greatest epic poet of Greece, and a name of the highest significance, not with regard to Greece only, but to Europe generally, and to the history of the human race. For in Homer we have to do not merely with a poet of the first class, holding the same place in literature that Aristotle and Newton do in science, but with the oldest records, after the books of Moses, that have exercised a permanent influence on the civilization of the west. It is but reasonable, therefore, that we should give a more full and minute consideration to the Homeric poems, than even the high position of their author on the topmost peak of the Hellenic Parnassus would justify.
The life of Homer did not fall within the strictly historical epoch of Greek literature; nor were there any diligent biographers in his day who made it a business to collect and to make public the notable sayings and doings of men of extraordinary genius. The existing literary testimonies for the facts connected with the life of the poet, do not carry us further back than the age of Pindar (B.C. 500); that is to say, to a period more than three hundred years posterior to the age of the great poet, taken at the latest of the various dates to which it is assigned. What we know of Homer, therefore, we know only through the channel of national tradition, uncertain and vague as that must always be in an age when writing was either unknown or little practised, and criticism of literary documents never dreamt of. We shall not, therefore, be surprised to hear that even the birthplace of their great national poet was unknown to the Greeks, and that the period in which he flourished was a puzzle to their ablest chronologers. We are not, however, to suppose that on this interesting subject we know absolutely nothing. However vague popular traditions may be, and however discrepant in minor details, they will generally be found to contain a nucleus of truth which a practised eye can readily distinguish from the fabulous accretions of idle or impudent imaginations; and if the general substance of such traditions regarding the life of a great poet, is not contradicted, or is rather confirmed, by the internal evidence of his reputed works, a reasonable man may take his stand upon them as confidently as he does upon any other conclusion, resting upon evidence which may reach the highest degree of probability, but can in no case partake of absolute scientific certainty.
The authorship of the *Iliad* of Homer, printed in Barnes', and other editions, and in Westermann's collection (*Bozepoos*, Brunswiek, 1845), is unknown; but their value as literary documents depends not on what the authors say in their own name, which is utterly worthless, but on the ancient authorities and special popular traditions which they quote. From them we know what was the account given by Aristotle of the birthplace of Homer, what Ephorus said was the local tradition of the people of Cuma, and what Homeric monuments were shown by the islanders of Ios. A very slight consideration of these ancient testimonies thus analysed will suffice to show the vanity of the claims put forth by various Greek cities as having given birth to Homer. Of these, seven is the number commonly mentioned in a well-known distich (*Atl. Gell., iii., 11*); but the reader who chooses to turn up Suidas will find at least half a dozen more; and to increase learning in this matter will only be to increase scepticism, unless a man carries with him the sound maxim of the lawyers, *ponderanda sunt testimonia non numeranda*. The claims of Athens, for instance, rest, according to a distinct testimony (*Lives* δ and ε in Westermann), on the mere fact that the Ionians of Smyrna were a colony from Attica, and that if Homer was a Smyrniote, he might reasonably be called an Athenian, just as a person born in Sydney may say he is a Londoner, because his father or his grandfather, or his great-grandfather was so. In a similar loose fashion the claims of Salamis in Cyprus, are found to be explained by the fact that Statius, one of the poets of the *Epic Cycle*, was a native of that island, and that the epic poem called *Cypris*, written by him, was by some attributed to Homer, from whom Strasins is said to have received it as a marriage gift with the daughter of the great poet (*Elian, V. H. IX., 16*). Colophon, in a similar way, claimed to have produced the poet of the *Iliad*, because of a famous humorous poem called the *Margites*, of which Homer was generally supposed to be the author (*Wecker, Epic Cycle*, i., 184). But the same critical inspection which enables us to expose the flimsy pretensions of these places, reveals the remarkable fact that those other cities which have most to say for themselves as being the native country of Homer, unite, by the peculiar form of their traditions, in giving to Smyrna at least some share in his birth,—a plain admission that at the time when these traditions were framed, the claims of Smyrna were considered so strong that they could not possibly be ignored. Thus the most detailed and best known *Life*, that attributed to Herodotus, which was for a long time received as authentic, deduces the parentage of Homer from Magnesia, in Thessaly; thence Meleanopos is said to have crossed the Aegean, and settled in Cumae, the principal city of the Æolians, in Asia Minor; here he married a lady of Cumae, by whom he had a daughter called Critheis; and this maiden having, unknown to her guardians, formed a connection with some unknown individual of the male sex, was, to avoid exposure, sent to Smyrna, where, on the banks of the River Meles, she brought forth Homer, thence called Melesegenes. We have already said that such local traditions are not history; but when we find another of the seven cities, namely, Ios, framing a local legend, which, while differing from that of Cumae in every other point, agrees with it in bringing the immortal minstrel to the banks of the Meles to be born, we must be altogether blind to the spirit in which local legends are composed, if we do not see here the strongest proof that the real country of Homer was that which is distinctly allowed in the legends of those very cities which are most interested in denying its claims. We say, therefore, that according to all human probability, Homer was born at Smyrna; and when we say, with equal probability, that he died at Ios,—one of the Cyclades in the Archipelago,—for on this point the various accounts also agree,—we have stated all that can be said to be known with regard to the father of epic poetry in Greece. The other events of his life, as given in the longer biographies, are fictions invented, many of them, with the plain purpose of giving a historical existence to certain of the characters mentioned in the *Iliad* and *Odyssey*; or they are mere blunders of which the source is innocent and obvious. That, like all minstrels, Homer was given to wander about from place to place in the exercise of his vocation is probable enough without any voucher, and appears quite certain from the extensive and accurate geographical information displayed in his works; but the details of his travels would be curiously retained in no man's memory; and what we have for them bears all the marks of a vulgar forgery. The much-bespoken circumstance of his being blind, noticed in all the ancient *Lives*, if implying a mere superinduced misfortune, and not a congenital defect, might, as a matter of popular tradition, be probable enough, were the origin of the story not too plain in the double fact that a blind poet is introduced in the *Odyssey* (viii. 64), and in the famous hymn to Apollo, which Thucydides (iii. 104) and other ancients accepted as the productions of the genuine Homer. This hymn, indeed, must be regarded as the main authority of those who claimed Homer as a Scioe: for the lines run expressly—
*Tou* ἀγαθὸς ἀνήρ, ἐκεῖ ἐν Σμύρνῃ ἐν τοῖς ὄρεσιν ἀναπαυόμενος, *Τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἀνδρὸς ὁ κατὰ Σμύρνην ἐν τοῖς ὄρεσιν ἀναπαυόμενος.*
*The blind old man who dwells in Chios' rocky tale;* and there is certainly no evidence so strong in favour of Smyrna, provided only it could be proved—what no scholar now dreams—that these lines were really so said and sung. by the veritable singer of the *Iliad* and *Odyssey*. But after this line is rejected, there remains no ground for the claims of Chios, save that weak one expressly mentioned by Strabo (xiv., p. 645), that in this city there flourished the famous guild or brotherhood of minstrels (of whom more anon), known by the name of the Homeridae; a fact of no more power, when critically examined, to prove that Homer himself was a Chioite, than the fact of Calvinistic theology being very dominant in Scotland would prove that the author of the doctrine was born in Edinburgh.
The age of Homer is a matter about which less that is satisfactory can be stated, than with regard to his country. That if not a Smyrniote he was at least a native of that part of Asia Minor, is proved not merely by the traditional evidence just adduced, but by the internal evidence of the poems themselves—by their rich tone, colour, and style, and also by many well-known facts relative to the early rise and growth of poetic literature among the Greeks. But chronology is, in the nature of the thing, a matter with which popular tradition has nothing to do: and the internal evidence of the poems themselves on this head, though strong enough, perhaps, to exclude certain extreme suppositions, affords a pretty wide range to a merely conjectural chronology. Herodotus, in a well-known passage (ii., 53), places Homer about four hundred years older than himself; that is, in the year 850 B.C., or thereabout; Aristotle, in the account given by him of the legend of Ios, makes the birth of Homer contemporary with the great Ionic migration (1044 B.C.); while Dionysius of Samos, the cyclographer, threw him back as far as the Trojan War, which he describes. To determine exactly between these contending dates, and at least a dozen more given in a very full scheme by Lauer (*Homerische Poesie*, p. 124), is of course hopeless; but the circumstances of the case warrant us in refusing to allow any date for Homer, so early as that assumed by the cyclographer, or later than that given by Herodotus. For such an extensive collection of myths as that connected with the Trojan War requires time to grow; and Homer manifestly talks of the heroes of the *Iliad* as belonging to some age not altogether identical with his own. The mingled elements, also, of Ionian and Æolic Hellenism, which appear in the Homeric poems, did not exist in Asia Minor at the early date supposed by Dionysius, or those who come near to him. As little, on the other hand, can we go beyond Herodotus, in bringing Homer nearer to the date of the Olympiads than the year 850, for the very uncertainty in which the wisest Greeks were as to the age of the poet, proves that he lived at a period considerably more ancient than the first year (776 B.C.) of their recognised national chronology.
Perhaps some reader may have been content that we should allude to these disputed points in a manner even more perfunctory than we have done; but in these days of rampant historical scepticism, imported wholesale from Germany, it is absolutely necessary to make some attempt to mark distinctly where the cloud-architecture of mere imagination ends, and the mainland of actual tradition, hazy and yet indubitable, commences. In reference to these sceptical views of the Germans, we cannot avoid noticing here that some of them have even gone so far as to deny the existence of such a man as Homer altogether; and, what is of more consequence to us, the language, which some of the more wild of that sect are still in the habit of using, has been adopted by some of our own scholars whose name is sufficient to make even their incidental errors dangerous. Mr Grote, for instance, uses the following language:—"The name of Homer—for I disallow his historical personality—means the *Iliad* and the *Odyssey*, and nothing else;" and again, "Homer is no individual man, but the divine or heroic father of the Gentile Homerids" (vol. ii., p. 179); that is to say, while the whole of the Greek nation believed they had once had a great epic poet, to whose extraordinary genius, as to a natural and adequate cause, they attributed their two great epic poems (just as the ordered world finds the best explanation of its existence in a God); we, the learned of modern times, are bound to doubt whether that poet had any existence, and to treat these poems as if they were not productions of a great poetical genius at all, but the creation of some half dozen or a score of second-rate rhymers, whose names no person ever cared to know, but who were cunning enough to raise themselves into a fictitious historical consequence by the creation of a symbolical head of their corporation called Homer, whom the silly world has, for nearly 3000 years, been willing to take for a substantial reality! Now, it ought at once to be granted to Mr Grote, and those Germans whose nebulous notions he has in this matter imported, that there was a tendency in the earliest times of the Greeks, as perhaps of all highly imaginative nations, to represent in the historical form certain favourite ideas and theories, theological and ethnological; which allegorical or mythical narratives, a modern reader of a prosaic temper may be apt to mistake for realities. Of the religious myth in particular, the historic was the generally accredited form, to such an extent that the original physico-theological ideas which these narratives were invented to convey, are now but dimly discernible behind the motley company of human incarnations by which they are impersonated. Nay, more, it may even be true in some cases, according to a favourite notion of the Germans (Uschold and others), that the religious symbols of one century became the anthropomorphic gods of another, and dwindled down to the merely human heroes of a third. Further, it is not to be denied that beyond the sphere of religion the practice seems to have prevailed among the Greeks to a certain extent of inventing names of characters, apparently historical, to symbolize the origin and the connection of certain notable races of men. Thus Hellen, in whose personality the most critical of ancients believed (see Thucyd. i., 3), is taken by almost all modern writers, even by Clinton, for a mere name invented as a symbol of the common nationality of the people whom he represented. But even with regard to national genealogies, we are nowise entitled to assume that because they are peculiarly liable to forgery, therefore no national genealogy is in any case to be accepted as true. Much less are we to make a general rule of evaporating all the most deeply-rooted local traditions of a country into mere misty imaginations and unsubstantial symbols, and to assume that the "manufacture of fictitious personalities" (Grote), was the only or the main function of the popular intellect of any people, at any stage of their civilization. Man is a real creature, and he deals with realities; and of all realities, those which he is least disposed to lose hold of are the great men whose energy fathers any extraordinary product of the national life, and whose name marks any great national epoch. In conformity with this real tendency of human nature we find that in all popular poetry the actions of famous men—the national heroes—form a much more prominent element than symbolized religious or physical philosophy (see some admirable remarks in Lauer, p. 131–174): and the periods of intellectual and political advancement marked by such names as Homer and Theseus are precisely those in which a great reality would be more powerful to seize the minds of men than the most significant symbol. Extraordinary and even miraculous stories in the life of a historical personage ought not in the very least to shake our credit in his fundamental reality; for it is precisely because his reality was so striking and so overpowering that these miraculous stories were invented, and naturally found credit. The Israelites carried back the genealogy of their nation to the son of Isaac, from whom they sprung. Had the books of Moses, with all their circumstantial details and life-like reality never been written, Homeric philologer might have said that Jacob was merely a symbol. In the same way the Athenians ascribed certain great political changes in their country to the son of Ægeus, of whom various wonderful and superhuman stories are told; but these stories no more justify us in throwing him into the limbo of symbols, than the ridiculous lies about Abraham and the other patriarchs, current in the Koran and other Eastern books, would entitle us to disallow the historical reality of the father of the faithful. In the same way—though there are some things of a plainly mythical nature in the traditional legends of Homer—to conclude from these that Homer himself is a myth, is to argue with the precipitation of a whim-intoxicated German, not with the deliberation of a sober-minded and judicious Englishman. Indeed, it is only doing the Germans justice to state that the "disallowance" of the personality of Homer, to use Mr Grote's phrase, is by no means so common among them now as in the first fever of intemperate Wolfian enthusiasm it might have been without offence. William Müller, the most popular champion of Wolfian ideas, says distinctly, in his Vorrede (p. 51), that "we are not called upon to question the personal existence of Homer;" and Professor Welcker (to whose learned labours all students of Homer are so much indebted), Nitsch, C. O. Müller, Dr Ilme (in Smith's Dictionary), Baumeister, Lauer, and others who have written recently on the subject, show a moderation of temper, and a soundness of historical judgment, very far removed from what we are accustomed to designate as "German extravagance." It is becoming evident to a thoughtful observer that even among that most speculative, sceptical, and, intellectually speaking, most anarchical nation of Europe, the conflict of extreme views is beginning to produce its natural result in the recognition of the great human realities which lie at the bottom of the strong though unpurified historical convictions of the masses.
So much for the poet. The next question that presents itself in connection with the name of Homer is that of the authenticity of the works which go under his name. What security have we that the poems we now read with such delight and instruction are the identical works which Aristotle analysed, which Plato denounced, which Thucydides and Strabo quoted as the best authority for some of the earliest and most important facts in Greek history and topography? What guarantee, further, that the works which the great writers of the classic age of Greece, received as genuine works of the great Ionian bard, actually were so; and how far they might not have been made subject to various interpolations and mutilations in the three or four centuries that elapsed between the heroic age, when they were composed, and the historic age, when we find them made the subject of literary study and criticism? The importance of these questions will appear the more strongly when we bear in mind that the celebrity of Homer naturally led to the national practice of stamping with his name many poetical works of a popular character, in which the stern tests applied by a severe criticism refuse to find any marks of so illustrious a paternity. Prominent among these are the Homeric hymns, treated as authentic by Thucydides, and published as undoubted works of the great bard in the Editio Princeps and other notable editions by modern scholars. Of the same kind are the Cypris already mentioned, of the contents of which a short account is given by Proclus the grammarian. To Homer also was very generally attributed by the ancients the Colophonian poem called Margites; and the Battle of the Frogs and Mice is an example of one of the many παράδειγματα, or humorous popular pieces, with the composition of which the singer of the wrath of Achilles is supposed to have amused his mighty mind in his hours of relaxation. With regard to all these it may be sufficient to state that the ancients themselves were very far from exhibiting a serious agreement as to their authorship; and their being attributed to Homer must be viewed as rather a favourite floating popular belief than a strong national conviction. Such being their character, it could not be expected that they should stand muster before the scrutinizing glance of modern criticism, and the sceptical analysis of the Germans. In talking of the Homeric poems we must therefore remove these minor works altogether from our view; but the fact of their having been for a long period so generally received as genuine works of the poet, leads us to treat with the greater consideration the caution of those who demand the severest proof for the real authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Now, with regard to these two great works, there is, in the first place, not the slightest reason to doubt that we possess and use them, so far as the contents and the text are concerned, exactly as they were possessed and used by the Greeks of the classic ages; and with regard to their authorship the faith which we have that these identical works were the genuine works of the great Ionian epopeist was the general faith of the whole ancient world, both Greek and Roman; and in the case of the Iliad at least (for there were some difficulties started by a few curious inquirers with regard to the Odyssey), a faith for centuries unshaken by a single breath of contradiction. That the Iliad, which we now read, is substantially the Iliad of Pindar and of Plato, can be proved to the satisfaction of any sane man, exactly in the same way that the Christian Scriptures read now in the Christian churches are proved to be substantially the same as those expounded by the earliest bishops, and sanctioned by the most authoritative councils of the Church. To the Greeks Homer was in fact a bible, and guarded with all the care and all the piety that belongs to such a book; a fact which at once explains the extravagant, and, to our feeling, illiberal zeal with which Plato denounces it in his ideal polity, and at the same time puts into our hands a guarantee of the surest and most sacred kind for the general authenticity of the poems as we now read them. No person who is even superficially read in the Greek classics can fail to have observed how constantly all writers of note, from the severe and stern Aristotle to the light and sportive Lucian, refer to Homer as to a writer of whom a universal knowledge might be presupposed in all their readers, and to whom a universal respect was paid. The consequence of this frequent reference is, that there is no writer of antiquity of whom we are more sure that we possess his genuine words as current in the mouths of the ancients, than we are with regard to the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. But more than this. In the time of the Ptolemies, and when the productive power of Greek literature had begun to faint and die away, there was a special band of learned critics and commentators, who made it their business to collate the various recensions of the Homeric epics, and to transmit their text to us with as much conscientious fidelity as was possible. Prominent among these were Aristarchus and Zenodotus, of whom the first has transmitted his name to modern times as a popular appellation for the literary man who exercises the higher sort of documentary criticism as a vocation; and not only do we know that such men existed, and exercised their philologic care on the great national treasure of the Homeric text, but we have in the Venetian scholia, first published from the St Mark's library by Villoison (1788), a series of notices of their method of critical procedure, and a list of their asterisks and obelisks, sufficient to dispel all doubts as to the unadulterated transmission of the Iliad and Odyssey, at least from the period when letters began to be a study and an occupation in Greece. But when did this period begin? and what have we to say for the nature of the guarantees of authenticity, whatever they were, that existed before this period? These are the really serious questions, the answers to which have raised difficulties that have made wise men pause and foolish men stumble, not without observation. On all hands it is allowed that Pisistratus, the well-known Athenian tyrant (B.C. 560), was the first, so far at least as Athens is concerned, to collect together the various books or rhapsodies of the Homeric epics, which were generally sung or recited separately, and to arrange and publish them—to use a modern phrase—in the form in which they now exist. Pisistratus, therefore, or rather his literary coadjutors, among whom Onomacritus is prominently named, must be regarded as our first historical guarantee for the text of the Iliad and Odyssey as we now possess it; but the details of his literary labours are unfortunately not in the least known to us; so from this point backward we are left to conjecture, to historical probabilities and internal evidence, and to the hundred and one small sceptical doubts and sceptical solutions of those doubts, which will never cease to exercise the wits of those who are born to torment themselves in this way. The question whether the Iliad as arranged by Pisistratus was, both in point of matter and arrangement, exactly the same as the Iliad, of which Homer was then the reputed author, is a question that in the nature of the case admits of no perfectly satisfactory answer. Absolutely the same of course in the nature of human things it cannot be; for even the Christian Scriptures, guarded as they have been by the double sanction of individual and corporate authority, have not been transmitted through eighteen centuries of literary record without being made subject to several very notable interpolations; nor can it even be said that any man at the present day can feel the same degree of certainty with regard to the text of Homer that he does with regard to that of Milton, Tasso, Dante, or even Virgil. Why? Not only because of the greater lapse of time; for in a question of documentary criticism this is often a point of comparatively small moment; but because of the different conditions under which these works were composed, and the different medium through which, in their earliest stage, they were transmitted. We read of no Pisistratus that first collected the scattered books of the Aeneid; the very MS. which Dante gloried in, or something as good, is no doubt lying in the Grand Duke's library in Florence at the present hour. In the case of these poets people may be vexed with various readings and doubtful lines—such questions as curious editors will raise even with regard to modern Scots and Byrons; but there is no talk about cutting out whole books, and the strange process with which learned Germans are so familiar, of restoring a great poem to its integrity by depriving it of some of its most beautiful parts. Let us endeavour then to fix a steady eye on the real state of the Homeric text at the time when it was collected by Pisistratus. What reason have we to suppose that it was then to any considerable extent interpolated, or changed in any way from its original condition as it came from the mouth of Homer? The answer to this question depends upon another. Who were the conservators of that trust previous to the time of Pisistratus; and what safeguards were they provided with against those invasions of spurious matter to which all works of extensive circulation, and general popularity, are especially subject? The conservators of the trust are, in the first place, the national ἀοδοι, minstrels or bards, who, like Homer himself, made a profession of singing songs and epic poems for the amusement of the people; and, when these had begun to wane, they were succeeded by the rhapsodists or popular reciters, who performed the same functions, but with less original genius and less social dignity in an age when historians, and orators, and philosophers, and rhetoricians, had usurped many of the functions that had originally been exercised by the ἀοδοι. Now it is of immense importance in the criticism of Homer to ascertain clearly if possible what was the moral position of the original minstrels' profession with regard to the great poet: for on this depends the likelihood of their either loosely interpolating or conscientiously respecting the integrity of his works. That they cannot have felt the same religious sort of respect for him that arose in the Greeks of a later age, seems pretty evident; they were minstrels by trade as well as he, and could only look upon him in the exercise of their profession as primus inter pares. Nevertheless, they did respect him very much; of which we have ample evidence in the existence of the famous guild or institution of poets in Chios, known by the name of the Homeridae, or sons of Homer, concerning whom we have the most distinct testimony in Harpocration. Whether any of the actual descendants of the poet formed the original nucleus of this fraternity we cannot tell; but its existence under that designation is ample proof of the extraordinary respect in which Homer continued to be held in the parts of Asia nearest to his birthplace, and affords a sufficient practical guarantee that the professional minstrels who were incorporated under this name would not, from mere rash conceit, be inclined to tamper with the tradition of the Smyrnaean muse of which they were the select depositaries. On the other hand, it must not be forgotten that a poem like the Iliad, made not to be read as a continuous book, but to be sung in separate parts for the public amusement, was peculiarly liable to have such additions made to it or variations as the occasion might require. Of this our own ballads (see Chambers' Songs and Ballads of Scotland, p. 106, note) supply everywhere abundant proof, the existing version of which is often pieced together from a variety of different texts, presenting all sorts of deficiencies and redundancies. That something of this kind should not have taken place with regard to the Homeric poems in general circulation through the scattered tribes of the Greeks, would have been positively miraculous; and we must suppose that the principal business of Pisistratus, in collecting these poems, was not, as some have strangely supposed, to create an order which never existed, but to fix an order which was in danger of being lost. Whether in doing so he had the advantage of any complete correct text derived from the Homeridae of Chios, with which to compose and correct the scattered rhapsodies in popular currency, we cannot say; but it is not at all unlikely—that any rate he would have little difficulty in restoring the original arrangement of the books, partly because that order in the generality of cases shines out manifestly from the inherent character of the plot, and the progress of the story, partly because there could not fail to exist among the more literate and accomplished of the rhapsodists some one who could recite by memory not merely single books, but the whole concatenation of books, as the Homeridae of Chios had received them from their great father. Most assuredly, as has been insisted on both by Baumelein and Grote, he never could have set himself seriously to make extensive modern interpolations in poems, the contents of which were well known over the whole of Greece, and had in Athens been made the subject of a special public regulation by their great lawgiver, Solon. (See Diog. Laert., in Solon 9.)
In the view here given of the respective functions of the Homeridae, and of Pisistratus, in the transmission of the Homeric poems, we have said nothing about the famous question, whether the art of writing was known in Homer's time? because a little reflection will show that this question has really very little bearing on the genuineness of the poems as we now possess them, and besides is a question that does not admit of a satisfactory answer. At the first blush, indeed, when a modern who is the slave of pen and ink, hears it stated that in all likelihood the great bard of the Iliad could neither read nor write, he is apt to feel very much as if the whole foundation for his critical faith in the poet was removed from beneath his feet, and there was no longer any ground for him to stand on. How many an eloquent modern speaker might be struck dumb if pen, ink, and paper were suddenly removed from the category of things that be! But they managed these matters differently on Parnassus and Helicon in the days when Memory was the mother of the Muses, and the Muses could sing sweetly without help from a goose quill. We have the most distinct testimony of Julius Caesar (B. C. vi. 14), to the effect "that the pupils of the Druids learn by heart a great number of verses; and some continue twenty years in a course of instruction. Nor do they think it right to commit their doctrines to writing, though in other matters they use the Greek alphabet. This they appear to me to do for two reasons; first, that they may not make their religious mysteries too common and profane by general publication, and again, that they may not weaken the power of memory in their scholars by teaching them to trust to written notes; for nothing is more common than that the abundance of literary helps teaches persons to remit their exertions in committing their knowledge to memory." This remarkable passage reveals to us in the most striking manner the real secret of the transmission of the Homeric poems without the help of written manuscripts; the memory of the minstrels was not more uncertain, but more true and trustworthy for this very reason, that they were not accustomed to depend for the faithful recollection of the poems which they recited, upon a leaf of papyrus or a library itself. In estimating the memorial powers of these men we must never forget not only that they exercised their art under intellectual conditions exactly the reverse of those which now exist, but also that they had no other business or interests by which to distract their attention, and so could perform certain feats with ease, that bear the same relation to our common exercises of memory, that tumbling and rope-dancing do to common walking. It is always in our power, by exclusive and persevering exercise of a favourite faculty in a favourite sphere, to perform apparent prodigies. We shall therefore readily disabuse ourselves of the superficial modern notion that written memoranda are necessary to the faithfulness of versified tradition; the "wonder," as it has been called by Grote, of the "preservation" of such long poems from such early ages will become part of the common intellectual drill of an age eloquent without paper, and poetical without ink; and the question will only remain, as a matter of legitimate curiosity with regard to the Iliad and Odyssey, whether their author was acquainted with those useful arts of literary conservation, the knowledge of which is in our days justly accounted a necessary element in the lowest stages of popular education. Now with regard to the use of letters in Greece, the general voice of Hellenic antiquity pointed to Cadmus as having imported these cunning symbols from Phoenicia at a period far antecedent to the age of Homer, or even the supposed date of the Trojan War; and this tradition is consistent not only with the philological analysis of their letters of the alphabet, but with the then general state of the civilization, and the admitted intercourse between Asia and the West as having taken place in various forms at a very early period of the history of the world. There is every probability, therefore, in favour of the belief that letters, in some shape or other, were known in Greece, at whatever date, between the Trojan War and the year 850, which may be assumed as most convenient for the age of Homer. But from this probable belief with regard to the epoch of the knowledge of letters in Greece, the distance to a reasonable conviction, with regard to the practice of Homer himself in composing and preserving his poems, is very great, and not lightly to be overlooked. That letters, when first introduced, were used only in great public matters, and for inscriptions in wood, stone, lead, and other heavy materials, not for writing a long concatenation of poetic rhapsodies, is conformable to the nature of the thing, and to every testimony that we have on the subject. According to the usual slow progress of human affairs, three centuries at least may well have been required to transfer letters from the rare service of temple-porticoes and monumental pillars, to the common use of literary conservation; so that, even assuming the use of letters for public purposes in the days of Homer, the probability may be considered very small that they were actually used by the poet or his immediate successors for any merely literary purpose. This probability becomes even less, when we consider that there is not a single allusion in the whole forty-eight books of the two poems to writing or books as a part of the civilization which they describe (the οἰκουρα ἀγρύπνοι, in Iliad, vi. 168, being ambiguous); and though this in itself were no conclusive argument, as any poet who uses pen and ink is not even in these days obliged to make his heroes do so, yet taken in connection with the general character of the poems, and the circumstances of the time, as ascertained by historical analogy, it is in nowise to be looked on as an altogether indifferent circumstance.
So far we have confined our remarks to the external aids and authorities, by means of which the poet and his works are in the first place commended to our attention. It now remains from this general basis of outward historical probabilities and presumptions, to direct our inquiry into the character and genius of the poems themselves, and from this investigation either to transmute our probabilities into certainties, or throw them aside as unsupported, or contradicted by a higher, and the highest sort of evidence. For no mere array of authorities, however venerable, can in the long run support an incoherent tradition that carries its own contradiction in its face. This eternal superiority of immaterial and inherent, to merely accredited evidence, has, since Bentley's famous dissection of the epistles of Phalaris, banished from the shelves of authentic classical tradition, many a hoary tome that had long held an honoured place there, along with the most venerated worthies of the Greek and Roman pantheon. How stands the case with regard to the Iliad and Odyssey? Are these works what they have for nearly three thousand years been reputed to be—the great poems of a great old Ilian poet—or do they bear the trick of forgery on their face, and show the patch-work of a bungling fabricator on the phylacteries of their outer garment?
The severe ordeal which the Homeric poems, in the way of internal analysis, have undergone, takes its rise in modern times from the publication of a famous edition, by F. A. Wolf, a German professor of extraordinary talent, in the year 1795. This scholar, partly following the bent of his own genius, partly no doubt carried along by the general revolutionary tendencies of the age, did, in the Prolegomena prefixed to his edition, set forth an extremely sceptical doctrine with regard to Homer and his poetry, with such rare learning, vigour, and taste, that it was impossible for German minds to resist him; and though the whole tendency and tone of English scholarship runs in a directly contrary direction, as
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1 It is remarkable that the germs of the Wolfian theory travelled from this country over to Germany; and Wolf, in his Prolegomena, honestly recognizes Wood and Bentley as valuable pioneers of the doctrine which he so eloquently endorses. Bentley's well-known utterance with regard to Homer is found in his Remarks on a late Discourse on Freethinking, by Philalethorus Lipsenius (Works by Dyce, iii., 304). "To prove Homer's universal knowledge, our author says, 'he designed his poems for eternity to please and instruct mankind;' but take my word for it, poor Homer, in those circumstances and early times, had never such aspiring thoughts. 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 Odyssey for the other sex;" from which passage, thrown out incidentally, however, be it remembered, and not deliberately the great work of Clinton sufficiently testifies; it cannot be denied that beyond the pale of mere Oxonians the Wolfian views have exercised no small influence in forming the critical opinions of some of the best educated minds in England. The critical spirit of the age, the sceptical researches of Niebuhr with regard to Roman history, and the increasing action of German scholarship on the learning of this country, have all tended to produce this result. The theory of Wolf, founded not merely on a minute critical analysis of the poems, but, as he imagined also, on satisfactory external evidence, was to the effect, that whether a great poet called Homer ever existed or not, the two great poems generally attributed to him are no homogeneous works created by the plastic power of a presiding genius, but mere aggregates of various origin, gathered together from the great floating element of popular poetry in Greece, and cunningly licked into shape by certain expert literary artizans in the days of Pisistratus. Now, with regard to the external evidence on which this paradox is founded, it seems at this hour generally agreed, even among the Germans, that the authorities relied on by Wolf do in no wise support his extreme conclusion—do not in fact go beyond the historical statement of the matter which we have just made, a statement perfectly consistent both with the personal existence of one great poet, and the organizing action of his presiding spirit on the two great poems that go by his name. The advocates of the Wolfian theory, therefore, are now driven to confine themselves to a series of arguments drawn from the minute critical examination of the text of the poems, by means of which they think they have evolved such an imposing array of inconsistencies, as is utterly incompatible with the belief in the presiding control of one great mind. Among those who have distinguished themselves in this field of what we may call Homeric histology, is Carl Lachmann, lately deceased, a Berlin professor of great erudition and subtlety, as attested by well-known works in various departments of philological investigation. It behoves us, therefore, to inquire, on what presumptions and on what principles the analytic criticism of this school is founded; and when we have shown that these presumptions require to be inverted, and that these principles are either altogether false or altogether misapplied, we may spare our readers the trouble of a minute and curious refutation of the individual objections. Those who wish to pursue the question into its details may consult the little tract of Lachmann (Beiträge zur Homer's Ilias, Berlin, 1847), or the English work of Colonel Mure (A Critical History of the Language and Literature of Ancient Greece, 2d edition, London 1854, vols. i. and ii.)—a book replete with the best German learning, and, what is of greater consequence, animated throughout with a spirit of good sense, and a fine poetical appreciation, which very few Germans can boast of.
In an investigation of this kind the presumptions with which a man starts, though not always distinctly set forth, are of the utmost consequence in determining his procedure. The false historical presumptions from which Wolf proceeded, naturally led him to seek for flaws in the texture of the Homeric poems; and it is manifest that even Mr Grote, who justly considers the extreme Wolfian theory as quite untenable, in propounding his wild scheme of resolving the Iliad into two distinct parts, has been influenced, partly by his desire to mitigate what he calls "the wonder" of the creation, and the preservation of two such long continuous poems, bearing the stamp of one mind, in an age when writing was altogether unknown. That there are no external historical presumptions of this kind we have already attempted to show; a presumption of a different kind we shall now state. It is not to be presumed that Homer would be anxiously accurate about the mere articulation or joint-work of his epic poems, for several reasons. First, because he was a poet, and aimed, as all true poets do, mainly at producing an effect on the feelings and imaginations of his hearers, not on their mere cognitive capacity. Small mistakes in incidental matters taken cognizance of by the curious understanding only, might, without offence, be committed by a great singer of poetry, as they would certainly not be observed by a healthy-minded hearer; and that mistakes of this kind actually have been made, and are even now daily made by poets and novelists of the highest order, has been shown by Colonel Mure in the most effective manner. Second, because he was a popular poet, a wandering minstrel with a lyre in his hand, as he is truly represented in all the old biographies, and not a learned Southey sitting in a library, with books, and desk, and pen and ink, printers' proof sheets, publishers' quarterly reviews, and every sort of literary apparatus of the newest and most approved description. In judging of the Iliad as a whole, we must never forget, though it seems to be very generally forgotten, that it was not, could not be, Homer's immediate object to compose a great whole, for the plain and simple reason that he had comparatively few opportunities of using such a whole. His art, therefore, was to concatenate a series of parts, which, while they might be used with effect on a few great festive occasions as a whole, were meant to produce their general and most appreciable effect, in the shape of parts either absolutely complete in themselves, or admitting of being easily supplemented by the indwelling traditional lore, which the poet could legitimately presuppose in the minds of his hearers. Something analogous to this we have in the great historical plays of Shakspeare, consisting of several parts, in any of which if there happened to be some small inconsistencies with the other parts, none but a curious person making a business of criticism would ever notice it, as the parts, though connected in conception, are so constructed as to give the impression of completeness, when they are represented as separate wholes. If this point be duly considered, and there is nothing more certain or more duly attested in the history of these poems, the weakness of a great number of the objections made by Lachmann and Grote to the concatenation of the Iliad will instantly appear. The tenth book, for instance—that in which the midnight expedition of Diomedes and Ulysses is described,—has, it is said, no necessary connection with the parts of the poem that precede or follow, and might be cut out without injury. Of course; because it was the object of the poet so to string together a number of little wholes, originally independent, that they might still remain little wholes, and yet become parts of a great whole—an exquisite trick of art plainly, and which, as the whole history of popular poetry teaches, it required precisely a mighty genius like Homer to perform. And this brings us to the third presumption, with which we must start in judging of the alleged inconsistencies of the Iliad. We must bear in mind that Homer did not make his materials, but received them; the little wholes which he had to recast and organize into a great whole, already existed in the minds and in the mouths of the people whom he addressed, just as the Romaic ballads that arose out of the war of independence in 1821-7, exist in the minds and mouths of the Hellenes of the present day, waiting for some second Homer, it may be, to fuse them into a great epos of Messolonghi, when the day may come.
Measured in every word, one thing seems plain, that by using the word "Sequel," the great critic gives us plainly to understand that he held there was an essential unity of plan going through both works, which puts him plainly out of the roll of thorough-going Wolfians, and advocates of what Nitsch calls the "Klein-Ilieder-theorie." Among other notable anticipators of Wolf's theory, the case of the Neapolitan philosopher Vico has often been mentioned. See Scienza nuova libro terzo; della discevuta del vero Omero, first published in the year 1723, and repeatedly reprinted. at length have come for that reconstruction of that Byzantine empire which the late Czar of Russia said he would on no account tolerate. In the same way, an epic poem of Caledonian loyalty, were the times favourable, might be made out of the materials contained in the Scottish Jacobite songs; and a grander epos still, called "The Fall of Napoleon," might be constructed containing many finely dramatic materials from the war songs composed by Körner and others in the great German rising of 1813. Now, if the rich materials of popular traditional song, out of which Homer constructed the Iliad (and no person who knows anything about such matters will think it more probable that he made it out of nothing), contained, as they could not but contain, certain elements that would be incongruous, when the different parts were worked up into a new whole; and if Homer did not care—as the practice of his art did not require him to be particularly curious—whether every line or phrase that marked the original independence of these parts, was nicely obliterated, it is manifest that the small flaws in the concatenation which may here and there be visible to the curious eye, prove, not, as Lachmann imagines, that one poet did not organize the whole, but that Homer gave himself no concern to disguise the fact, that the several parts of his poem, both in the popular tradition and in the actual practice of his art, had a complete and independent existence apart from the magnificent whole into which his genius had organized them.
These considerations will enable the student of Homer to make short work, not only with the hypercritical cautiousness and the peeping anatomy of Lachmann's Betrachtungen, but also with the more large and philosophical analysis of Mr Grote. We must not start in our inquiry into the unity of the Iliad, with the strong inclination to magnify the importance of small inconsistencies, but with the most charitable desire possible to overlook them. This poet, as compared with Virgil, Dante, or Milton, demands the special indulgence of the critic; and yet it does rather seem that from Wolf down to Grote, the whole army of objectors are keenly set upon being particularly severe, in many cases positively ill-natured, and, from a poetical point of view, as Colonel Mure has triumphantly shown, positively unjust. For not only do they pay no regard to those kindly considerations which we have stated, arising out of the peculiar position of the poet, and the nature of his materials, but with a perverse ingenuity pardonable scarcely in Germans, they insist on judging poetry by rules applicable only to works composed with a strictly practical or a purely scientific view. If an experienced soldier like Napoleon could criticise with such a cutting eloquence the description of the taking of Troy by the polished and learned Virgil, which yet speaks admirably to the imagination—(see Classical Museum, vol. i., p. 205)—how strange and how unreasonable that a gentleman of Mr Grote's discernment should urge as a strong proof against the authenticity of the seventh book of the Iliad, the circumstance that it represents a ditch or dyke, as having been made in the ninth year of the war, which, according to all principles of military tactics, should have been made, as Thucydides (i. 11.) seems to have taken the liberty of supposing it was made, in the first year! The answer to all such very scientific cavils is this, that Homer was neither a soldier nor a critic, but a poet; and that when composing the seventh book of the Iliad, he had before his mind's eye not a future Vegetius or a Grote, but only the wrath of Achilles, and the place which that occupied in the popular traditions of Æolia. If critical spectacles were not used when popular poems were composed, their correct appreciation can allow no place to scientific microscopes. Many things may be discovered by scientific eyes,—wonders in the white rock, and wonders in the blue cheese,—but the character and effect of popular poetry does not come within the laws of that particular kind of vision. Even Mr Grote, who has so ably exposed the absurdity of the Wolfian "small song theory" (Klein-lieder-theorie), which resolves the Iliad into an aggregate of separate ballads, implying no common authorship on the ground of alleged inconsistencies, has, in attempting to resolve the same great work into two separate works, the Achilleid and the Iliad, adopted a principle of criticism, which every man who has any practical knowledge of poets and poetry, must feel to be quite out of place. "The last two books of the poem," he says, "were probably additions to the original Achilleid; for the death of Hector satisfies the exigencies of a coherent scheme, and we are not entitled to extend the oldest poem beyond the limits which such necessity prescribes." And in the spirit of this criticism, he cuts out the whole books, from the 2d to the 7th inclusive, because the coherent scheme of an Achilleid is sufficiently satisfied without them, and there is no necessity for extending the oldest poem beyond the limits which such exigency requires. But a great poet is not influenced in the selection or the arrangement of his material by any exigency of this kind; that rude coherency of scheme which satisfies a mere logical mind, may omit precisely those elements which work most powerfully on his own mind, and that of his hearers; not imaginative meagreness and parsimony, but luxuriance and exuberance is his law. On the whole, the candid student of Lachmann and Grote, if he be a person of native poetical appreciation, will have no difficulty in coming to the conclusion, that the great mass of the recent sceptical objections against the organic unity of the Iliad, proceed on essentially perverse and oblique principles, and that the brave old minstrel has assuredly fallen on evil days, when men are eager to judge him for whose judgment he never wrote, and by canons which he never acknowledged.
The current of these remarks by no means implies that there are no interpolations in the received text of Homer. They are merely to the effect, that the sharpest scrutiny of modern criticism and hypercriticism has failed to point out any such gross incongruities in the component parts of the poem, as would distinctly indicate the separate authorship of those parts. In other words, the positive impression of an organic unity which the unlearned reader receives from the perusal of these poems, can in no wise be considered to have been nullified by the multiform endeavours of learned men to prove, that these famous poems are, to any considerable extent, an aggregation of independent and unharmonized integers. That those integers once existed in that crude state, may be assumed as most certainly true; but the poems, as we now have them, prove, in the face of the most cruel analysis, that these crude elements did, in the earliest ages of Greek culture, come under the fusing and formative influence of a great poet-mind so completely, that any attempt to resolve them into their primitive elements by the method of mere analysis must prove a failure. With this understanding, every reasonable man must be willing to admit that there are, and must in the nature of the case be, not a few extraneous additions to a work, which was a sort of public property in everybody's hands for several hundred years before it was finally fixed down to the literary form in which we now have it. Some of these interpolations, of course, may be pointed out, with more or less success, according to the general laws by which incongruities in literary documents are exposed; but in addition to the presumptions for leniency of treatment already stated, the critical reviser of the Homeric text must bear in mind, that there prevails in the popular poetry of all countries a certain current tone, and common property in thought and in expression, which makes it extremely difficult, from mere internal evidence, to distinguish the original work of the great master-mind from the additions made by a skilful interpolator. Under these extremely delicate and dubious conditions, it does appear extremely strange, that Lachmann and so many other learned Germans, should talk with as much dogmatic decision about the original constituent elements of the *Iliad*, as if they had been present at their creation, and personally superintended their manufacture; and a plain man can only conclude with regard to the whole matter, that in philology, as in metaphysics, these minute investigators have, by an intense special devotion, worked themselves into a sort of chronic insanity, from which only time and the gradual operation of certain potent political and social causes may ultimately achieve their redemption.
Before we leave this part of the subject a few words may be allowed to the famous question, Whether, assuming Homer's authorship of the *Iliad*, there be not reasonable grounds for assigning the *Odyssey* to the plastic powers of a different and less mighty minstrel? Now, if this were altogether an open question, and there were no distinct and intelligible Hellenic traditions as to the common authorship of these two wonderful poems, not a few things might be urged in favour of a separate authorship which might have weight with a reasonable critic. There is a certain more mild and subdued tone in the *Odyssey*, which, along with certain points of difference in incidental matters, might be sufficient, were there no contrary evidence, to authorize the supposition of a different intellectual origin. But the great error of those who, in modern times, take upon themselves to assert the separate authorship of these works, is the groundless assumption that the general voice and tradition of Hellenic antiquity is to be taken as an element of no weightsoever, in the critical estimate of such a matter. On this point we differ *toto ceelo* from the Germans, and are nothing ashamed to believe, with our learned countryman Colonel Mure, that Aristotle, Plato, and the overwhelming majority of the highest intellects in Greece, had very sufficient reasons for placing a wide gulph between the two epic poems which they agreed to stamp with the name of Homer, and the very inferior worksof a cognate character, known afterwards under the name of the *Epic Cycle*. Nature did not produce twin Homers in those old Greek days, we may depend on it, any more than she has produced in these days twin Dantes or twin Shakespeares. If there had been a second Homer of genius large enough to produce a counterpoise to such a work as the *Iliad*, no doubt the Homericide of some second Chios would have been equally eager to stereotype his memory in their composition, and to immortalize themselves with his name. But precisely, we imagine, because there was only one Homer, was there only one guild of gentle Homericide, and one uniform undisputed authorship of the *Iliad* and the *Odyssey* among the Greeks, till some pragmatical grammarians in meagre Alexandria (among whom a certain Xenon and Hellanicus are specialized), the prototypes of our modern Wolfians, began to nibble at imagined incongruities, and to moot the question of separate authorship. Such being the historical conditions under which the question is raised, it is manifest that the presumptions, as in the question about the unity of the *Iliad*, are all against the disintegrators; and a detailed examination of their array of minute and microscopic objections to the common authorship will, in all likelihood, bring the intelligent student, as it has brought Colonel Mure, to a distinct verdict of *not proven*. One may, indeed, urge the same objection against all the objections of the Separatists—Xegetowers as they were called—that Mr Grote has urged against Lachmann and the minute directors of the *Iliad*. "The Wolfian theory," says that eminent scholar, "explains the gaps and contradictions throughout the narrative, but it explains nothing else." In like manner, we may say the theory of the Separatists explains the small incongruities between the *Iliad* and the *Odyssey*, but it leaves out of account altogether a more difficult matter to explain—the very remarkable congruity that exists between the whole style, tone, colour, and materials of these poems. This congruity has been pointed out with great skill and effect by Colonel Mure, also by a recent French writer, Alexis Pierron (*Litterature Grecque*, Paris, 1850), whose words, after so much heavy discussion with the Germans, the English reader will doubtless accept as a welcome relief:
"Mais le style, les tours de phrase, l'ordre et le mouvement des pensées! mais la vérification! mais les formules consacrées! mais les épithètes traditionnelles! c'est là ce que les chorizotes n'aglissent de comparer dans les deux poèmes. Je n'hésite pas à dire, que cent vers pris au hasard dans l'un ne ressemblent pas moins à cent vers pris dans l'autre, et pour la facture, et pour la tournure, et pour le mouvement général, que ceux-ci ne ressemblent à tous les vers qui les précèdent et les suivent. Si le style est l'homme même, comme dit Buffon, le même style c'est le même homme. Il n'y a qu'un Homère. Le style ne s'éloigne pas; et, malgré tous les efforts, on ne prend pas le tour d'esprit d'un autre; on n'agit qu'avec soi-même, mieux qu'autrui ou plus mal, aussi bien peut-être, mais toujours pareillement. Sans doute c'est une grande merveille que le même homme qui a composé l'Iliade soit aussi l'auteur de l'Odyssee. Mais le phénomène est si extraordinaire, admis par le chorizote est bien plus incroyable encore. Le vieux Pythagoricien Ennius, disait que l'âme d'Homère avait passé dans la sienna; et l'on sait quel Homère c'était qu'Ennius. C'est bien une autre métamorphose qu'il nous faudrait admettre, pour donner raison à ces Pythagoriciens nouveaux. Il y a une chose cent fois plus extraordinaire que l'existence d'un Homère unique, c'est l'existence de deux Homères."
After having cleared our way through this dreary accumulation of critical briars and brambles, it only remains that we state shortly what is the real character and worth of the Homeric poems, as we have them, and what is their proper and enduring place in the poetical literature of the world. And here we must start with a grateful recognition of the point of view on which our judgment of the Homeric poems has been placed by the labours of Wolf and his followers. Their error did not lie in their blindness to the true character of these productions, but in their attributing to a dozen or a score of Homers a phenomenon which finds a more obvious and satisfactory explanation in the time-honoured recognition of one. But the genuine character of the *Iliad* and the *Odyssey* as the poetry of the people, composed to be sung, not the poetry of the individual, written to be read, though previously discovered by Bentley, Vico, and Wood, was never generally acknowledged and felt till it was brought forward by Wolf, and scattered over Europe by the host of enthusiastic disciples whom his genius roused into a new and vivid consciousness of a great truth. All the errors of that school, in fact, which we have been obliged to criticise in severe language, were but exaggerations and caricatures of the great truth which Wolf propounded in his *Prælogomena* of the essential generic difference between *Paradise Lost*, the epos of the scholarly man Milton, and Homer's *Iliad*, the epos of the rude Greek people. Homer lived in an age when the individual poet had not yet commenced to separate himself from the general culture of his people, after such a strange fashion as we see in the Shelleys, the Byrons, the Wordsworths, and the Tennysons of modern times. The poetry of Homer, therefore, represents the age of Homer more completely than the most popular of our highly cultivated modern poetry represents the age to which the poet belongs. The reason of this plainly is, that in the earliest ages of society, the minstrel was the only and the universal exponent of the highest moral and intellectual life of his age, and had an existence only as expressing
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1. "Some people believe in twenty Homers; we in one. Nature is not so prodigal of her poets." (John Wilson, in *Blackwood's Magazine*, April 1831.) 2. An Essay On the Original Genius and Writings of Homer, by R. Wood, Esq., London, 1770. this culture in a popular and effective way. Whereas, in later times, the man of genius rose into an independent existence, and often expressed merely his own culture, and that of a select body—more or less numerous—of literary sympathizers and admirers whom he might have the power to attach. The intimate relation that existed between the heroic Ἀχιλλεύς and his hearers may perhaps be best understood by comparing that sort of action and reaction which exists between the writers of leading articles in a newspaper like the Times and the public to whom their daily appeals are addressed. A similar case occurs in the weekly addresses of a popular preacher to a religious people like the Scotch, whose faith has not degenerated into decent formalism or unmeaning ceremonial. Herein, therefore, lies the invaluable excellence of the Homeric poems, which Wolf profoundly felt, and which made him careless about the mere personality of their reputed author—in the fact that, whether these poems be the composition of one, or of half-a-hundred minstrels, they are equally inspired by the breath of a great poetic soul, and that soul the highest life of the Greek people, at one of the most poetical periods of its existence. Recognizing this fundamental truth, the great German critic could readily let loose from his grasp a great many much-bespooken excellencies of the mere man Homer, apart from the Greek people, which were either quite imaginary, or not at all necessary to the main fact of the essentially popular and national character of the poems. In room of a great mass of foolish indiscriminate eulogy heaped up by various famous critics both ancient and modern, Wolf enunciated the peculiar excellence of the great king of Hellenic ballad-singers in the following simple and significant words:—"Hec carmina paulo diligentius cognita admirandae ostendant via nature atque ingenii minorem artis, nullam reconditae doctrinae et exquisita" (Prologem. 12). The first great excellence of Homer's poetry, as here expressed, undoubtedly lies in its complete naturalness, simplicity, and healthiness, with an entire absence of all those faults which are the natural product of over-stimulated art in a high stage of intellectual culture. In thought, Homer exhibits nothing strained, far-fetched, or affected; in sentiment, no morbid groping; no curious over-nice sensibility in particular favourite directions; in moral tone, neither prudery nor wantonness; no uncomfortable strife between the real and the ideal, between poetry and life, between rhyme and reason. With the bard of the Iliad, as indeed to a great extent with all the Greek poets in the best ages, the ideal is only the highest step in the ladder of the real. In style again, we find in Homer, as in the Old Testament, nothing that smacks of the artist; there is no forced and studied concentration as in Thucydides and Tacitus; no stringing together of brilliant antitheses as in Velleius Paterculus; much less any theatrical turgidity and prepared pomp of words as in Lucan, and not a few of the later classics, both Greek and Roman, who flourished at a period when language had lost its native modesty and become vitiated, as a conceited beauty does by an assiduous contemplation of her own perfections. Closely connected with this complete naturalness of Homer, is his remarkable objectiveness, as the German critics call it—that is to say, the extraordinary clearness, breadth, accuracy, and vigour of his impressions of the external world; or, as an artist would say, his fine eye both for minute delicacy of detail and grandeur of general effect in his pictures. The reason of this lies in the fact that Homer lived in a perfectly natural state of society, when all men, and especially poets, were constantly called upon to use their eyes, not upon grey parchment and spotted paper, but upon the fresh and ever-changing variety of those soul-seizing pictures which nature and life are continually pouring in upon those whose eyes are quick and open to her fulness. In Homer there is found not the least trace of the anxiously subtle thought, the loose-floating sentiment, the cloudy imaginations, the dim speculations, the grey intangible abstractions that never fail to characterize the poetry of a later age, when the particular mental character of the poet assumes an undue prominence, and the writer wastes himself in a painful struggle to find adequate expressions for certain infinite longings and indefinite desires that have no counterpart in the external world, or in the bosom of any healthy-minded reader. Not a less remarkable consequence of the nice harmony between Homer and his audience was the honest faith and unaffected religiousness that breathes through every page of his two great works. Poets, indeed, are naturally a religious race, and, except under peculiar, harsh influences, readily harmonize with the theological belief of the country to whose highest human aspirations it is their high mission to give utterance. But in ages of high intellectual culture, when the individual often runs aside into strange tracks of private speculation, the leading minds of the day, including poets, often find themselves forced into a state of strange and uncomfortable protest against the religious convictions of the masses whom they are destined to lead; and in this way strange phenomena become visible in the literary heaven—as in the case of Euripides, Lucretius, Lucan, Lucian, Goethe, Byron, Burns, Shelley, and many more. With difficulties of this kind, which always interfere to a great extent with a poet's popular influence, Homer had nothing to do. The theology of his day was no doubt full of puerilities, and not free from contradictions; but philosophy yet unborn had not brought these puerilities and inconsistencies into a distinctly felt collision with the higher sentiments of a healthy piety in the mind of the great minstrel. Homer's piety is accordingly thoroughly serious, but within playfully cheerful. Calvinistic readers might think him jesting sometimes; and grave German critics have been offended at the tone of the love affair of Ares and Aphrodite in Odyssey viii., which they confidently pronounce an interpolation; but they are mistaken.—Lucian did not live till 1000 years afterwards, and he wrote many clever comic sketches indeed, but not an Iliad. The epic poet, or great popular minstrel of a heroic age, is always a believer.
The extraordinary excellence of the Iliad and Odyssey as pattern specimens of the popular epos, may be most readily discerned by comparing them with the Niebelungen-lay of the Germans, a poem composed in a similar stage of society, and so much under the same circumstances that Lachmann actually set himself to analyse it after the Wolfin fashion, and resolve it into what he considered its constituent "small songs." In this Teutonic epos the unprejudiced reader will, along with many quiet beauties, discover an utter want of that equestrian vigour, manliness, and fire, which never remit in the sinewy and bracing course of the Iliad. Homer sometimes seems to take his subject easily,—either sleeps himself, no doubt, or some interpolated Homerid is sleeping in his chair,—but he is never flat, never thin, never weak. Of the Niebelungen-lay, on the other hand, we may say that breadth, dilution, and weakness, are the characteristics; it is a German Iliad, and a very German Iliad indeed, as Coleridge said of the Messiah of Klepatoek—an Iliad composed by an old German in his easy chair, enveloping his ungirt muse in a loose-floating atmosphere of tobacco smoke;—Homer in his slip-
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1 On this point, and on the subject of Homeric interpolation generally, see some admirable remarks in a paper by W. Watkins Lloyd. Classical Museum, vol. vi., p. 387. 2 On the interesting subject of the Theology of Homer, see Nägelbach's Homerische Theologie, Nürnberg, 1849; and Classical Museum, vol. vii., p. 414. The work of Granville Penn—"An Examination of the Primary Argument of the Iliad, London, 1821"—contains some ideas on this subject that must be regarded as high-flown and hyperbolical, and remote from the simple truth. pers. But besides vigour, the Greek asserts his proud pre-eminence over the German by the healthy hilarity, and the rich sunny luxuriance of his fine Ionic temperament. One feels that these poems were written in a clime where, next to Olympian Jove, the shining Apollo was the great object of local worship. His variety and many-sidedness have been equally praised; for, though it is certainly true that there is, for our modern tastes, a very considerable superfluity of mere fighting in the *Iliad*, we must bear in mind that Homer wrote in an age when the soldier was the only hero, and for a people to whom the recital of the military exploits of their ancestors was as full of moral significance, as the trials of the Apostle Paul are to a modern Christian. Not less admirable, finally, than his vigour, his sunniness, and his luxuriant variety, are the sobriety, sense, and moderation—the truly Greek *ouσιαστικόν*—that everywhere regulate, and keep within chaste limits, the billowy enthusiasm of the old minstrel. Occasionally, perhaps, when a patriotic feeling interferes, there may be discerned a little ludicrous exaggeration—as, for example, in the manner in which Hector is made to comport himself before the might of Achilles, in the 22d book; but, generally speaking, the poet's thorough naturalness and truth, keep him by a safe instinct within the nicest limits of good taste. In the Niebelungen-lay, on the other hand, as in Klopfstock's *Messiah*, there is a plentiful exhibition, in the author's way, of the most appalling exaggeration. The catastrophe of the *Odyssey*, no doubt, is sufficiently bloody; but this is the divine retributive vengeance of a goddess for a long series of offences of a very gross and wanton description; and, besides, it may well be called sober and moderate when contrasted with that gigantic Cyclopean architecture of terrors cemented with streaming blood, and wrapt in flames of potentous conflagration, which forms such a grim catastrophe to the grim epos of the Niebelungen.
The works of Homer have been translated into all the notable languages of the west; seldom, however, or never, it is to be feared, with the pervading perception of his true character as a great popular minstrel, the general understanding of which great truth, as we have stated, dates in Europe only from the publication of Wolf's *Prolegomena* about 60 years ago. The best Italian translations are by Cesaretti and Monti; French, by Dacier, de Rochefort, Bidaud, and Dugas-Monthel; German, by Stolberg and Voss; English, by Chapman, Hobbes, Pope, Cowper, Sotheby, and Newman. The principal editions are that of Florence, 1488, cura Demetrii Chalcondylae; the *Editio Princeps*, a rare and beautiful book in 2 vols. folio, of which there is a copy in the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh, and about 60 copies altogether dispersed in various parts of England; Francini, Venice, 1537; H. Stephani, Paris, 1566; Barnes, Cantab., 1711; Clarkii, London, 1729; Foulis, Glasgow, 1756-8; Ernesti, 1759; Alter Vindob, 1789; Villoison, 1788; Wofilius, Hal., 1794; Heyne, 1802; Payne Knight, London, 1820; Spitzner, Gotha, 1836; Bekker, Berlin, 1843; Baumelein, Leipzig, 1854.
For other details with regard to Homeric literature, which forms a library in itself, the student, besides Colonel Mure's great work, may consult Bernhardy's *Griechische Literatur*, Hallo, 1845; Lauer's *Homeriche Poesie*, Berlin, 1851, and Dr Ilme's article in Smith's Dictionary.
**Homer**, or **Omer**, the largest dry measure amongst the Hebrews. It was in later times replaced by the **Cor**, and is estimated at 7,398,000 Paris grains. See **Cords**.