Institutions which embrace competition have, from the character of man’s nature, a great self-sustaining power; and there is no reason to suppose that between the time of Thamyris and that of the Sicyonian rhapsodists this method of recitation had at any time fallen into abeyance. In a fragment of Hesiod[72], quoted by the Scholiast on Pindar, we find the phrase ῥάπτειν ἀοιδήν; but on account of its mention of Homer as a contemporary, this fragment is untrustworthy. In other places, however, he distinctly witnesses to the matches and prizes of the bards, and says that at the match held by Amphidamas in Aulis, he himself won a tripod[73]. Again, Thucydides finds an unequivocal proof of the competition of bards in the beautiful passage which he quotes from the very ancient Hymn to Apollo[74].
I do not think it needful to dwell in detail upon the means privately taken for the transmission of the Homeric songs. Cinæthus of Chios (according to the Scholiast on Pindar[75], quoting Hippostratus, a Sicilian author of uncertain date), ἐῤῥαψῴδησε τὰ Ὁμήρου ἔπη (about 500 B.C.), for the first time at Syracuse. It may be observed that this passage may probably imply the foundation of public recitations there. Eustathius[76], quoting, as Heyne[77] observes, inaccurately, charges Cinæthus with having corrupted the Homeric poems; but the words of the Scholiast need not mean more than that he composed certain poems and threw them into the mass of those which were more or less taken to be Homeric. We need not enlarge upon Creophylus[78], or upon the Homeridæ mentioned by Pindar, and, according to Strabo, claimed as her own by Chios[79]. That name appears to be used freely by Plato[80], without explanation, as if in his own time they formed a well-known school. According to Athenæus[81], quoting Aristocles, a writer of uncertain date, the name Ὁμηρισταὶ was given to the rhapsodists generally.
The Iliad and the Odyssey were known to Herodotus under their present titles, as we find from his references to them. But it is justly argued by Heyne, that there must have been known poems of their scope and subject at the time when the other Cyclic poems were written, which fill up the interval between them, and complete the Troic story[82]; that is to say, not long after the commencement of the Olympiads.
Again, it is needless to do more than simply touch upon the relation of Homer to Greek letters and culture in general. He was the source of tragedy, the first text-book of philosophers, and the basis of liberal education; so much so, that Alcibiades is said to have struck his schoolmaster for having no MS. rhapsody of the Iliad[83], while Xenophon quotes Niceratus as saying that his father made him learn the Iliad and Odyssey, and that he could repeat the whole of them by heart[84]. Cassander, king of Macedon, according to Athenæus, could do nearly as much. He had by heart τῶν ἐπῶν τὰ πολλά.[85]
Passing on from this evidence of general estimation, I come to what is more important with respect to the question of the text—that is, the state of the poems at the time of the Alexandrian recensions, as it is exhibited by Villoison, from the Venetian Scholia on the Iliad which he discovered. From this source appears to me to proceed our best warrant for believing in the general soundness of the text.
The first tendencies of the Alexandrian school, as they are represented by Zenodotus, appear to have been towards very free excision and emendation. Aristarchus, its highest authority, is considered to represent a reaction towards more sober handling. The plan of expressing suspicion by obeli was a good one—it raised the question of genuineness without foreclosing it. The passages which he excluded stand in the text, and many among them are not much damaged by the condemnation. One particularly, in the speech of Phœnix,[86] appears to me alike beautiful and characteristic. After all, the obelos is generally attached to lines of amplification and poetic ornament; which could be dispensed with, and yet leave the sense not vitally mutilated. But we may quote Aristarchus as a witness, on the whole, to the substantial soundness of the text. For it is plain that the affirmation of all his doubts would still leave us with the substance of the Iliad as it is; while it seems that the judgment of mankind, or rather its feeling, which in such a matter is worth more than its judgment, has refused to go as far as he did, for his doubts or adverse verdicts are recorded, but the lines and passages remain, are still read and taught as Homer, and are not pretended to be distinguishable by any broad mark of intrinsic inferiority. It is not meant that the soundness of each line has been considered and affirmed to be free from doubt, but that it has been felt that, while clear discrimination in detail was impracticable, retention was, on the whole, safer than exclusion. Nor is this because a principle of blind credulity has prevailed. On the contrary, the same judgment, feeling, or instinct, be it what it may, of civilised man, which has found it safest to adhere to the traditional text of Homer, has likewise thought it safest to rule the case of authorship adversely as to the Hymns. Under all the circumstances, I find no difficulty in understanding such accounts as that which tells us that the inquiry, which is the best edition of Homer? was met with the answer, ‘the oldest;’—or such a passage as that of Lucian,[87] who introduces Homer in the Shades, declaring that the ἀθετούμεναι στίχες, the suspected and rejected verses, were all his; whereupon, says Lucian, I recognised the abundant frigidity of the school of Zenodotus and Aristarchus. This is in an ironical work; but ironical works are often used as the vehicles of real opinions.
The Venetian Scholiast is full of familiar references to the different editions of the text of the Iliad, as being standards perfectly well known; and he thus exhibits to us, in a considerable degree, the materials which the Alexandrian critics found existing, and with which they went to work upon that poem.
The multitude of editions (ἐκδόσεις) which they had before them, were partly state editions (αἱ πολιτικαὶ, αἱ κατὰ πόλεις, αἱ διὰ τῶν πόλεων, αἱ ἀπὸ τῶν πόλεων), and partly those due to private care (οἱ κατ’ ἄνδρα). These latter seem to have obtained the name in two ways. The first was, when it was taken from particular editors who had revised the text, such as Antimachus (contemporary with Plato), Callimachus, and, above all, Aristotle, who prepared for Alexander the Great the copy ἐκ νάρθηκος, and, again, the edition of Zenodotus, that of Aristophanes, and the two separate editions of Aristarchus, all of the Alexandrian school; or else they were named from the persons who possessed them, and for whom they had been prepared by the care of learned men. Among such possessors was Cassander, king of Macedonia.
The existence of these State editions is a fact full of meaning. It appears to show nothing less than this, that the text was under the charge of the public authorities in the several States. We have particular names for six of these editions through the Venetian Scholiast—those of Marseilles, Chios, Cyprus, Crete, Sinope, Argos. On beholding this list, we are immediately struck by the fact that while it contains names from the far East, like Sinope, and far West, like Marseilles, it does not contain one name of a city in Greece Proper, except Argos, and that a city having perhaps less communion than almost any other considerable place with Greek literature in general. We ask why do not Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Corinth, why do not Syracuse and the great Greek towns of Sicily and Italy, appear with their several Homeric texts? The most likely answer appears to be, not that these six enumerated cities were more distinguished than others by the carefulness of their provisions for the safety of the Homeric text, but that for some reason, possibly from their lying less within the circle of Greek letters at large, they still retained each their particular text, whereas an approximation had been made to a common text,—of which the cities most properly Greek in general availed themselves. For sometimes there are certain signs supplied in the Scholia of a common text prevailing in the State or national, and another in the private editions, and this without reference to the six cities above mentioned. In the supposition of such a tendency to divaricate, there is nothing beyond likelihood; for private editors would be more free to follow their own judgments or conjectures, whereas the public curators would almost, as a matter of course, be more rigidly conservative. At any rate, there are traceable indications before us to this effect; for the Scholiast cites for particular readings—
and on the other hand—
as well as in other places, τινὲς τῶν πολιτικῶν (e. g. xxiv. 30), and αἱ πλείους τῶν κατ’ ἄνδρα (xxiii. 88). It is therefore likely that there was a national text, approximating to uniformity, and used in common by those cities, the principal ones of Greece, which are not quoted as having had texts of their own; for there is no reason, that I am aware of, to suppose that the phrases αἱ πολιτικαὶ, and the rest of those equivalent to it, are confined to the six editions. Now, while the six State editions indicate a care probably dating from very early times for the soundness of the text, the common State recension, if, as appears probable, there was one, indicates a gradual convergence of critical labours and of the public judgment in the generality of those States, of which the people had the oldest, strongest, and most direct interest in the Homeric poems.
There is a third form of common text, less perfect than either of the others, of which abundant traces are found. We find mention of the editions or copies called αἱ κοιναὶ, αἱ δημοτικαὶ, αἱ δημώδεις, and they are sometimes described collectively, as on Iliad ii. 53, ἐν δὲ ταῖς κοιναῖς ἐγέγραπτο καὶ τῇ Ζηνοδοτείῳ, βουλήν. Sometimes the greater part of these κοιναὶ or δημώδεις have a particular reading. They all, of all classes, varied more or less, and are distinguished according to their merits, as φαυλαὶ, εἰκαιότεραι, μέτριαι, χαριέσταται. These ordinary or public (not national) editions, prepared for sale in the open book-market, were probably founded, in the main, on the national text, but being intended for general sale, and not prepared by responsible editors, they were ordinarily inferior. This Venetian Scholiast was himself a critic, and wrote when the Æolic and Ionic dialects were still in use, as appears from his references to them.[88]
The Scholia to the Odyssey supply the names of some editions besides those which have been mentioned. One of these is the Αἰολὶς, or Αἰολική;[89] another is ἡ ἐκ Μουσείου,[90] which is explained to refer to the depository near the School at Alexandria; and a third ἡ Κυκλικὴ,[91] which is interpreted to mean an edition in which the poems of Homer were placed in a series with those of the Cyclical authors.
On the one hand, then, it may be readily admitted that the Homeric poems were exposed, before they were reduced to writing, to the powerful and various action of disintegrating causes. Among these we may name neglect, inability to cope with the real difficulties of their transmission, the personal vanity of the rhapsodists, and the local vanity of communities. But I think we have also disclosed to us, both by the fragmentary notices of the history of the poems if taken in their collective effect, and by the state of things in and upon which the Alexandrian critics laboured, the operation of an immense amount of restorative counter-agency. All chance of our arriving at a sober judgment must depend upon our duly weighing these two sets of forces in their relation to one another. There were indeed tendencies, which may well be called irresistible, to aberrations from the traditional standard; but there were barriers also insurmountable, which seem to have confined those aberrations within certain limits. They could not proceed beyond a given point without awakening the consciousness, that Homer, the priceless treasure of Greece, and perhaps the first source of its keener consciousness of nationality, was in danger of being disfigured, and deformed, and so lost; and that sense, when once awakened, without doubt generated such reactions as we find exemplified in the proceedings of Pisistratus.
We may indeed derive directly, from the force of the destroying element, when viewed in detail, the strongest proof that there must have been an original standard, by recurrence to which its ravages could from time to time be repaired. For if that element had worked without such means of correction, I do not see how we could now have been in possession of an Iliad and an Odyssey. As with regard to religions after they are parted from their source, the tendency would have been to continually-increasing divergence. The dissimilarities arising from omission, alteration, and interpolation, would have grown, so as to embrace larger and larger portions of the poems, and at this day, instead of merely questioning this or that line in a few places, and comparing this with that reading, we should have been deliberating among a dozen Iliads and a dozen Odysseys, to discover which were the true.
If, then, it be said that the proceedings of Pisistratus or of Solon, bear testimony not to the soundness but to the incessant corruption of the text, my answer is, they bear witness to its corruption, just as the records of the repairs of Westminster Abbey might be said, and truly said, to bear testimony to its disrepair. That partial and local faults, and dislocations, would creep in, is as certain as that wind and weather act upon the stoutest fabric: but when we read of the repairs of a building, we infer that pains were taken to make it habitable; and when we read of the restorations of Homer, we perceive that it was an object of public solicitude to keep the poems in a state of soundness. As, indeed, the building most used will cæteris paribus require the most frequent repairs, so the elementary causes of corruption, by carelessness, might operate most powerfully in a case where the poet might be recited by every strolling minstrel at a local festivity: but it is also clear that in these very cases there would be the greatest anxiety to detect and to eliminate the destructive elements, when once they were seen to be making head. But, in truth, the analogy of a building does not represent the case. Edifices are sometimes disfigured by the parsimony of after-times: but there was no time, so far as we know, when Greece did not rate the value of Homer more highly than the cost of taking care of him. Again, the architects of degenerate ages think, as Bernini did of Michael Angelo, that they can improve upon their designs: but the name of no Greek has been recorded who thought he could improve upon Homer, and the vanity of the nameless was likely to be checked by their companions and competitors.
We have principally had in view the question, whether Homer was, in a peculiar degree, guarded against any profound and radical corruption which might grow out of unchecked carelessness; but the result will be not more unfavourable, if we ask how did he stand in regard to the other great fountain-head of evil, namely, falsification with a purpose? Now, the fact, that in any given case provision is made for jealous custody against any attack from without, affords no proof, or even presumption, against the subsistence of destroying causes within. But the Greeks, as a nation, had no motive to corrupt, and had every motive to preserve the text of Homer. His national office and position have been admirably expressed by Statius, in verses on the Trojan expedition:—
His works were the very cradle of the nation; there it first visibly lived and breathed. They were the most perfect expression of every Greek feeling and desire: in the rivalry between the Hellenic race and the (afterwards so called) βάρβαροι of Asia, they gave, in forms the most effective and the most artful, everything worth having to the former, and left the later Greek nothing to add. What void to be filled could even vanity discover, when so many Greek chieftains, inferior, in a degree never measured, to Achilles, were, nevertheless, each of them, too strong for the prince of Trojan warriors?
But it may perhaps be replied that, even supposing that collective Greece could gain nothing by corrupting Homer, yet the relative distribution of honour among the principal States might be affected to the profit of one and the prejudice of another. Now it is plain that, in this delicate and vital point, the sectional jealousies of the Greeks would afford the best possible security to the general contents of the text: something of the same security that the hatred of the Jews and the Samaritans supplied, when they became rival guardians of the books of the Old Testament. Argos, deeply interested for Diomed, and Lacedæmon for Menelaus, and both for Agamemnon, were watchmen alike powerful and keen against Athens, if she had attempted to obtain for herself in the Iliad a place at all proportioned to her after-fame. There were numerous parts of Homer’s Greece, both great and small, that fell into subsequent insignificance, such as Pylos, Ithaca, Salamis, Locris: the relative positions of Thessaly and Southern Greece were fundamentally changed in the historic times. But all, whether they exulted in the longlived honours of their States, or whether they fondly brooded on the recollections of former fame, were alike interested in resisting interlopers who might seek to trespass for their own advantage, as well as in the general object of preserving the priceless national monument from decay. Nor is there any room to suppose, that these questions of primeval honour were indifferent to the later Greeks. The citation from the Catalogue by the Athenian envoys before Gelon in Herodotus (to take a single instance), affords conclusive proof to the contrary: and, even so late as in the day of Pausanias, he tells us that Argolis and Arcadia were the States, which even then were still keenly disputing with Athens the palm of autochthonism.
It, therefore, appears to me that the presumptions of the case are on the whole favourable, and not adverse, to the general soundness of the Homeric text.
I confess myself to be very greatly confirmed in this view of the presumptions, by the scarcely measurable amount of internal evidence which the text supplies to substantiate its own integrity. Almost the whole of the copious materials which recent writers have accumulated to prove the unity and personality of the author, is available to show the soundness of the text. The appeal need not be only to the undisturbed state of the main strata of the poems, the consistent structure and relations of the facts; the general corpus of the poems might have been sound, and yet a bad text would, when subjected to a very searching ordeal on the minutest points, have revealed a multitude of solecisms and errors: but, instead of this, the rigid application of the microscope has only shown more clearly a great perfection in the workmanship. The innumerable forms of refined and delicate coincidence in names and facts, in the use of epithets, the notes of character, the turn of speeches and phrases, and the like, are so many rills of evidence, which combine into a stream of resistless force, in favour of that text which has been found so admirably, as a mirror, to reflect the image and the mind of Homer, and which, like a mirror, could not have reflected it truly unless it had itself been true.
Indeed, I must proceed a step further; and admit that the arguments ab extra, which I have here put forward respecting the historic aims of the poet, his proximity in time to his subject, and the probable soundness of the text, are rather answers to objections, than the adequate materials of affirmative conviction.
After having myself tested the text as to its self-consistency and otherwise, in several thousand places, I find scarcely one or two places in each thousand, where it seems to invite expurgation in order to establish the consistency of its contents. The evidence on which I really place reliance is experimental evidence: and that I find in the poems, accumulated to a degree which no other human work within my knowledge approaches. I do not presume to hope more than that the more remote and general arguments, which have now been used, may assist in removing preliminary barriers to the consideration of the one cardinal and paramount argument, the text itself and its contents.
And here a brief reference must be made to the scepticism in miniature which has replaced the more sweeping incredulity of Wolf and his school. Editors of great weight, refusing to accompany even the Chorizontes in separating the authorship of the poems, nevertheless freely condemn particular passages. I do not deny that there are various passages, of which the genuineness is fair matter for discussion. But I confess that I find such grounds of excision, as those commonly alleged by critics recommending it, very indeterminate, and of a nature to leave it doubtful where their operation is to stop. They generally involve arbitrary assumptions either of construction or of history, or the application of a more rigid and literal rule of consistency than poetry either requires or can endure, or else the capital error, as I cannot but consider it, of bringing Homer to be tried at the bar of later and inferior traditions. And there is a want of common principles, a general insecurity of standing ground, and an appearance of reforming Homer not according to any acknowledged laws of criticism, but according to the humour of each accomplished and ingenious man: which, in a matter of this weight, is no sufficient guarantee. I therefore follow in the line of those, whose recommendation is to draw every thing we can out of the present text; and to see how far its contents may constitute a substantive and consistent whole, in the various branches of information to which they refer. When we have carried this process as far as it will bear, we may find, first that many or some of the seeming discordancies are really embraced within a comprehensive general harmony, and secondly that with a fuller knowledge of the laws of that harmony we may ourselves be in a condition at least of less incapacity to pronounce what is Homeric and what is not. I will only say that were I to venture into this field of criticism, I should be governed less than is usual by discrepancies of fact often very hastily assumed; and much more than is usual by any violence done to the finer analogies of which Homer is so full, and by departures from his regular modes of thought, feeling, and representation.
The principal and final purpose, which I wish to present in the most distinct manner to the mind of the reader, is that of securing for the Homeric traditions, estimated according to the effect of the foregoing considerations, a just measure of relative as well as absolute appreciation.
It appears to me that there has prevailed in this respect a wide-spread and long-continued error, assuming various forms, and affecting in very different degrees, without doubt, the practice of different writers, but so extended and so rooted, as at this stage in the progress of criticism to require formal challenge. I mean, that it is an error to regard and accept all ancient traditions, relating to the periods that precede regular historic annals, as of equal value, or not to discriminate their several values with adequate care. Above all, I strongly contend that we should assign to the Homeric evidence a primary rank upon all the subjects which it touches, and that we should make it a rule to reduce all other literary testimony, because of later origin, to a subordinate and subsidiary position.
Mere rumours or stories of the pre-historic times are not, as such, entitled to be called traditions. A story of this kind, say in Apollodorus, may indeed by bare possibility be older than any thing in Homer; but if it comes to us without the proper and visible criteria of age, it has no claim upon our assent as a truthful record of the time to which it purports to refer. Traditions of this class only grow to be such, as a general rule, for us, at the time when they take a positive form in the work of some author, who thus becomes, as far as his time and circumstances permit, a witness to them. It is only from thenceforward, that their faithful derivation and transmission can be relied on as in any degree probable.
Again, I cast aside statements with respect to which the poet, being carried beyond the sphere of his ordinary experience, must, on that account, not be presumed to speak historically; yet even here, if he is speaking of matters which were in general belief, he is a witness of the first class with respect to that belief, which is itself in another sense a matter of history; and here also those, who have followed him at a remote date, are witnesses of a lower order.
Or there may be cases, as, for instance, in the stubborn facts of geography, where the laws of evidence compel us rudely to thrust aside the declaration of the bard; or cases where his mode of handling his materials affords in itself a proof that he did not mean to speak historically, but, in the phrase of Aristotle, ἐκπληκτικῶς, or for poetic effect.
Or again, it is conceivable, though I do not know whether it has happened, that Homeric testimony might come into conflict, not with mere counter-assertion, but with those forms of circumstantial evidence which are sometimes conclusively elicited by reasoning from positive data of architecture, language, and ethnology. I claim for Homer no exemption from the more cogent authority which may attach to reasoning of this kind.
Clearing the question of these incumbrances, I wish to submit to the suffrages of those, who may be more competent than myself to estimate both the proposition and the proof, the following thesis: that, in regard to the religion, history, ethnology, polity, and life at large of the Greeks of the heroic times, the authority of the Homeric poems, standing far above that of the whole mass of the later literary traditions in any of their forms, ought never to be treated as homogeneous with them, but should usually, in the first instance, be handled by itself, and the testimony of later writers should, in general, be handled in subordination to it, and should be tried by it, as by a touchstone, on all the subjects which it embraces.
It is generally admitted that Homer is older by some generations than Hesiod, by many than the authors of the Cyclical Poems; and older by many centuries than the general mass of our authorities on Greek antiquity, beginning with Æschylus and Herodotus, and coming down to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Ælian, Pausanias, Diogenes Laertius. Nor is it by time alone, that his superior proximity and weight are to be measured. Of all the ages that have passed since Homer, it may be truly said that not one has produced a more acute, accurate, and comprehensive observer. But, above all, writing of the heroic time, he, and he alone, writes like one who, as from internal evidence we may confidently assert, stood within its precinct, and was imbued from head to foot with its spirit and its associations.
It is, of course, quite possible, that in one particular or another, Homer may be in error, and the later tradition, it is also just possible, may be correct. But so, also, the evidence of an eye-witness in a court of justice may be erroneous, while by chance the merest hearsay may be true. This does not divert men from a careful classification of evidence according to its presumptive value, where they have purposes of utility, according to the common and limited sense of the term, in their view. In regard to the early Greek history, the practice has often been otherwise; partly in the works of scholars, and yet more, as we might expect, in the more popular forms of tuition. It has been to lump together the heterogeneous mass of traditions embodied in the literature of a thousand years. All that the sport of fancy and imagination had conceived—all that national, or local, or personal vanity had suggested—all that motives of policy had forged in history or religion—or so much of this aggregate as time has spared to us, has been treated without any systematic recognition of the different value of different orders of tradition. I admit that it is towards the close of the Greek literature that we find the principal professed inquirers into antiquity; and their aim and method may have redressed, in great part, any inequality between themselves and writers of the time of Thucydides or Plato. But nothing can cancel, nothing, it might almost be said, can narrow, the enormous interval, in point of authority, between Homer, who sang in the heroic age, and those who not only collected their materials, but formed their thoughts, after it was closed, and after its floating reminiscences had become subject to the incessant action of falsifying processes.
For a length of time the temper of our ancient histories was one of unquestioning reception. But where much was self-contradictory, all could not be believed. Under these circumstances, it was not unnatural that those writers who were full and systematic, should be preferred, rather than that the labour should be undergone of gathering gold in grains from the pages of Homer, of carefully collecting facts and presumptions singly from the text, and then again estimating the amount and effect of their bearings upon one another. Hence the Catalogues of Apollodorus, or the downright assertions of Scholiasts, have been allowed to give form to our early histories of Greece; and the authentic, but usually slighter notices of Homer, have received little attention, except where, in some detail or other, they might suit the argument which each particular writer happened to have in hand. Again, because Herodotus was by profession an historian and nothing else (at least, I can discern no better reason), more importance seems to be attached to his notices of prior ages than to the less formally presented notices of Homer, who, according to the statement of Herodotus himself, preceded him by four hundred years. I do not mean by this remark to imply that Herodotus and Homer are particularly at variance with one another, but only to illustrate what seems to me a prevailing source of error.
In general, where the traditions reported by the later writers are preferred to those of Homer, it is perhaps because, although they may conflict with probability as well as with one another in an infinity of points, yet they are in themselves more systematic and complete. They represent to us for the most part pasticcios arbitrarily made up of materials of unequal value, but yet made up into wholes; whereas, the evidence which he supplies is original though it is fragmentary. Had he been followed by a continuous succession of authors, we should, no doubt, do wisely in consenting to view the subjects of fact, with which he dealt, mainly as they were viewed by those who trod in his steps. But, on the contrary, they were separated from him by a gulf both wide and deep; over which his compositions floated, in despite of difficulties so great that many have deemed them positively insurmountable, only by their extraordinary buoyancy.
It is in the Cyclic poems that we should naturally seek for materials to enlarge, expound, or correct Homer. But there is not a line or a notice remaining of any one of them, which would justify our assigning to them any historical authority sufficient to qualify them for such a purpose. Their reputed authors, from Arctinus downwards, all belong to periods within the dates of the Olympiads[93]. They all bear marks of having been written to fill the gaps which Homer had left unoccupied, and so to enter into a partnership, if not with his fame, yet with his popularity; with the popularity, of which his works, as we can well judge from more recent experience, would be sure to shed some portion upon all compositions ostensibly allied with them, and which then, as now, presented the most cogent inducements to imitators who had their livelihood to seek by means of their Muse.
Homer, without doubt, gave an immense addition of celebrity and vogue to the subject of the Trojan war, much as Boiardo and Ariosto did to the whole circle of the romances of which Orlando is the centre. One of these poems, the Ἰλίου Πέρσις, is a simple expansion, as Mure has observed[94], of the third lay of Demodocus in the Eighth Odyssey[95]. They seem to bear the mark of being, not composed first-hand from actions of men, but from a stock of compositions in which heroic actions had already been enshrined; so little do they appear to have been stamped with the individuality which denotes original design. And accordingly the usual manner of quoting them is not as the certain works of a given person, but the form of citation is (ὁ γράψας τὴν μικρὰν Ἰλιάδα, ὁ ποιήσας τὰ Κύπρια ἔπη), the writer of the little Iliad, the composer of the Cyprian Songs, and the like. Heyne[96] holds even the commencement of the Cyclic poems to have been at least a century after the date of the Iliad and Odyssey.
Mr. Fynes Clinton, whose name can never be mentioned without a grateful recognition of his merits and services, supplies, in the early part of his Fasti Hellenici, many valuable suggestions for the sifting of early Greek history. But he nowhere acknowledges, or approaches (I believe) to the acknowledgment of the rule, that for the heroic age the authority of Homer stands alone in kind. In the Fasti Hellenici many statements, dating long after Homer, are delivered as if of equal authority with his in regard to the history of that age; and Mr. Clinton seems to have been led into a snare, to which his duty as a chronologer probably exposed him, in assuming that history and chronology may be expected to begin together; an assumption, I apprehend, not supported by probability. Mr. Mitford has admirably pointed out the importance of veracity to Homer’s function, and to his fame as a poet, at a time when a poet could be the only historian[97], the probability and singular consistency of his scattered anecdotes, and the remarkable contrast between the clearness of his history, and the darkness and uncertainty which follow after him, and continue until the historic age begins; nor does he scruple to declare that ‘for these early ages Homer is our best guide[98].’ But even this is still short of my desire, which is not merely to recognise him as primus inter pares, but to treat his testimony as paramount, and as constituting a class by itself, with which no other literary testimony can compete. And so once more Bishop Marsh, in his able work on the Pelasgi, assigns no special office, I might perhaps say no peculiar weight, to the Homeric testimony.
But I am glad to shelter myself under the authority afforded me by the practice of Buttmann, who, in the Preface to his admirable Lexilogus, declares his rule of philological investigation in Homer to be this: to take, first, the evidence of the text itself in its several parts; secondly, that of the succeeding epic poetry, and along with this the testimony of the prime after-ages of Greek literature; thirdly, grammatical tradition.
And yet the extensive contrariety between the old and the new is admitted. ‘The Iliad and the Odyssey,’ says Mr. Grote[99], ‘and the remaining Hesiodic fragments, exhibit but too frequently a hopeless diversity, when confronted with the narratives of the logographers.’ And the author of the Minos[100] cleared away the fabulous and defaming accounts of that sovereign, to return to the representations of Homer and of Hesiod; καίτοι γε πιθανώτεροί εἰσιν ἢ σύμπαντες οἱ τραῳδοποιοὶ, ὧν συ ἀκούων ταῦτα λέγεις. The great ancient writers, indeed, seem never to have questioned the authority of Homer as a witness; nor could any one wish to see him enthroned at a greater elevation than that assigned to him as late as in the pages of Strabo. Virgil systematically made light of him, but he was in a manner compelled by his subject to make light of historical veracity altogether.
Historical scepticism, which has come of late years into possession of the ground, has not redressed, as affecting Homer, the wrong that had been done by historical credulity. We once exalted into history the general mass of traditions relating to the ages which next preceded those of continuous historic records; we now again decline the labour of discrimination, and reduce them all alike into legend. The name of Mr. Grote must carry great weight in any question of Greek research: but it may be doubted whether the force and aptitude of his powerful mind have been as successfully applied to the Homeric as to the later periods. He presents us, indeed, with even more goodly and copious catalogues than historians are wont of Æolids, of Pelopids, of ruling families in every corner of Greece, and from the earliest times; but he, too, fixes a chronological point for the commencement of history, namely, the first recorded Olympiad[101]. He seems to think that the trustworthy chronology of Greece begins before its real history. He declines to take his start from disinterred Pelasgi[102]; he conceives that we have no other authority for the existence of Troy than we have for the theogonic revolutions[103]; the immense array of early names that he presents are offered as names purely legendary. He will not attempt to determine how much or how little of history these legends may contain; he will not exhibit a picture from behind the curtain, because, as he forcibly says, the curtain is the picture, and cannot by any ingenuity be withdrawn[104]. He deals in the main alike with Homer, Hesiod, the tragedians and minor Greek poets, the scattered notices of the historians, of the antiquarian writers near the Christian era, and of the Scholiasts. Of course, therefore, he cannot be expected to rectify the fault, if such there has been, in regard to the appreciation of the poems of Homer.
I may, however, observe that in this, as in other cases, extremes appear to meet. Attempts to winnow the legendary lore, and to separate the historic or primitive kernel from the husk, were clearing the stage of a multitude of mythical personages unknown to the earliest tradition; all of whom now are ushered in once more; they are, indeed, labelled as unhistorical; but they are again mixed up wholesale with those, from whose company critical observation had expelled them. In thus reimparting a promiscuous character to the first scenes of Grecian history, we seem to effect a retrogressive and not a progressive operation. At any rate it should be understood that the issue raised embraces the question, whether the personality of Achilles and Agamemnon has no better root in history than that of Pelasgus, of Prometheus, or of Hellen. And again, whether all these, being equal to one another, are likewise equal, and no more than equal, in credit to Ceres, Bacchus, or Apollo. As to all alike, what proportion of truth there may be in the legend, or whether any, ‘it is impossible to ascertain, and useless to inquire[105];’ all alike belong to a region, essentially mythical, neither approachable by the critic, nor measurable by the chronologer.
If the opinions which have been here expressed are in any degree correct, we must endeavour to recover as substantial personages, and to bring within the grasp of flesh and blood some of those pictures, and even of those persons, whom Mr. Grote has dismissed to the land of Shadow and of Dream.
In this view, the earliest Greek history should be founded on the text of Homer, and not merely on its surface, but on its depths. Not only its more broad and obvious statements should be registered, but we should search and ransack all those slighter indications, suggestions, and sources of inference, in which it is so extraordinarily rich; and compel it, as it were, to yield up its treasures. We cannot, indeed, like the zoologist, say the very words, Give me the bone, and I will disinter the animal; yet so accurately was the mind of Homer constructed, that we may come nearer to this certainty in dealing with him, than with any other child of man. The later and inferior evidence should be differently handled, and should not be viewed as intrinsically authoritative. But that portion of it, which fills up the gaps or confirms the suggestions of Homer, becomes thereby entitled to something of historic rank. Again, widely extended and uniformly continued traditions may amount to proof of notoriety, and may, not by their individual credit, but by their concurrence, supply us with standing ground of tolerable firmness. Beyond all this we may proceed, and may present to view, where for any cause it seems desirable, even ill-supported legends, but always as such, with fair notice of any circumstances which may tend to fix their credit or discredit, and with a line sufficiently marked between these and the recitals which rest upon Homeric authority. Thus, the general rule would be to begin with Homer: a Jove principium. We should plant his statements each in their place, as so many foundation stones. While he leads us by the hand, we should tread with comparative confidence; when we quit his guidance, we should proceed with caution, with mistrust, with a tone no higher than that of speculation and avowed conjecture.
In many instances, the application of these principles will require the rudiments of early Greek history to be recast. In illustration of this statement, I will refer to a legend, which has heretofore been popularly assumed as in a great degree the ethnological starting point of Greek history.
The current ideas respecting the distribution of the Greek races are founded upon the supposition that there was a certain Hellen, and that he had three sons, Dorus, Æolus, and Xuthus, the last of whom died and left behind him two sons, Ion and Achæus. This Hellen was (so runs the story) the son of Deucalion, and Deucalion was the son of Prometheus, and the husband of Pyrrha, who again was the daughter of Epimetheus and of Pandora, the first-made woman. From the agency of Deucalion and Pyrrha, the human race took a new commencement after the Deluge. The nation at large were called Hellenes, after Hellen; and from his two surviving sons, and his grandsons Ion and Achæus, were named the four great branches of the common stem. Such is the legend as it stands in Apollodorus[106]; and that part of it which describes Hellen and his three sons, but no more, is found in a fragment of Hesiod, quoted by Tzetzes on Lycophron[107].
It is obvious that any one, setting about the invention of a story with the compound purpose, first, of uniting the Greeks in a common bond of race; secondly, of referring them to a common country as their cradle; and, thirdly, of carrying up their origin to an extreme antiquity, could hardly have done better than invent this tale. And that, which might have been done at a stroke by an individual mind, was done no less effectually by the common thought and wish of the Greek people moulding itself by degrees into tradition. The tale has a symmetry about it, most suggestive of design and invention. How clearly it connects all the celebrated families or groups of the Greek nation; with what accuracy it fixes their relation to the common stem; and with how much impartial consideration for the self-love of every one among them, and for their several shares of fame.
Not only in general, but even in detail, we may watch the gradual formation of this tradition adapting itself to the state of Greece. In Homer we find no Hellenes greatly distinguished, except Æolids and Achæans. This is the first stage. But when the Dorians attain to power[108], they claim a share in the past answerable to their predominance in the present: and they receive accordingly the first place in the genealogy as it stands in Hesiod, where Dorus is the first-named among the three sons of Hellen. The Achæans, now in depression, do not appear as Hellenes at all. But with the lapse of time the Ionians of Athens, becoming powerful, desire to be also famous: therefore room must be made for them: and the Achæans too by their local intermixture with the same race, and their political sympathy with Athens, once more come to be entitled to notice: Xuthus accordingly, in the final form of the tradition is provided with two sons. Ion and Achæus, and now all the four branches have each their respective place.
This tradition, however, is neither in whole nor in part sustained by Homer, and can by no effort be made to fit into Homer; to say nothing of its containing within itself much incongruity. If we exclude Xuthus, as a mere mute, it gives us five persons as the eponymists of five races, the four last included in the first. But of the five persons thus placed upon the stage, Homer gives us but one; that one, Æolus, has no race or tribe, but only two or three lines of descendants named after him. Again, the two or three children of Æolus in Homer become five in Hesiod, twelve in Apollodorus, and by additions from other writers reach a respectable total of seventeen[109]. Thus as to persons, Homer has indeed an Æolus, but he has no Hellen, no Dorus, no Ion, no Achæus. Now as to races. He mentions, without doubt, Hellenes, Achæans, Dorians, Ionians; but affords hardly any means of identifying Dorians with Hellenes, and as to Ionians, supplies pretty strong presumptions that they were not Hellenic[110]. Nor does he establish any relation whatever between any of the four races and any common ancestor or eponymist. Again, the Deucalion of this legend is two generations before its Æolus; but the Deucalion of Homer, who may be reckoned as three generations before the fall of Troy, is also three generations later than his Æolus. In fact, this legend of Hellen and his family is like an ugly and flimsy, but formal, modern house, built by the sacrilegious collection of the fragments of a noble ruin.
It may be thought dangerous, however, in setting up the authority of Homer, to pull down that of Hesiod, who comes nearest to him. But, firstly, Hesiod is only responsible for so much of the legend as connects two persons named Æolus and Dorus with Hellen as their source; which is at any rate no more than a poetical dress given to an hypothesis substantially not in conflict with the Homeric traditions. Secondly, as respects literal truth, the name Hellen at once bears the strongest evidence against its own pretensions to an historical character such as that assigned to it, because its etymology refers it to the territorial name Ἑλλὰς, and through this to the national name Ἕλλοι[111]. Lastly, the essential difference in point of authority lies between Homer and Hesiod, not between Homer together with Hesiod on the one side, and those who came after Hesiod on the other. Homer was fully within the sphere and spirit of the heroic age; Hesiod was as plainly outside it. He is apparently separated from the mighty master by a considerable term, even as measured in years. That term it would be difficult to define by any given number; but it is easy to see that even when defined it would convey an utterly inadequate idea of the interval of poetic and personal difference, and of moral and social change, between Hesiod and Homer. It is not to be found in this or that variation, for it belongs to the whole order of ideas; all the elements of thought, the whole tone of the picture, the atmosphere in which persons and objects are seen, are essentially modified.
I venture one remark, however, upon Hesiod’s very beautiful account of the Ages. None can fail to be struck by the order in which he places them. Beginning with the Golden, he comes next to the Silver age, and then to Brass. But, instead of descending forthwith the fourth and last step to the Iron age, he very singularly retraces his steps, and breaks the downward chain by an age of heroes, of whom he says that it was