in 1488, in two vols. folio, under the superintendence of Demetrius Chalcondylas, assisted by another Demetrius from the island of Crete. The printer, Bernardo Nerli, dedicated the collection to Pietro, son of Lorenzo de' Medici. This rare and precious edition was faithfully reproduced, with a few corrections, in 1504, by the Aldine presses, at Venice, in two vols. 8vo. But the second Aldine edition of 1517 presents sensible differences in the text, which the subsequent editions reproduce, till that of 1528 inclusively. This is what may be called the first age of the editions of Homer. The second dates from Henri Etienne, who, with the assistance of an ancient manuscript, and the commentaries of Eustathius, collected a certain number of various readings, which he gave upon the margin, or developed, along with his own conjectures, in the notes of his beautiful work entitled Poetae Graci principes Heroici. Homer. Carminis, Paris, 1566. With Barnes the Hellenist, who was celebrated in his own time, but whose reputation must necessarily diminish with the progress of philological criticism, commences a third epoch, which may be denominated that of Clarke, or perhaps of Ernesti, who improved upon the labours of Clarke, as Clarke had improved upon those of his predecessor Barnes. But he did not dissemble that his edition still left much to be desired; and he modestly admitted that he had only prepared materials for future editors. Such an editor as Ernesti appears to have contemplated was found in the person of Wolf, who, in 1784 and 1785, published at Halle, in Saxony, a complete edition of Homer, the superiority of which, in regard to correctness, was soon generally acknowledged. This edition was distinguished for an exact and severe revision of the text; and in it the learned professor had already announced the system afterwards developed and adopted by him, when Villoison published his famous edition of the Iliad, in folio, Venice, 1788. This edition occupies too important a place in modern philology, and, as some think, concerns too deeply the glory of Homer individually, to be passed by with a simple notice, or without entering into some details. Villoison was busily occupied at Venice with the publication of his Anecdota Graeca, when, by accident, he discovered, in the library of St Mark, a manuscript of Homer, which, in his judgment, belonged to the tenth century, and was consequently anterior by two hundred years to the Commentaries of Eustathius. This manuscript contained the Iliad entire, accompanied with an immensity of scholia, abridged from those of Zenodotus, Aristophanes, Aristarchus, Crates Mallores, Ptolemy of Ascalon, and several other celebrated grammarians. But that which particularly struck him, was observing the margins filled with asterisks, daggers, and all the different signs adopted to distinguish verses supposed to have been altered or transposed, from those the authenticity of which was universally recognised. The publication of the work did not fail to realise the great hopes which the learned of Europe had conceived from its mere announcement, and the success of the edition was complete. But it confirmed Wolf more than ever in the opinion that it was to the critics of Alexandria that recourse must be had in order to recover and reconstitute the true text of Homer; and, fortified by the new proofs of the truth of his assertion which he conceived to have under his eyes, he ably profited by the assistance which these ancient scholia afforded him, and made no difficulty in substituting for the ordinary readings of the text the variations which appeared to him to be demonstrated. Thus, by a singular chance, the beautiful monument elevated to the glory of Homer by one of the most famous Hellenists of his age, became the basis of a system calculated to deprive Homer of the admiration which, for ages, had been lavished on him. Villoison was so much affected by this circumstance that he repented of having ever published his Iliad. That of Wolf, accompanied with the Odyssey and the Hymns, re-appeared at Leipzig in 1804, in four vols. small 8vo. This edition adds to its other merits that of a typographical execution which does much honour to the press of M. Goschen. The edition of the Iliad by Heyne, in eight vols. 8vo, which appeared at Leipzig in 1802, has not completely justified the expectations which might have been entertained of such an editor. His principal merit consists in presenting a clear and exact interpretation of the text, and in collecting, in the Excursus and Commentaries which accompany it, all that is important to be known for the perfect understanding of Homer. The doctrine of Heyne on the spirits rough and smooth (asper et lenis), which, according to him, were much more strongly aspirated in the time of Homer, and pronounced like the Æolic digamma, has met with more adversaries than partisans; although it explains very well how certain Hom syllables, naturally short, become long at the end of a word, when the following one begins with a vowel, and causes to disappear the hiatuses which are of so frequent occurrence in the verses of this great poet.

From the commencement or towards the middle of the sixteenth century, Homer was translated into prose and verse amongst the Italians, the English, the French, the Spaniards, and other nations; but we shall only notice those versions which occupy a place more or less distinguished in literature. In Italy the most esteemed are those of Salvi, Cerutti, Cesaretti, and Monti; Salvi, however, translated all that remains of Homer, but the others confined themselves to the Iliad. In England, the translation of Pope threw into the shade those of Chapman, Ogilvy, and Hobbes; but many, nevertheless, prefer to it that of Couper, as more exact, and preserving better the simple and natural colour of the original; whilst some are of opinion that the recent version of Sotheby, the accomplished translator of Wieland's Oberon and Virgil's Georgics, is, in several respects, superior to all its predecessors. The French have, in prose, Madame Dacier, Bitambé, Lebrun, and Dugal-Montbel, each of whom is distinguished for some particular merit. Of the French translations in verse we shall only notice two; those of Rochefort and of M. Aignan, which are both considered excellent. The Germans attach much importance to the versions of Bodmer, of the Count de Stolberg, brother of the translator of Sophocles, and of Voß, all of whom have translated Homer into hexameter verses; a system of versification which prevailed in that school, and which was applied to the ancients, with what success we shall not venture to pronounce. Spanish literature contains no good translation of Homer. The most recent, and, comparatively speaking, the best, is that of Don Saverio Malo, a gentleman employed in the Royal Library at Madrid.

We shall not expatiate here on the literary merit of the prince of poets. It is too generally known, and too deeply felt, to require any exposition at our hands. Besides, what addition could we hope to make to the admirable Essay of Pope on the Life and Writings of Homer; to the Discours Préliminaire of Rochefort; and, above all, to the eloquent eulogium which the Abbé Barthélémy puts in the mouth of the Scythian Anacharsis? The dissertations of Lamotte are also, in their kind, so much more honourable to the author or authors of the Iliad and Odyssey, that the number and severity of the criticisms contained in them give to the praise a character more solid and less equivocal. The authority of genius is powerful, nay universal. That of Homer has, for thirty centuries, presided over the destinies of almost every literature of the world. It was from the works of the first and greatest of poets that Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and others, derived not only the subjects of their tragedies, but the spirit and sentiments by which these are animated, and the varied charms of that style of which Homer possessed the secret, and left them a model. It was to his genius that the epic poets, as Virgil and Tasso, were indebted for their sublime beauties; it was from his works that the greatest artists of ancient and modern times borrowed their finest conceptions; and both are the more elevated in proportion as they approach nearer to their great model. In a word, as Homer has been denominated Ἡρώης τοῦ Ποιητή, so the expression Homeric beauties, having passed into a proverb, has become amongst men of letters the appropriate qualification of the grand and the beautiful in poetry.

(Besides the works already quoted, see Biographie Universelle, art. Homere; Chalmers's Biog. Dictionary, art. Homer; Blackwell's Inquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer, second edition, London, 1736, in 8vo; and Wood's Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer, London, 1775, in 4to.)

Omer, or Chomer, a Jewish measure, containing the tenth part of the ephah. See CORUS and MEASURE.