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STUDIES ON HOMER
AND
THE HOMERIC AGE.

BY THE
RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE, D.C.L.
M. P. FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.

IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. I.

Plenius ac melius Chrysippo et Crantore.—Horace.

OXFORD:
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
M.DCCC.LVIII.

[The right of Translation is reserved.]

STUDIES ON HOMER
AND
THE HOMERIC AGE.
I. PROLEGOMENA.
II. ACHÆIS:
OR,
THE ETHNOLOGY OF THE GREEK RACES.

BY THE
RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE, D.C.L.
M. P. FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

Plenius ac melius Chrysippo et Crantore.—Horace.

OXFORD:
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
M.DCCC.LVIII.

[THE CONTENTS.]

STUDIES ON HOMER
AND
THE HOMERIC AGE.

I. PROLEGOMENA.[1]

Sect. 1.—On the State of the Homeric question.

We are told that, in an ancient city, he who had a new law to propose made his appearance, when about to discharge that duty, with a halter round his neck. It might be somewhat rigid to re-introduce this practice in the case of those who write new books on subjects, with which the ears at least of the world are familiar. But it is not unreasonable to demand of them some such reason for their boldness as shall be at any rate presumably related to public utility. Complying with this demand by anticipation, I will place in the foreground an explicit statement of the objects which I have in view.

These objects are twofold: firstly, to promote and extend the fruitful study of the immortal poems of Homer; and secondly, to vindicate for them, in an age of discussion, their just degree both of absolute and, more especially, of relative critical value. My desire is to indicate at least, if I cannot hope to establish, their proper place, both in the discipline of classical education, and among the materials of historical inquiry. When the world has been hearing and reading Homer, and talking and writing about him, for nearly three thousand years, it may seem strange thus to imply that he is still an ‘inheritor of unfulfilled renown,’[2] and not yet in full possession of his lawful throne. He who seems to impeach the knowledge and judgment of all former ages, himself runs but an evil chance, and is likely to be found guilty of ignorance and folly. Such, however, is not my design. There is no reason to doubt that Greece

Dum fortuna fuit

knew right well her own noble child, and paid him all the homage that even he could justly claim. But in later times, and in most of the lands where he is a foreigner, I know not if he has ever yet enjoyed his full honour from the educated world. He is, I trust, coming to it; and my desire is to accelerate, if ever so little, the movement in that direction.

As respects the first portion of the design which has been described, I would offer the following considerations. The controversy de vitâ et sanguine, concerning the personality of the poet, and the unity and antiquity of the works, has been carried on with vigour for near a century. In default of extraneous testimony, the materials of warfare have been sedulously sought in the rich mine which was offered by the poems themselves. There has resulted from this cause a closer study of the text, and a fuller development of much that it contains, than could have been expected in times when the student of Homer had only to enjoy his banquet, and not to fight for it before he could sit down. It is not merely, however, in warmth of feeling that he may have profited; the Iliad and the Odyssey have been, from the absolute necessity of the case, put into the witness-box themselves, examined and cross-examined in every variety of temper, and thus, in some degree at least, made to tell their own story. The result has been upon the whole greatly in their favour. The more they are searched and tested, the more does it appear they have to say, and the better does their testimony hang together. The more plain does it become, that the arguments used on the side of scepticism and annihilation are generally of a technical and external character, and the greater is the mass of moral and internal evidence continually accumulated against them. In consequence, there has set in a strong reaction among scholars, even in Germany (in England the destructive theories never greatly throve), on behalf of the affirmative side of all, or nearly all, the main questions which had been raised. Mure,[3] the last and perhaps most distinguished of British writers on this subject, has left the debate in such a state that those who follow him may be excused, and may excuse their readers, from systematic preliminary discussion; and may proceed upon the assumption that the Iliad and Odyssey are in their substance the true offspring of the heroic age itself, and are genuine gifts not only of a remote antiquity but of a designing mind; as well as that he, to whom that mind belonged, has been justly declared by the verdict of all ages to be the patriarch of poets. These controversies have been ‘bolted to the bran;’ for us at least they are all but dead, and to me it seems little better than lost time to revive them.

Having then at the present day the title to the estate in some degree secured from litigation, we may enter upon the fruition of it, and with all the truer zest on account of the conflict, which has been long and keenly fought, and in the general opinion fairly won. It now becomes all those, who love Homer, to prosecute the sure method of inquiry and appreciation by close, continued, comprehensive study of the text; a study of which it would be easy to prove the need, by showing how inaccurately the poems are often cited in quarters, to which the general reader justifiably looks for trustworthy information. To this we have been exhorted by the writer already named:[4] and we have only to make his practice our model. That something has already been attained, we may judge by comparison. Let us take a single instance. In the year 1735 was published ‘Blackwell’s Inquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer.’ Bentley, as it would appear from Bishop Monk’s Life[5] of that extraordinary scholar, was not to be taken in by a book of this kind: but such men as Bentley are not samples of their time, they are living symbols and predictions of what it will require years or generations to accomplish. We may rather judge of the common impression made by this book, from the Notes to Pope’s Preface to the Iliad, where Warton[6] extols it as ‘a work that abounds in curious researches and observations, and places Homer in a new light.’ But no reader of Homer, in our own time, would really, I apprehend, be the poorer, if every copy of it could be burned.

Since the time of Blackwell’s work, important aids have been gained towards the study of Homer, by the researches of travellers, fruitful in circumstantial evidence, and by the discovery of the Venetian Scholia, as well as by the persevering labours of modern critics. We have been gradually coming to understand that these precious works, which may have formed the delight of our boyhood, have also been designed to instruct our maturer years. I do not here refer to their poetic power and splendour only. It is now time that we should recognise the truth, that they constitute a vast depository of knowledge upon subjects of deep interest, and of boundless variety; and that this is a knowledge, too, which can be had from them alone. It was the Greek mind transferred, without doubt, in some part through Italy, but yet only transferred, and still Greek both in origin and in much of its essence, in which was shaped and tempered the original mould of the modern European civilization. I speak now of civilization as a thing distinct from religion, but destined to combine and coalesce with it. The power derived from this source was to stand in subordinate conjunction with the Gospel, and to contribute its own share towards the training of mankind. From hence were to be derived the forms and materials of thought, of imaginative culture, of the whole education of the intellectual soul, which, when pervaded with an higher life from the Divine fountain, was thus to be secured from corruption, and both placed and kept in harmony with the world of spirits.

This Greek mind, which thus became one of the main factors of the civilized life of Christendom, cannot be fully comprehended without the study of Homer, and is nowhere so vividly or so sincerely exhibited as in his works. He has a world of his own, into which, upon his strong wing, he carries us. There we find ourselves amidst a system of ideas, feelings, and actions, different from what are to be found anywhere else; and forming a new and distinct standard of humanity. Many among them seem as if they were then shortly about to be buried under a mass of ruins, in order that they might subsequently reappear, bright and fresh for application, among later generations of men. Others of them almost carry us back to the early morning of our race, the hours of its greater simplicity and purity, and more free intercourse with God. In much that this Homeric world exhibits, we see the taint of sin at work, but far, as yet, from its perfect work and its ripeness; it stands between Paradise and the vices of later heathenism, far from both, from the latter as well as from the former; and if among all earthly knowledge, the knowledge of man be that which we should chiefly court, and if to be genuine it should be founded upon experience, how is it possible to over-value this primitive representation of the human race in a form complete, distinct, and separate, with its own religion, ethics, policy, history, arts, manners, fresh and true to the standard of its nature, like the form of an infant from the hand of the Creator, yet mature, full, and finished, in its own sense, after its own laws, like some masterpiece of the sculptor’s art.

The poems of Homer never can be put in competition with the Sacred Writings of the Old Testament, as regards the one invaluable code of Truth and Hope that was contained in them. But while the Jewish records exhibit to us the link between man and the other world in the earliest times, the poems of Homer show us the being, of whom God was pleased to be thus mindful, in the free unsuspecting play of his actual nature. The patriarchal and Jewish dispensations created, and sustained through Divine interposition, a state of things essentially special and exceptional: but here first we see our kind set to work out for itself, under the lights which common life and experience supplied, the deep problem of his destiny. Nor is there, perhaps, any more solemn and melancholy lesson, than that which is to be learned from its continual downward course. If these words amount to a begging of the question, at least, it is most important for us to know whether the course was continually downwards; whether, as man enlarged his powers and his resources, he came nearer to, or went farther from his happiness and his perfection. Now, this inquiry cannot, for Europe and Christendom at least, be satisfactorily conducted, except in commencing from the basis which the Homeric poems supply. As regards the great Roman people, we know nothing of them, which is at once archaic and veracious. As regards the Greeks, it is Homer that furnishes the point of origin from which all distances are to be measured. When the historic period began, Greece was already near its intellectual middle-age. Little can be learned of the relative movements of our moral and our mental nature severally, from matching one portion of that period with another, in comparison with what we may gather from bringing into neighbourhood and contrast the pristine and youthful Greece of Homer on the one hand, and, on the other, the developed and finished Greece of the age of the tragedians or the orators.

The Mosaic books, and the other historical books of the Old Testament, are not intended to present, and do not present, a picture of human society, or of our nature drawn at large. Their aim is to exhibit it in one master-relation, and to do this with effect, they do it, to a great extent, exclusively. The Homeric materials for exhibiting that relation are different in kind as well as in degree: but as they paint, and paint to the very life, the whole range of our nature, and the entire circle of human action and experience, at an epoch much more nearly analogous to the patriarchal time than to any later age, the poems of Homer may be viewed, in the philosophy of human nature, as the complement of the earliest portion of the Sacred Records.

Although the close and systematic study of the Homeric text has begun at a date comparatively recent, yet the marked development of riches from within which it has produced, has already been a real, permanent, and vast addition to the mental wealth of mankind. We can now better understand than formerly much that relates to the fame and authority of this great poet in early times, and that we may formerly have contemplated as fanciful, exaggerated, or unreal. It was, we can now see, with no idle wonder that, while Greek philosophers took texts from him so largely in their schools, the Greek public listened to his strains in places of thronged resort, and in their solemn assemblages, and Greek warriors and statesmen kept him in their cabinets and under their pillows; and, for the first and last time in the history of the world, made the preservation of a poet’s compositions an object of permanent public policy.

Sect. 2.—The Place of Homer in Classical Education.

Now, from these considerations may arise the important question, Does Homer hold in our English education the place which is his due, and which it would be for our advantage to give him? An immense price is paid by the youth of this country for classical acquirement. It is the main effort of the first spring-tide of their intellectual life. It is to be hoped that this price will continue to be paid by all those, who are qualified to profit by the acquisition; and that though of other knowledge much more will hereafter be gained than heretofore, yet of this there shall on no account be less. Still, viewing the greatness of the cost, which consists in the chief energies of so many precious years, it highly concerns us to see that what we get in return is good both in measure and in quality. What, then, are the facts with respect to the study of Homer in England at the present day?

I must here begin with the apology due from one who feels himself to be far from perfectly informed on the case of which it is necessary to give an outline. But even if I understate both the amount of Homeric study, and its efficiency, there will, I am confident, remain, after every due allowance shall have been made for error, ample room for the application of the general propositions that I seek to enforce. They are these: that the study of Homer in our Universities is as yet below the point to which it is desirable that it should be carried, and that the same study, carried on at our public Schools, neither is, nor can be made, a fitting substitute for what is thus wanting at the Universities.

In my own day, at Oxford, now a full quarter of a century ago, the poems of Homer were read chiefly by way of exception, and in obedience to the impulse of individual tastes. They entered rather materially into those examinations by which scholarship was principally to be tested, but they scarcely formed a substantive or recognised part of the main studies of the place, which were directed to the final examination in the Schools for the Bachelor’s degree. I do not recollect to have ever heard at that time of their being used as the subject matter of the ordinary tutorial lectures; and if they were so, the case was certainly a rare one. Although the late Dr. Gaisford, in the estimation of many the first scholar of his age, during his long tenure of the Deanery of Christ Church, gave the whole weight of his authority to the recommendation of Homeric study, it did not avail to bring about any material change. The basis of the Greek classical instruction lay chiefly in the philosophers, historians, and later poets; and when Homer was, in the academical phrase, ‘taken up,’ he was employed ornamentally, and therefore superficially, and was subjected to no such searching and laborious methods of study as, to the great honour and advantage of Oxford, were certainly applied to the authors who held the first rank in her practical system. I am led to believe that the case at Cambridge was not essentially different, although, from the greater relative space occupied there by examinations in pure scholarship, it is probable that Homer may, under that aspect at least, have attracted a greater share of attention.

When, however, the University of Oxford brought to maturity, in the year 1850, a new Statute of examinations, efforts were made to promote an extended study of Homer. Those efforts, it happily appears, have produced a considerable effect. Provision was made by that statute for dividing the study of the poets from the philosophical and historical studies, and for including the former in the intermediate, or, as it is termed, ‘first public’ examination, while both the latter were reserved for the final trial, with which the period of undergraduateship is usually wound up. All candidates for honours in this intermediate examination are now required to present not less than twelve Books of Homer on the list of works in which they are to be examined. And I understand that he has also taken his place among the regular subjects of the tutorial lectures. This is a great sign of progress; and it may confidently be hoped that, under these circumstances, Homer will henceforward hold a much more forward position in the studies of Oxford. There remains something to desire, and that something, I should hope, any further development of the Examination Statute of the University will supply.

It is clear, that the study of this great master should not be confined to preparation for examinations which deal principally with language, or which cannot enter upon either primitive history, or philosophy, or policy, or religion, except by way of secondary illustration. Better far that he should be studied simply among the poets, than that he should not be studied at all. But as long as he is read only among the poets, he cannot, I believe, be read effectively for the higher and more varied purposes of which Homeric study is so largely susceptible.

The grammar, metre, and diction, the tastes, the whole poetic handling and qualities of Homer, do, indeed, offer an assemblage of objects for our consideration at once and alike singular, attractive, extended, and profitable. The extraneous controversies with which his name has so long been associated as to his personality and date, and as to the unity and transmission of his works, although they are for us, I trust, in substance nearly decided, yet are not likely to lose their literary interest, were it only on account of the peculiarly convenient and seductive manner in which they open up many questions of primitive research; presenting these questions to us, as they do, not in the dull garb pieced out of antiquarian scraps, but alive, and in the full movement of vigorous debate. All this is fit for delightful exercise; but much more lies behind.

There is an inner Homeric world, of which his verse is the tabernacle and his poetic genius the exponent, but which offers in itself a spectacle of the most profound interest, quite apart from him who introduces us to it, and from the means by which we are so introduced. This world of religion and ethics, of civil policy, of history and ethnology, of manners and arts, so widely severed from all following experience, that we may properly call them palæozoic, can hardly be examined and understood by those, who are taught to approach Homer as a poet only.

Indeed, the transcendency of his poetical distinctions has tended to overshadow his other claims and uses. As settlers in the very richest soils, saturated with the fruits which they almost spontaneously yield, rarely turn their whole powers to account, so they, that are taught simply to repair to Homer for his poetry, find in him, so considered, such ample resources for enjoyment, that, unless summoned onwards by a distinct and separate call, they are little likely to travel further. It was thus that Lord Bacon’s brilliant fame as a philosopher diverted public attention from his merits as a political historian.[7] It was thus, to take a nearer instance, that most readers of Dante, while submitting their imaginations to his powerful sway, have been almost wholly unconscious that they were in the hands of one of the most acute and exact of metaphysicians, one of the most tender, earnest, and profound among spiritual writers. Here, indeed, the process has been simpler in form; for the majority, at least, of readers, have stopped with the striking, and, so to speak, incorporated imagery of the ‘Inferno,’ and have not so much as read the following, which are also the loftier and more ethereal, portions of the ‘Divina Commedia.’ It may be enough for Homer’s fame, that the consent of mankind has irrevocably assigned to him a supremacy among poets, without real competitors or partners, except Dante and Shakspeare; and that, perhaps, if we take into view his date, the unpreparedness of the world for works so extraordinary as his, the comparative paucity of the traditional resources and training he could have inherited, he then becomes the most extraordinary, as he is also the most ancient, phenomenon in the whole history of purely human culture. In particular points he appears to me, if it be not presumptuous to say so much, to remain to this day unquestionably without an equal in the management of the poetic art. If Shakspeare be supreme in the intuitive knowledge of human nature and in the rapid and fertile vigour of his imagination, if Dante have the largest grasp of the ‘height and depth’ of all things created, if he stand first in the power of exhibiting and producing ecstasy, and in the compressed and concentrated energy[8] of thought and feeling, Homer, too, has his own peculiar prerogatives. Among them might perhaps be placed the faculty of high oratory; the art of turning to account epithets and distinctive phrases; the production of indirect or negative effects; and the power of creating and sustaining dramatic interest without the large use of wicked agents, in whom later poets have found their most indispensable auxiliaries. But all this is not enough for us who read him. If the works of Homer are, to letters and to human learning, what the early books of Scripture are to the entire Bible and to the spiritual life of man; if in them lie the beginnings of the intellectual life of the world, then we must still recollect that that life, to be rightly understood, should be studied in its beginnings. There we may see in simple forms what afterwards grew complex, and in clear light what afterwards became obscure; and there we obtain starting-points, from which to measure progress and decay along all the lines upon which our nature moves.

Over and above the general plea here offered for the study of Homer under other aspects than such as are merely poetical, there is something to be said upon his claims in competition with other, and especially with other Greek poets. The case of the Latin poets, nearer to us historically, more accessible in tongue, more easily retained in the mind under the pressure of after-life, more readily available for literary and social purposes, must stand upon its own grounds.

In considering what is the place due to Homer in education, we cannot altogether exclude from view the question of comparative value, as between him and his now successful and overbearing rivals, the Greek tragedians. For we are not to expect that of the total studies, at least of Oxford and Cambridge, any larger share, speaking generally, can hereafter be given to Greek poetry, as a whole, than has heretofore been so bestowed. It is rather a question whether there should be some shifting, or less uniformity, in the present distribution of time and labour, as among the different claimants within that attractive field.

I do not dispute the merits of the tragedians as masters in their noble art. As long as letters are cultivated among mankind, for so long their honours are secure. I do not question the advantage of studying the Greek language in its most fixed and most exact forms, which they present in perfection; nor their equal, at least, if not greater value than Homer, as practical helps and models in Greek composition. But, after all allowances on these, or on any other score, they cannot, even in respect of purely poetic titles, make good a claim to that preference over Homer, which they have, nevertheless, extensively enjoyed. I refer far less to Æschylus than to the others, because he seems more to resemble Homer not only in majesty, but in nature, reality, and historical veracity: and far less again to Sophocles, than to Euripides. But it may be said of them, generally, though in greatly differing degrees, that while with Homer everything is pre-eminently fresh and genuine, with them, on the contrary, this freshness and genuineness, this life-likeness, are for the most part wanting. We are reminded, by the matter itself, of the masks in which the actors appeared, of the mechanical appliances with the aid of which they spoke. The very existence of the word, ἐκτραγῳδεῖν,[9] and other[10] like compounds, shows us that, in the Greek tragedy, human nature and human life were not represented at large; they were got up; they were placed in the light of certain peculiar ideas, with a view to peculiar effects. The dramas were magnificent and also instructive pictures, but they taught, as it were, certain set lessons only: they were pictures sui generis, pictures marked with a certain mannerism, pictures in which the artist follows a standard which is neither original, nor general, nor truly normal. Let us try the test of an expression somewhat kindred in etymology: such a word as ἐξομηροῦν would carry upon its face a damning solecism. Again, let us mark the difference which was observed by the sagacity of Aristotle.[11] With the speeches in the Iliad, he compares the speeches in the tragedians; those most remarkable and telling compositions, which we have occasion so often to admire in Euripides. But, as he says, the Characters of the ancients, doubtless meaning Homer, speak πολιτικῶς, those of the moderns, ῥητορικῶς. I know no reason why the speeches of Achilles should not be compared with the finest passages of Demosthenes: but no one could make such a comparison between Demosthenes and the speeches, though they are most powerful and effective harangues, which we find in the Troades, or the Iphigenia in Aulide. This contrast of the earnest and practical with the artificial, runs, more or less, along the whole line which divides Homer from the tragedians, particularly from Euripides.

When we consider the case in another point of view, and estimate these poets with reference to what they tell, and not to the mere manner of their telling it, the argument for assigning to Homer a greater share of the attention of our youth, becomes yet stronger. For it must be admitted that the tragedians, especially the two later of the three, teach us but very little of the Greek religion, history, manners, arts, or institutions. At the period when they wrote, the religion of the country had become political or else histrionic in its spirit, and the figures it presented were not only multiplied, but were also hopelessly confused: while morals had sunk into very gross corruption, of which, as we have it upon explicit evidence, two at least of them largely partook. The characters and incidents of their own time, and of the generations which immediately preceded it, were found to be growing less suitable for the stage. They were led, from this and other causes, to fetch their themes, in general, from the remote period of the heroic or pre-historic ages. But of the traditions of those ages they were no adequate expositors; hence the representations of them are, for the most part, couched in altered and degenerate forms. This will be most clearly seen upon examining the Homeric personages, as they appear in the plays of Euripides. Here they seem often to retain no sign of identity except the name. The ‘form and pressure,’ and also the machinery or physical circumstances of the Greek drama, were such as to keep the tragedians, so to speak, upon stilts, while its limited scope of necessity excluded much that was comprised in the wide circle of the epic action; so that they open to us little, in comparison with Homer, of the Greek mind and life: of that cradle wherein lie, we are to remember, the original form and elements, in so far as they are secular, of European civilization.

If I may judge in any degree of the minds of others by my own experience, nothing is more astonishing in Homer, than the mass of his matter. Especially is this true of the Iliad, which most men suppose to be little more than a gigantic battle-piece. But that poem, battle-piece as it is, where we might expect to find only the glitter and the clash of arms, is rich in every kind of knowledge, perhaps richest of all in the political and historical departments. It is hardly too much to say, in general, that besides his claims as a poet, Homer has, for himself, all the claims that all the other classes of ancient writers can advance for themselves, each in his separate department. And, excepting the works of Aristotle and Plato, on either of which may be grafted the investigation of the whole philosophy of the world, I know of no author, among those who are commonly studied at Oxford, offering a field of labour and inquiry either so wide or so diversified, as that which Homer offers.

But, if Homer is not fully studied in our universities, there is no adequate consolation to be found in the fact, that he is so much read in our public schools.

I am very far indeed from lamenting that he is thus read. His free and genial temperament gives him a hold on the sympathies of the young. The simple and direct construction of almost all his sentences allows them easy access to his meaning; the examination of the sense of single words, so often requisite, is within their reach; while it may readily be believed that the large and varied inflexions of the Greek tongue, in his hands at once so accurate and so elastic, make him peculiarly fit for the indispensable and invaluable work of parsing. It may be, that for boyhood Homer finds ample employment in his exterior and more obvious aspects. But neither boyhood nor manhood can read Homer effectively for all purposes at once, if my estimate of those purposes be correct. The question therefore is, how best to divide the work between the periods of life severally best suited to the different parts of it.

It is, indeed, somewhat difficult, as a general rule, beneficially and effectively to use the same book at the same time as an instrument for teaching both the language in which it is written, and the subject of which it treats. What is given honestly to the one purpose, will ordinarily be so much taken or withheld from the other. For the one object, the mind must be directed upon the thought of the author; for the other, upon the material organ through which it is conveyed; or, in other words, for the former of these two aims his language must be regarded on its material, for the latter on its intellectual, side. The difficulty of combining these views, taken of necessity from opposite quarters, increases in proportion as the student is young, the language subtle, copious, and elaborate, the subject diversified and extended. In some cases it may be slight, or, at least, easily surmountable; but it is raised nearly to its maximum in the instance of Homer. There are few among us who can say that we learned much of the inward parts of Homer in our boyhood; while perhaps we do not feel that our labours upon him were below the average, such as it may have been, of our general exertions; and though other generations may greatly improve upon us, they cannot, I fear, master the higher properties of their author at that early period of life. Homer, if read at our public schools, is, and probably must be, read only, or in the main, for his diction and poetry (as commonly understood), even by the most advanced; while to those less forward he is little more than a mechanical instrument for acquiring the beginnings of real familiarity with the Greek tongue and its inflexions. If, therefore, he is to be read for his theology, history, ethics, politics, for his skill in the higher and more delicate parts of the poetic calling, for his never-ending lessons upon manners, arts, and society, if we are to study in him the great map of that humanity which he so wonderfully unfolds to our gaze,—he must be read at the universities, and read with reference to his deeper treasures. He is second to none of the poets of Greece as the poet of boys; but he is far advanced before them all, even before Æschylus and Aristophanes, as the poet of men.

But no discussion upon the general as well as poetical elevation of Homer, can be complete or satisfactory without a more definite consideration of the question—What is the historical value of his testimony? This is not settled by our showing either his existence, or his excellence in his art. No man doubts Ariosto’s, or Boiardo’s, or Virgil’s personality, or their high rank as poets; but neither would any man quote them as authorities on a point of history. To arrive at a right view of this further question, we must be reasonably assured alike of the nature of Homer’s original intention, of his opportunities of information, and of the soundness of his text. To these subjects I shall now proceed; in the meantime, enough may have been said to explain the aim of these pages so far as regards the more fruitful study of the works of Homer, the contemplation of them on the positive side in all their bearings, and the clearing of a due space for them in the most fitting stages of the education of the youth of England.

Sect. 3.—On the Historic Aims of Homer.

For the purposes of anatomy every skeleton may be useful, and may sufficiently tell the tale of the race to which it belongs. But when we come to seek for high beauty and for approaches to perfection, of how infinite a diversity, of what countless degrees, does form appear to be susceptible! How difficult it is to find these, except in mere fragments; and how dangerous does it prove, in dealing with objects, to treat the whole as a normal specimen, simply because parts are fine, or even superlative. When, again, we pass onward, and with the body regard also the mind of man, still greater is the range of differences, and still more rare is either the development of parts in a degree so high as to bring their single excellence near the ideal standard, or the accurate adjustment of their relations to one another, or the completeness of the aggregate which they form.

Now, it appears to me, that in the case of Homer, together with the breadth and elevation of the highest genius, we have before us, and in a yet more remarkable degree, an even more rare fulness and consistency of the various instruments and organs which make up the apparatus of the human being—constituted as he is, in mind and body, and holding, as he does, on the one side of the Deity, and on the other, of the dust. Among all the qualities of the poems, there is none more extraordinary than the general accuracy and perfection of their minute detail, when considered with reference to the standards at which from time to time they aim. Where other poets sketch, Homer draws; and where they draw, he carves. He alone, of all the now famous epic writers, moves (in the Iliad especially) subject to the stricter laws of time and place; he alone, while producing an unsurpassed work of the imagination, is also the greatest chronicler that ever lived, and presents to us, from his own single hand, a representation of life, manners, history, of morals, theology, and politics, so vivid and comprehensive, that it may be hard to say whether any of the more refined ages of Greece or Rome, with their clouds of authors and their multiplied forms of historical record, are either more faithfully or more completely conveyed to us. He alone presents to us a mind and an organization working with such precision that, setting aside for the moment any question as to the genuineness of his text, we may reason in general from his minutest indications with the confidence that they belong to some consistent and intelligible whole.

It may be right, however, to consider more circumstantially the question of the historical authority of Homer. It has been justly observed by Wachsmuth[12], that even the dissolution of his individuality does not get rid of his authority. For if the works reputed to be his had proceeded from many minds, yet still, according to their unity of colour, and their correspondence in ethical and intellectual tone with the events of the age they purport to describe, there would arise an argument, founded on internal evidence, for the admissibility of the whole band into the class of trustworthy historical witnesses.

But, first of all, may we not ask, from whence comes the presumption against Homer as an historical authority? Not from the fact that he mixes marvels with common events; for this, to quote no other instance, would destroy along with him Herodotus. Does it not arise from this—that his compositions are poetical—that history has long ceased to adopt the poetical form—that an old association has thus been dissolved—that a new and adverse association has taken its place, which connects poetry with fiction—and that we illogically reflect this modern association upon early times, to which it is utterly inapplicable?

If so, there is no burden of proof incumbent upon those, who regard Homer as an historical authority. The presumptions are all in favour of their so regarding him. The question will, of course, remain—In what proportions has he mixed history with imaginative embellishment? And he has furnished us with some aids towards the consideration of this question.

The immense mass of matter contained in the Iliad, which is beyond what the action of the poem requires, and yet is in its nature properly historical, of itself supplies the strongest proof of the historic aims of the poet. Whether, in the introduction of all this matter, he followed a set and conscious purpose of his own mind, or whether he only fed the appetite of his hearers with what he found to be agreeable to them, is little material to the question. The great fact stands, that there was either a design to fulfil, or, at least, an appetite to feed—an intense desire to create bonds and relations with the past—to grasp its events, and fasten them in forms which might become, and might make them become, the property of the present and the future. Without this great sign of nobleness in their nature, Greeks never could have been Greeks.

I have particularly in view the great multitude of genealogies; their extraordinary consistency one with another, and with the other historical indications of the poems; their extension to a very large number, especially in the Catalogue, of secondary persons; I take again the Catalogue itself, that most remarkable production, as a whole; the accuracy with which the names of the various races are handled and bestowed throughout the poems; the particularity of the demands regularly made upon strangers for information concerning themselves, and especially the constant inquiry who were their parents, what was, for each person as he appears, his relation to the past? and further, the numerous legends or narratives of prior occurrences with which the poems, and particularly the more historic Iliad, is so thickly studded. Even the national use of patronymics as titles of honour is in itself highly significant of the historic turn. Nay, much that touches the general structure of the poem may be traced in part to this source; for all the intermediate Books between the Wrath and the Return of Achilles, while they are so contrived as to heighten the military grandeur of the hero, are so many tributes to the special and local desires in each state or district for commemoration of their particular chiefs, which Homer would, of course, have to meet, as he itinerated through the various parts of Greece.

Now, this appetite for commemoration does not fix itself upon what is imaginary; it may tolerate fiction by way of accessory and embellishment, but in the main it must, from its nature, rely upon what it takes to be solid food. The actions of great men in all times, but especially in early times, afford it suitable material; and there is nothing irrational in believing that the race which in its infancy produced so marvellous a poet as Homer, should also in its infancy have produced great warriors and great statesmen. Composing, with such powers as his, about his own country, and for his own countrymen, he could scarcely fail, even independently of conscious purpose, to convey to us a great mass of such matter as is in reality of the very highest historic truth and value. If, indeed, we advance so far as to the conviction that his hearers believed him to be reciting historically, the main question may speedily be decided. For each generation of men, possessed of the mental culture necessary in order to appreciate Homer, knows too much of the generations immediately preceding to admit of utter and wholesale imposition. But it is a fair inference from the Odyssey, that the Trojan War was thus sung to the men and the children of the men who waged it. Four lays of bards[13] are mentioned in that poem; one of Phemius, three of Demodocus; and out of the four, three relate to the War, which appears to show clearly that its celebrity must have been both instantaneous and overpowering; the more so, as the only remaining one has reference not to any human transaction, but to a scene in Olympus. And I shall shortly advert to the question, whether the Homeric poems themselves were in all probability composed not later than within two generations of the War itself.

It may be true that, with respect to some parts of his historical notices, the poet, adapting himself to the wishes and tastes of his hearers, might take liberties without fear of detection, most of all where he has filled in accessories, in order to complete a picture; but I think we should be wrong in supposing that in the interest of his art he would have occasion to make this a general practice, or to carry it in historical subjects beyond matters of detail. Nor can I wholly disregard the analogy between his history and his equally copious and everywhere intermixed geographical notices: such of them, I mean, as lay within the sphere of Greek experience. These indeed, he could not, under the eyes of the men who heard him, cast into the mould of fiction; yet there could be no call of popular necessity for his unequalled and most minute precision, and it can only be accounted for by the belief that accurate record was a great purpose of his poems. If he was thus careful to record both classes of particulars alike, and if, as to the one, we absolutely know that he has recorded them with exemplary fidelity, that fact raises a corresponding presumption of some weight as to the other.

But there is, I think, another argument to the same effect, of the highest degree of strength which the nature of the case admits. It is to be found in the fact that Homer has not scrupled to make some sacrifices of poetical beauty and propriety to these historic aims. For if any judicious critic were called upon to specify the chief poetical blemish of the Iliad, would he not reply by pointing to the multitude of stories from the past, having no connexion, or at best a very feeble one, with the War, which are found in it? Such brief and minor legends as occur in the course of the Catalogue, may have a poetical purpose; it appears not improbable that they may be introduced by way of relief to the dryness of topographical and local enumeration. But in general the narratives of prior occurrences are (so to speak) rather foisted in, and we must therefore suppose for them a purpose over and above that, which as a mere poet Homer would have in view. It is hard to conceive that he would have indulged in them, if he had not been able to minister to this especial aim by its means. Thus, again, the curious and important genealogy of the Dardanian House[14] is given by Æneas, in answer to Achilles, who had just shown by his taunt that he, at least, did not want the information, but knew very well[15] the claims and pretensions of his antagonist. Again, the long story told by Agamemnon, in the assembly held for the Reconciliation, when despatch was of all things requisite, may best be accounted for by the desire to relate the circumstances attending the birth of the great national hero, Hercules. It certainly impedes the action of the poem, which seems to be confessed in the rebuke insinuated by the reply of Achilles:—

νῦν δὲ μνησώμεθα χάρμης
αἶψα μάλ’· οὐ γὰρ χρὴ κλοτοπεύειν ἐνθάδ’ ἐόντας
οὐδὲ διατρίβειν· ἔτι γὰρ μέγα ἔργον ἄρεκτον.[16]

Still more is this the case when Patroclus, sent in a hurry for news by a man of the most fiery impatience, is (to use the modern phrase) button-held by Nestor, in the eleventh Book, and, though he has ‘no time to sit down,’ yet is obliged to endure a speech of a hundred and fifty-two lines, ninety-three of which, containing the account of the Epean contest with Pylos, are absolutely and entirely irrelevant. It may be said, that these effusions are naturally referable to the garrulous age of Nestor, and to false shame and want of ingenuousness in Agamemnon. In part, too, we may compare them with the modern fashion among Orientals of introducing parables in common discourse. But many of these have no parabolic force whatever: and from all of them poetical beauty suffers. On the other hand, the historic matter introduced is highly curious and interesting for the Greek races: why, then, should we force upon Homer the charge of neglect, folly, or drowsiness,[17] when an important purpose for these interpolations appears to lie upon the very face of them?

It will be observed, that if this reasoning in reference to the interlocutory legends be sound, it supplies an historical character to the poem just in the places where the general argument for it would have been weakest; inasmuch as these legends generally relate to times one or two generations earlier than the Troica, and are farther removed, by so much of additional interval, from the knowledge and experience of his hearers.

But, over and above the episodes, which seem to owe their place in the poem to the historic aim, there are a multitude of minor shadings which run through it, and which, as Homer could have derived no advantage from feigning them, we are compelled to suppose real. They are part of the graceful finish of a true story, but they have not the showy character of what has been invented for effect. Why, for instance, should Homer say of Clytæmnestra, that till corrupted by Ægisthus she was good?[18] Why should it be worth his while to pretend that the iron ball offered by Achilles for a prize was the one formerly pitched by Eetion?[19] Why should he spend eight lines in describing the dry trunk round which the chariots were to drive?[20] Why should he tell us that Tydeus was of small stature?[21] Why does Menelaus drive a mare?[22] Why has Penelope a sister Iphthime, ‘who was wedded to Eumelus,’ wanted for no other purpose than as a persona for Minerva in a dream?[23] These questions, every one will admit, might be indefinitely multiplied.

But, after all, there can be no point more important for the decision of this question, than the general tone of Homer himself. Is he, for ethical and intellectual purposes, the child of that heroic age which he describes? Does he exhibit its form and pressure? Does he chant in its key? Are there a set of ideas of the writer which are evidently not those of his heroes, or of his heroes which are not those of the writer, or does he sing, in the main, as Phemius and Demodocus might themselves have sung? Wachsmuth says well, that Homer must be regarded as still within the larger boundaries of the heroic age. There are, perhaps, signs, particularly in the Odyssey, of a first stage of transition from it; but the poet is throughout identified with it in heart, soul, speech, and understanding. I would presume to argue thus; that Homer never would have ventured to dispense with mere description, and to adopt action as his sole resource—to dramatise his poem as he has dramatised it—unless he had been strong in the consciousness of this identity. It is no answer to say that later writers—namely, the tragedians—dramatised the subject still more, and presented their characters on the stage without even those slender aids from interjected narrative towards the comprehension of them, which Homer has here and there, at any rate, permitted himself to use. For the consequence has been in their case, that they entirely fail to represent the semblance of a picture of the heroic age, or indeed of any age at all. They produce remote occurrences or fables in a dress of feelings, language, and manners suited to their own time, as far as it is suited to any. Besides, as dramatists, they had immense aids and advantages of other kinds; not to mention their grand narrative auxiliary, the Chorus. But Homer enjoyed little aid from accessories, and has notwithstanding painted the very life. And yet, seeking to paint from the life, he commits it to his characters to paint themselves and one another. Surely he never could have confined himself to this indirect process, unless he had been emboldened by the consciousness of his own essential unity with them all. He would have done as most other epic poets have done, whose personages we feel that we know, not from themselves, but from what the poet in the character of intelligencer has been kind enough to tell us; whereas we learn Achilles by means of Achilles, Ulysses by means of Ulysses, and so with the rest. Next to their own light, is the light they reflect on one another; but we never see the poet, so to speak, holding the candle. Still, in urging all this, I feel that more remains and must remain unspoken. The question, whether Homer speaks and paints essentially in the spirit of his own age, or whether he fetches from a distance both his facts and a manner so remarkably harmonizing with them, must after all our discussions continue one to be settled in the last resort not by arguments, which can only play a subsidiary part, but first by the most thorough searching and sifting of the text; then by the application of that inward sense and feeling, to which the critics of the destructive schools, with their ἀναποδεικταὶ φάσεις, make such copious appeals.

But the assumption by an effort of mind of the manners and tone of a remote age, joined with the consistent support of this character throughout prolonged works, is of very rare occurrence. In Greek literature there is nothing, to my knowledge, which at all approaches it; and this I think may fairly be urged as of itself almost conclusive against ascribing it to Homer. The later tragedians, in whose compositions we should look for it, do not apparently so much as think of it; and it is most difficult to suppose a poet so national as Homer to be in this cardinal respect entirely different from all others of his race. Indeed the supposition is radically at variance with the idea of his poetical character; of which the very groundwork lies in a childlike unconsciousness, and in the unity of Art with Nature[24].

May we not, however, go a good deal further, and say boldly that the faculty of assuming in literary compositions an archaic costume, voice, and manner, does not belong at all either to an age like that of Homer, or to any age of which the literary conditions at all resemble it?

In the first place, an inventor, working like Homer for the general public, must, by departing altogether from the modes of thought, expression, and action current in his own day, pro tanto lose his hold upon those on whose approval he depends. It seems to follow that this will not be seriously attempted, except in an age which has ceased to afford a liberal supply of the materials of romance. Is not this presumption made good by experience? The Greek tragedians, it is indisputable, did not find it necessary to aim, and did not aim, at reproducing the whole contemporary apparatus, which was in strictness appropriate and due to their characters. Virgil made no such attempt in the Æneid, of which, notwithstanding the manners abound in anachronisms of detail. The romance poets of Italy idealize their subject, not, however, by the revival of antique manners with their proper apparatus of incidents, but by means of an abundant preternatural machinery. Even in Shakespeare’s King John, Henry IV, or Henry VIII, how little difference can be detected from the Elizabethan age, or (in this point) from one another[25]. Again, in Macbeth or Lear, enough is done to prevent our utterly confounding their ages with the common life of the hearers; but there is nothing that approaches to a complete characteristic representation of the respective times to which the personages are supposed to belong. So, again, in Coriolanus, Julius Cæsar, or Antony and Cleopatra, there is a sort of Roman toga thrown loosely over the figures; but we do not feel ourselves amidst Roman life when we read them. And, in truth, what is done at all in these cases is not done so much by reproducing as by generalizing, in the same sense as a painter generalizes his draperies. A great instance of the genuine process of reproduction is to be found in Sir Walter Scott. He, however, besides being a man of powerful genius, cast not in the mould of his own age, but in one essentially belonging to the past, was a master of antiquarian knowledge. And this leads me to name what seems to be the second condition of serious and successful attempts (I need not here speak of burlesques, of which all the touches must be broad ones) at disinterring and reviving bygone ages in the whole circle and scheme of their life. The first, as has been already said, is to live in an age itself socially old, so as not to abound in proper materials for high invention. The second is, to live in an age possessed of such abundant documents and records of a former time as to make it practicable to explore it in all points by historical data. This condition was wanting to Virgil, even supposing him to have had the necessary tastes and qualifications. It was not wanting to Scott, with reference especially to the period of the Stuarts, who, besides a vast abundance of oral and written traditions, had laws, usages, architecture, arms, coins, utensils, every imaginable form of relic and of testimony at his command, so that he could himself first live in the age of his works, and then, when himself acclimatised, invent according to it.

In all this it is not forgotten that a certain amount of archaism is indispensable in all works purporting to draw their subject from a long-past age. But this minimum need only be slight and general, as in the Æneid; and it consists rather in the exclusion of modern accessories, than in the revival of the original tone. And again, the very choice of subject, as it is grave and severe or light and gay, will to some extent influence the manners: the former will spontaneously lean towards the past, the latter, depending on the zest of novelty, will be more disposed to clothe itself in the forms of the present. Thus we have a more antique tone in Henry the Fifth, than in the Merry Wives of Windsor. But archaic colouring within limits such as these is broadly different from such systematic representation of the antique as Homer must have practised, if he had practised it at all.

As in romance and poetry, so in the progress of the drama, this method appears to be the business of a late age. The strength of dramatic imagination is always when the drama itself is young. It then confidently relies upon its essential elements for the necessary illusion; it knows little, and cares less, about sustaining it by elaborate attention to minor emblems and incidents. But when it has lived into the old age of civilized society, when the critical faculty has become strong and the imagination weak, then it strengthens itself by minute accuracy in scenery and costume,—in fact, by exact reproduction. This is indeed the novel gift of our own time: and by means of it theatrical revivals are now understood and practised among ourselves in a manner which former generations could not emulate, but did not require.

Nor must we forget the importance, with reference to this discussion, of Homer’s minuteness, precision, and multitude of details. Every one of these, be it remembered, if we suppose him not to be painting from the life, affords an additional chance of detection, by the discrepancy between the life habitually present to the poet’s experience, and that which he is representing by effort. But the voice of the Homeric poems is in this respect, after all, unisonous, like that of the Greeks, and not multiform, like that of the Trojan army[26]. We are driven, therefore, to suppose that Homer practised this art of reproduction on a scale, as well as with a success, since unheard of, and this at a period when, according to all likelihood and all other experience, it could only in a very limited sense be possible to practice it at all. The extravagance of these suppositions tells powerfully against them, and once more throws us back on the belief that the objects which he painted were, in the main, those which his own age placed beneath his view.

This view of the historical character of Homer, I believe, substantially agrees with that taken by the Greeks in general. If I refer to Strabo, in his remarkable Prolegomena[27], it is because he had occasion to consider the point particularly. Eratosthenes had treated the great sire of poets as a fabulist. Strabo confutes him. Eratosthenes had himself noticed the precision of the geographical details: Thisbe, with its doves; Haliartus and its meadows; Anthedon, the boundary; Lilæa by the sources of Cephissus; and Strabo retorts upon him with force—πότερον οὖν ὁ ποιῶν ταῦτα ψυχαγωγοῦντι ἔοικεν ἢ διδάσκοντι; his general conclusion is, that Homer used fiction, as his smith in the Odyssey used gold for plating silver:—

ὡς δ’ ὅτε τις χρυσὸν περιχεύεται ἀργύρῳ ἀνὴρ,

that so Homer adjoined mythical ornaments to true events. But history was the basis:—ἔλαβεν οὖν παρὰ τῆς ἱστορίας τὰς ἀρχάς[28]. And, in adopting the belief that Homer is to be taken generally for a most trustworthy witness to facts, I am far from saying that there are no cases of exception, where he may reasonably be suspected of showing less than his usual fidelity. The doctrine must be accepted with latitude: the question is not whether it is absolutely safe, but whether it is the least unsafe. We may most reasonably, perhaps, view his statements and representations with a special jealousy, when they are such as appear systematically contrived to enhance the distinctive excellencies of his nation. Thus, for instance, both in the causes and incidents of the war, and in the relative qualities and merits of Greeks and Trojans, we may do well to check the too rapid action of our judgments, and to allow some scope to the supposition, that the historical duties of the bard might here naturally become subordinate to his patriotic purpose in glorifying the sires of his hearers, that immortal group who became through him the fountain head to Greece, both of national unity and of national fame.

Indeed, while I contend keenly for the historic aim and character of Homer, I understand the terms in a sense much higher than that of mere precision in the leading narration. We may, as I am disposed to think, even if we should disbelieve the existence of Helen, of Agamemnon, or of Troy, yet hold, in all that is most essential, by the historical character of Homer. For myself, I ask to be permitted to believe in these, and in much besides these; yet I also plead that the main question is not whether he has correctly recorded a certain series of transactions, but whether he has truly and faithfully represented manners and characters, feelings and tastes, races and countries, principles and institutions. Here lies the pith of history; these it has for its soul, and fact for its body. It does not appear to me reasonable to presume that Homer idealized his narration with anything like the license which was permitted to the Carlovingian romance; yet even that romance did not fail to retain in many of the most essential particulars a true historic character; and it conveys to us, partly by fact and partly through a vast parable, the inward life of a period pregnant with forces that were to operate powerfully upon our own characters and condition. Even those who would regard the cases as parallel should, therefore, remember that they too must read Homer otherwise than as a poet in the vulgar and more prevailing sense, which divests poetry of its relation to reality. The more they read him in that spirit the higher, I believe, they will raise their estimate of his still unknown and unappreciated treasures.

Sect. 4.—The probable Date of Homer.

In employing such a phrase as the date of Homer, I mean no reference to any given number of years before the Olympiads, but simply his relation in the order of history to the heroic age; to the events, and, above all, to the living type of that age.

When asserting generally the historic aims and authority of the poet, I do not presume to pronounce confidently upon the difficult question of the period at which he lived. I prefer to dwell upon the proposition that he is an original witness to manners, characters, and ideas such as those of his poems. It is not necessary, to make good this proposition, that we should determine a given number of years as the maximum that could have passed between the Trojan war and the composition of the Iliad or Odyssey. But the internal evidence seems to me very strongly to support the belief, that he lived before the Dorian conquest of the Peloponnesus. That he was not an eye-witness of the war, we absolutely know from the Invocation before the Catalogue[29]. It also appears[30] that he must have seen the grandchildren of Æneas reigning over the land of Priam. It is no extravagant supposition that forty or fifty years after the siege, perhaps even less, might have brought this to pass.

The single idea or form of expression in the poems, which at first sight tends to suggest a very long interval, is that quoted by Velleius Paterculus[31], the οἷοι νῦν βροτοί εἰσι[32]. But the question arises, whether this is an historical land-mark, or a poetical embellishment? In the former sense, as implying a great physical degeneracy of mankind, it would require us to suppose nothing less than a lapse of centuries between the Troica and the epoch of the poet. This hypothesis, though Heyne speaks of the eighth or ninth generation[33], general opinion has rejected. If it be dismissed, and if we adopt the view of this formula as an ornament, it loses all definite chronological significance. Thus it is lost in the phrase, common in our own time with respect to the intellectual characters of men now no more, but yet not removed from us, perhaps, by more than from a quarter to half a century—‘there were giants in those days.’ Nay, the observation of Paterculus, especially as he was an enthusiastic admirer, itself exemplifies the little care with which these questions have been treated. For the Iliad itself supplies a complete answer in the speech of Nestor, who draws the very same contrast between the heroes of the Troica and those of his own earlier days:

κείνοισι δ’ ἂν οὔτις
τῶν οἱ νῦν βροτοί εἰσιν ἐπιχθονίων μαχέοιτο[34].

And it is curious that we have in these words a measure, supplied by Homer himself, of the real force of the phrase, which seems to fix it at something under half a century, and thus makes it harmonise with the indication afforded by the passage relating to the descendants of Æneas. The argument of Mitford[35] on the age of Homer appears to me to be of great value: and, while it is rejected, it is not answered by Heyne[36]. Nor is it easy to conceive the answer to those who urge that, so far as the poet’s testimony goes, the years from Pirithous to the siege are as many as from the siege to his own day[37]. But Pirithous was the father of Polypætes, who led a Thessalian division in the war.[38]

If this view of Homer’s meaning in the particular case be correct, we can the better understand why it is that the poet, who uses this form of enhancement four times in the Iliad, does not employ it in the Odyssey, though it is the later poem, and though he had opportunities enough; such as the athletic exploits of Ulysses in Phæacia, and especially the handling of the Bow in Ithaca. For in the Iliad a more antique tone of colouring prevails, as it is demanded by the loftier strain of the action.

There is one passage, and one only, which is just capable of being construed as an allusion to the great Dorian conquest: it is that in the Fourth Book of the Iliad, where Juno tells Jupiter that she well knows he can destroy in spite of her, whensoever he may choose, her three dearest cities, Argos, Sparta, and Mycenæ[39]. It is probable that the passage refers to sacking such as had been practised by Hercules[40], and such as is pathetically described by Phœnix[41]. But, in the first place, we do not know that these cities were in any sense destroyed by the Dorian conquest, more than they had been by previous dynastic and territorial changes. If, on the other hand, it be contended, that we need not construe the passage as implying more than revolution independent of material destruction, then we need not introduce the idea of the Dorian conquest at all to sustain the propriety of the passage, for Homer already knew by tradition how those cities, and the territory to which they belonged, had changed hands from Danaïds to Perseids, and from Perseids to Pelopids.

But indications even far less equivocal from an isolated passage would be many times outweighed, in a case like that of Homer, by any conclusion justly drawn from features, whether positive or negative, that are rooted in the general body of the poems. Now such a conclusion arises from the admitted and total absence of any allusion in Homer to the general incidents of the great Dorian conquest, and to the consequent reconstruction of the old or European Greece, or to the migrations eastward, or to the very existence of the new Asiatic Greece which it is supposed to have called into being. Respecting the conquest itself, he might by a sustained effort of deliberate intention have kept silence: but is it possible that he could have avoided betraying by reference to results, on a thousand occasions, his knowledge of a change which had drawn anew the whole surface of society in Greece? It would be more rational, were we driven to it (which is not the case), even to suppose that the passage in question had been tampered with, than to imagine that the poet could have forborne through twenty-eight thousand lines, to make any other reference to, or further betray his knowledge of, events which must on this supposition have occupied for him so large a part of the whole horizon of life and experience.

Again, the allusions to the trumpet and the riding-horse found in illustrative passages, but not as used in the war, are by far too slight and doubtful, to sustain the theory that Homer saw around him a system of warfare different from that which he recorded; and require us to adopt no supposition for the explanation of them, beyond the very natural one that the heroic poet, without essentially changing manners, yet, within certain limits, insensibly projects himself and his subject from the foreground of every-day life into the mellowness of distance; and, therefore, that he may advisedly have excluded from his poem certain objects or practices, which notwithstanding he knew to have been more or less in use. Again, what are we to say to the minute knowledge of Greece proper and the Peloponnesus, which Homer has displayed? Why does he (apparently) know it so much better than he knew Asia Minor? How among the rude Dorians, just emerged from comparative barbarism, could he learn it at all? How strange, that Lycurgus should have acquired the fame of having first introduced the poems to the Peloponnesus, unless a great revolution and a substitution of one dominant race for another had come between, to obliterate or greatly weaken the recollection of them in the very country, which beyond all others they covered with a blaze of glory.

Of the very small number of passages in the poems which contain a reference to events later than the action, there are two, both relating to the same subject, for which at first sight it appears difficult to account. Why does Neptune obtrude upon the Olympian Court his insignificant and rather absurd jealousy, lest the work of defence, hastily thrown up by the Achæan army, should eclipse the wall built around Troy by Apollo and himself? Evidently in order to obtain from Jupiter the suggestion, that he should subsequently himself efface all traces of it. But why does Homer show this anxiety to account for its non-appearance? Why does he return subsequently to the subject, and most carefully relate how Jupiter by raining, and Apollo by turning the mouths of eight rivers, and Neptune with his trident, all cooperated to destroy the work, and make the shore smooth and even again? Had Homer lived many generations after the Trojan war, these passages would have been entirely without purpose, for he need not then have given reasons to show, why ages had left no trace still visible of the labour of a day. But if he lived near the period of the war, the case is very different. He might then be challenged by his maritime hearers, who, if they frequented the passage into the Sea of Marmora, would have had clear views of the camp of Agamemnon, and who would naturally require him to assign a cause for the disappearance even of such a work as a day’s labour of the army could produce, and as the Trojan soldiery could make practicable for their chariots to drive over[42].

These particular indications appear to be worth considering: but the great reasons for placing the date of Homer very near to that of the War are, his visible identity with the age, the altering but not yet vanished age, of which he sings, and the broad interval in tone and feeling between himself, and the very nearest of all that follows him.

Sect. 5.—The Probable Trustworthiness of the Text of Homer.

Let us now proceed to consider the question, what assumption is it, on the whole, safest to make, or what rule can we most judiciously follow, as our guide in Homeric studies, with reference to the text of the Poems?

Shall we adopt a given form of completely reconstructed text, like that of Mr. Payne Knight?

Shall we, without such adherence to a particular pattern, assume it to be either indisputable or, at least, most probable that an extensive corruption of the text can hardly have been avoided[43]; and shall we, in consequence, hold the received text provisionally, and subject to excision or to amendment according to any particular theory concerning Homer, his age, its manners and institutions, which we may ourselves have thought fit to follow or construct?

Shall we admit as authoritative, the excisions of Aristarchus or the Alexandrian critics, and the obeli which he has placed against verses which he suspected?

Or shall we proceed, as a general rule, upon the belief, that the received text of Homer is in general sound and trustworthy, so far, at least, as to be very greatly preferable to any reconstructed or altered form whatever, in which it has hitherto been produced or proposed for our acceptance?

My decided preference is for the fourth and last of these alternatives: with the observation, however, in passing, that the third does not essentially differ from it with respect to the great body of the Poems, so far as we know what the Alexandrian text really was.

I prefer this course as by far the safest: as the only one which can be entered upon with such an amount of preliminary assent, as to secure a free and unbiassed consideration of Homeric questions upon a ground held in common: and as, therefore, the only one, by means of which it can be hoped to attain to solid and material results as the reward of inquiry. In order fairly to raise the issue, the two following propositions may be stated as fitting canons of Homeric study:—

1. That we should adopt the text itself as the basis of all Homeric inquiry, and not any preconceived theory, nor any arbitrary standard of criticism, referable to particular periods, schools, or persons.

2. That as we proceed in any work of construction by evidence drawn from the text, we should avoid the temptation to solve difficulties found to lie in our way, by denouncing particular portions of it as corrupt or interpolated: should never set it aside except upon the closest examination of the particular passage questioned; should use sparingly the liberty even of arraying presumptions against it; and should always let the reader understand both when and why it is questioned.

Now, let us consider these rules, and the method which it is proposed by means of them to apply,

a. With reference to the failure of other methods.

b. With reference to the antecedent probabilities for or against the general soundness of the text.

c. With reference to the internal evidence of soundness or unsoundness afforded by the text itself.

The first of the two rules has been brought more and more into operation by the believers in Homer as the Poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, in self-defence against the sceptical theories: and it has been both announced and acted upon by Mure with such breadth and completeness, as to leave to those, who adopt it, simply the duty of treading in his footsteps.

Again, as to the second, it may now be hoped that by the force of circumstances it is gradually coming into vogue, though perhaps less, as yet, by a distinct conviction of its reasonableness, than through the utter failure and abortiveness of all other methods. First to theorise rashly (with or without consciousness), and then rudely to excise from the Homeric text whatever clashes with our crude conceptions, is, after all, an essentially superficial and vulgar method of proceeding: and if it was excusable before the evidence touching the Poet and the text had been so greatly confirmed, as it has recently been, by closer scrutiny, it can hardly be forgiven now. The text of Homer cannot be faultless: but, in the first place, it is plain, as far as general consent can make it so, that the poems, as they stand, afford a far better and surer foundation than any other form of them which has been proposed, whether curtailed in their principal members, as by the destructive school, or only amended by free handling in detail. All the recasting processes which have yet been tried, have begotten ten solecisms, or another solecism of tenfold magnitude, for every one that they did away. In fact, the end of schemes, such as that of Lachmann[44], has been not to achieve any thing like real progress in a continuous work, but simply to launch so many distinct speculations, isolated, conflicting, each resting on its author’s own hearty approval, and each drawing from the rest of the world no other sign than the shrug or the smile, which seems to be the proper reward of perverted ingenuity.

It would be presumptuous and unjust to treat the remarkable performance of Mr. Payne Knight as one of what may be called—to borrow a phrase from the commercial world—the Homeric bubble-schemes. It was anticipated with eagerness by Heyne. It was hailed by the calm judgment and refined taste of Lord Aberdeen. Yet this was not enough.

ἁμέραι δ’ ἐπίλοιποι
μάρτυρες σοφώτατοι[45].

The ordeal of time has not destroyed the value of Mr. Payne Knight’s Prolegomena, but it has been decidedly unfavourable to his text as a practical attempt at reconstruction. With the old text in the right hand, and Mr. Knight’s in the left, who would doubt in which to look for the nearest likeness to Homer? Or who will ever again venture to publish an abridged or re-modelled Iliad?

Apart, however, from the unsatisfactoriness of the results of attempts at reconstruction, have we reason to believe that the text of Homer has, as a whole, been seriously vitiated by interpolation or corruption? The difficulties attending its transmission from the time of the poet are not to be denied. But I think we have scarcely enough considered the amount of means which were available, and which were actually employed, in order to neutralize those difficulties, and achieve the task. Although writing of some description appears to have existed at the epoch of the Poems, it can be probably proved, and may at any rate be fully admitted, that Homer did not write, but recited only. This is the first step: now for the second. I pass by the argument with those, who deny that poems of this length could be transmitted orally at all, as one already disposed of by the general verdict of the world. So, likewise, I leave behind me, at the point where Mure has placed them, all the reasonings of the piecers, who say that there were originally a number of Iliadic and Odyssean songs, afterwards made up into the poems such as we now have them: of the amplifiers, who look upon them as expanded respectively by gradual interpolations and additions from an original of small dimensions; of the separators, who will have just two Homers and no more, one for the Iliad, and one for the Odyssey. I assume for the present purpose the contrary of all these three propositions: and simply invite those who disbelieve them, but who also conceive that the text is generally unsafe and untrustworthy in its detail, to some consideration of that subject.

In attempting to weigh retrospectively the probable fortunes of the Homeric text, I presume that we may establish as our point of departure the judgment delivered by Heyne[46], that the manuscripts of Homer are satisfactory: that we possess all, or nearly all, that the Alexandrian critics possessed; and that by the advance of the critical art, we have now probably, on the whole, a better and truer Homer than that of Aristarchus, which is the basis of the modern text. The imperfect state of notation when writing first began to be used, and the changes in pronunciation, have not, we may also suppose with Heyne[47], done more than trifling or secondary damage to the copies.

The first serious question is this; how far was Homer mutilated, first, by the rhapsodists, or reciters, before he was put into writing, and secondly, by those who, in order to bring the lays of the Iliad into one body, must, it is assumed, have added and altered much, even if they had no whims of their own, and only sought to do what was needful nexûs et juncturæ causâ. It is, of course, admitted that these lays, even though ideally one as they came from their framer, were in many cases actually separated. And Heyne quotes the Scholiast of Pindar[48], complaining by report that Cinæthus and his school had interpolated largely, as well as the passage in which Josephus[49] (so he states) gives it as his opinion that the Iliad, from having been pieced together long after it was composed, presented many discrepancies. Now, even if this were the opinion of Josephus, it would have no more pretension to historical authority, than if it had been delivered yesterday. But the fact is, that Josephus mentions it simply as a current notion; φασὶν οὐδὲ τοῦτον ... ἀλλὰ διαμνημονευομένην ... καὶ διὰ τοῦτο πολλὰς ἐν αὐτῇ σχεῖν τὰς διαφωνίας. Indeed, it cannot be too carefully borne in mind, that if the positive notices of Homer in early times are slight, so as to throw us back very much upon the poems for their own vindication, yet, on the other hand, all the authorities cited on the sceptical side, are chronologically so remote from the question in debate, that they are but opinions and not proofs, and that we may canvass and question them without the smallest scruple, or fear that we are pitting mere theory against legitimate evidence.

It is not to be denied that the condition of the Homeric poems, before they were committed to writing, was one of great danger. But the question may well be asked, how came poems of such length to be preserved at all by mere oral transmission through a period of undefined, and possibly of very great, length? It is plain that nothing but an extraordinary celebrity, and a passionate attachment on the part of the people, could have kept them alive. Now, if we suppose this celebrity and this attachment, let us inquire further, whether they may not have supplied the means of neutralizing and counteracting, in the main, the dangers to which the poems were exposed; and whether it is unreasonable to say, That which could have preserved them in their unity at all, must, in all likelihood, have preserved them in a tolerably genuine state. Fully admitting that the evidence in the case is imperfect, and can only lead to disputable conclusions, I nevertheless ask, What is the most probable supposition respecting the condition of the Homeric poems in the pre-historic times of Greece? Is it not this—that, with due allowance for a different state of circumstances, they were then, what they were in later times; the broad basis of mental culture; the great monument of the glory of the nation, and of each particular State or race; the prime entertainment of those prolonged festive gatherings which were so characteristic of early Greece; that they were not only the special charge and pride of particular poetical schools, but distinct objects of the care of legislators and statesmen; that in this manner they were recognised as among the institutions of the country, and that they had thus to depend for their transmission, not only on the fire of national and poetic feeling, but upon a jealous custody much resembling that which even a comparatively rude people gives to its laws?

I shall attempt a summary of the arguments and testimonies which appear to me to recommend, if they do not compel, the adoption of these conclusions.

1. Heraclides Ponticus, a pupil of Plato, in a fragment περὶ πολιτειῶν, declares that Lycurgus was the first to bring the poetry of Homer into Peloponnesus: τὴν Ὁμήρου ποίησιν, παρὰ τῶν ἀπογόνων Κρεοφύλου λαβὼν, πρῶτος διεκόμισεν εἰς Πελοπόννησον. This testimony is late with reference to the fact it reports, but not late in the history of Greek literature. Of the source from which it was derived by the author who gives it us, we know nothing. No light is thrown upon it by Ælian,[50] who adds the epithet ἀθρόαν to ποίησιν. Plutarch enlarges the expression of the tradition, but seems to add little to its matter, except that some portions of Homer were known before Lycurgus brought the whole from Crete.[51] It is stated in the Republic of Plato,[52] that Creophylus was a companion of Homer. Strabo[53] informs us that he was a Samian; and Hermodamas, the master of Pythagoras, is said by Diogenes Laertius[54] to have been his descendant. Now, we cannot call any part of these statements history; but they exhibit a body of tradition, of which the members, drawn from scattered quarters, agree with one another, and agree also with the general probability that arises out of a fact so astonishing as is in itself the actual preservation of the poems of Homer. It is in truth this fact that lays the best ground for traditions such as the one in question. If they came before us artificially complete and embellished, that might be made a ground of suspicion. But appearing, as this one does, with an evident absence of design, there is every presumption of its truth. Before considering the full force which attaches to it if it be true, we will draw out the kindred traditions.

2. Of these, the next, and a most important one, is the statement of Herodotus respecting Clisthenes, the ruler of Sicyon, who, when he had been at war with Argos, ῥαψῳδοὺς ἔπαυσε ἐν Σικυῶνι ἀγωνίζεσθαι, τῶν Ὁμηρείων ἐπέων εἵνεκα, ὅτι Ἀργεῖοί τε καὶ Ἄργος τὰ πολλὰ πάντα ὑμνέαται[55]. He proceeds to say, that Clisthenes sought to banish the memory of Adrastus, as being an Argive hero, from Sicyon. It is not necessary to inquire what these Homeric poems may have included; but the conclusion of Grote, that they were ‘the Thebais and the Epigoni, not the Iliad[56],’ seems to me incredible. Nor is it correct that the Iliad fails to supply matter to which the statement may refer. In the Iliad, the name of Argos, though meaning it is true the country rather than a city, is nearly associated with the chief seat of power, and becomes representative of the whole Hellenic race in its heroic infancy. This is surely honour infinitely higher, than any local fame it could derive from the civil feud with Thebes. The Iliad, too, marks most clearly the connexion of Adrastus with Argos—for it names Diomed as the husband of his daughter or granddaughter, Ægialea[57]; it also marks the subordinate position of Sicyon,

ὅθ’ ἄρ’ Ἄδρηστος πρῶτ’ ἐμβασίλευεν[58],

by making it a mere town in the dominions of Agamemnon, while Argos figures as a sovereign and powerful city. There may therefore perhaps be room to doubt whether Herodotus meant even to include the Thebais or Epigoni in the phrase ‘Homeric poems.’

But the importance of the passage is not wholly dependent on these considerations. It shows,

a. That there were, at Sicyon, State-recitations of Homer six centuries before the Christian era, attended with rewards for the successful performers.

b. That these recitations were in conformity with common use; for they are named as something ordinary and established, which was then set aside, not as a custom peculiar to Sicyon.

c. That the recitations depended upon the Homeric poems, since they were entirely stopped on account of exceptionable matter which the Homeric poems were deemed to contain.

d. That these recitations were in the nature of competitive contests among the rhapsodists, when the best and most approved, of course, would obtain prizes. This implies that the recitations were not single, as if by poet laureates, but that many shared in them.

3. Next to this tradition, and nearly coeval with it, but reported by later authority, is that respecting Solon and Athens. Dieuchidas of Megara, an author of uncertain age, placed by Heyne[59] later than Alexander, is quoted in Diogenes Laertius[60] as testifying to the following effect concerning Solon: τά τε Ὁμήρου ἐξ ὑποβολῆς γέγραφε ῥαψῳδεῖσθαι. οἷον ὅπου ὁ πρῶτος ἔληξεν, ἐκεῖθεν ἄρχεσθαι τὸν ἐχόμενον. μᾶλλον οὖν Σόλων Ὅμηρον ἐφώτισεν, ἢ Πεισίστρατος. But we have also a better witness, I think, in Lycurgus the orator, contemporary with Demosthenes,[61] who gives a most striking account of the political and martial use of the Homeric songs. He says, οὕτω γὰρ ὑπέλαβον ὑμῶν οἱ πατέρες σπουδαῖον εἶναι ποιήτην, ὥστε νόμον ἔθεντο καθ’ ἑκάστην πενταετηρίδα τῶν Παναθηναίων μόνου τῶν ἄλλων ποιήτων ῥαψωδεῖσθαι τὰ ἔπη. ‘It was with these songs in their ears,’ he proceeds, ‘that your fathers fought at Marathon; and so valiant were they then, that from among them their brave rivals, the Lacedæmonians, sought a general, Tyrtæus.’

a. Now, these words appear to carry the traditional origin of this law, as far as the authority of Lycurgus will avail, back to the early part of the seventh century, when Tyrtæus lived.[62]

b. Thus, at the period when Athens is just beginning to rise towards eminence, she enacts a law that the poems of Homer shall be recited at her greatest festival.

c. This honour she accords to Homer (whatever that name may have imported) alone among poets.

d. This appears, from the connexion with Tyrtæus, to be a tradition of a matter older still than the one mentioned by Dieuchidas. But the two are in thorough accordance. For Dieuchidas does not say that Solon introduced the recitations of Homer, nor does he refer simply to the Panathenaica. He pretty clearly implies, that Solon did not begin the recitations, but that he reformed—(by bringing them into regular succession, which implies a fixed order of the songs)—what had been introduced already; while Lycurgus seems to supply the notice of the original introduction as having occurred before the time even of Tyrtæus.

4. The argument from the sculptures on the chest of Cypselus, representing subjects taken out of the Iliad, refers to a period nearly corresponding with that of Tyrtæus, as Cypselus was probably born about B. C. 700: and tends to show that the Iliad was famous in Corinth at that date.[63]

5. The next of the specific traditions is that relating to Pisistratus. To his agency it has been the fashion of late years to assign an exaggerated, or even an exclusive, importance. But whereas the testimonies respecting Lycurgus, Clisthenes, and Solon, (as well as the Athenian legislators before him,) are derived from authors probably, or certainly, of the fourth and fifth centuries B. C., we have none at all respecting Pisistratus earlier than the Augustan age.[64] Cicero says he first disposed the Homeric books in their present order; Pausanias,[65] that he collected them, διεσπασμένα τε καὶ ἀλλαχοῦ μνημονευόμενα; Josephus,[66] who, as we have seen, merely refers to the report that the Iliad was not committed to writing until after Homer’s time, is wrongly quoted[67] as a witness to the labours of Pisistratus. An ancient Scholion, recently discovered,[68] names four poets who worked under that prince. And it may be admitted, that the traditions respecting Pisistratus have this distinctive mark—that they seem to indicate the first accomplishment of a critical and literary task upon Homer’s text under the direct care and responsibility of the sovereign of the country.

Thus, the testimony concerning Pisistratus is of an order decidedly inferior to that which supports the earlier traditions, and cannot with propriety be put into the scale against them where they are in conflict with it; but there is no reason to reject the report that he fixed the particular order of the poems, which the law of Solon may have left open in some degree to the judgment of the reciters, although they were required by it to recite in order.

6. The dialogue, doubtfully ascribed to Plato under the name of Hipparchus, states that that sovereign—

τὰ Ὁμήρου πρῶτος ἐκόμισεν ἐς τὴν γῆν ταυτηνὶ, καὶ ἠνάγκασε τοὺς ῥαψῳδοὺς Παναθηναίοις ἐξ ὑπολήψεως ἐφεξῆς αὐτὰ διιέναι, ὥσπερ νῦν ἔτι οἵδε ποιοῦσι[69].

As regards the matter of original introduction, this passage contradicts all the foregoing ones. From the uncertainty who is its author, it must yield to them as of less authority. But this is not all. It is on the very face of it incredible: for it asserts, not that his poetry was first arranged or adjusted, but first brought into the country by Hipparchus. This is in itself absurd: and it is also directly in the teeth of the statement, which can hardly be a pure fiction, that Solon by law required the poems of Homer to be recited at the Panathenæa. As regards the succession in reciting, it is quite possible that he may have put the last hand to the work of his father.

However, the passage may deserve notice as a sign of the general belief that the care of the poems of Homer, and provision for their orderly publication in the only mode then possible, was a fit and usual part of the care of States and their rulers.

The whole mass of the passages which have been cited may be thought to bear primarily on the controversies which I have waived. But they have a most important, even if secondary, bearing upon the question, whether the received text is generally sound in its structure. The dangers which menaced that text of course were referable to two sources: the one, want of due care; and the other, falsification for a purpose: and it is necessary to bring into one view the whole positive evidence with respect to the preservation and publication of the Homeric poems, in order to estimate the amount both of these dangers and of the safeguards against them. I resume the prosecution of this task.

From the word ἀγωνίζεσθαι, applied by Herodotus to the recitations at Sicyon, it is plain that they were matches among the rhapsodists. And as the match did not in the main depend upon the original compositions of the candidates, but on the repetition of what Homer was reputed to have composed, the question arises, on what grounds could the prize be adjudged? Partly, perhaps, for the voice and manner of the rhapsodist; but partly also, nay, we must assume principally, for his comparative fidelity to the supposed standard of his original. And, when we consider the length of the poems, we may the more easily understand how the retentiveness of memory required to give an adequate command of them, might well deserve and receive reward. True, the vanity of a particular rhapsodist might readily induce him to suppose that he could improve upon Homer. But surely such an one would be subject to no inconsiderable check from the vigilance, and the impartial, or more probably the jealous, judgment of his contemporaries and rivals. The aberrations, too, or interpolations, of each one inventor, would be immediately crossed by those of every other; and the intrinsic superiority of the great poet himself, and the extraordinary reverence paid to his name, would thus derive powerful aid from the natural play of human passions. I look upon the circumstance that these recitations were competitive, and probably open to all comers, as one of the utmost importance. Freedom, in such a case, would be far more conservative than restriction.

The force of such considerations is abated indeed, but it is not destroyed, by the fact that poems not composed by Homer were esteemed to be Homeric. We have no means of knowing whether this false estimation reached in general beyond the character of mere vulgar rumour. We find, indeed, that Callinus ascribed the Thebais to Homer, Thucydides the Pythian Hymn, and Aristotle the Margites. But, of these three, the last judgment, for all we know, may have been a true one. The Thebais was judged by Pausanias to be the best of the epics, after the Iliad and Odyssey. It does not therefore follow, that because a poet might assign this to him, he would also have assigned others. Few authors show more slender marks of critical acumen than Herodotus; but even he treats the notions that the Cyprian epic or the Epigoni belonged to Homer in terms such as to show, that they were at most mere speculations, and not established public judgments.[70]

Now, even in a critical age, it seems to be inevitable, that authors of conspicuous popularity shall be followed on their path, not only by imitators, but, where there is the least hope of even temporary success, by forgers. We see, in the present day, attempts to vent new novels under the name of Walter Scott. I have myself a volume, purchased in Italy, of spurious verses, printed under the name of her great, though not yet famous, modern poet, Giacomo Leopardi. In periods far less critical, impostors would be bolder, and dupes more numerous. But it cannot be shown that a number of other epics, or even that any single one, had been generally ascribed to Homer with the same confidence as the Iliad and Odyssey; nor that the same care, public or private, was taken in any other case for the keeping and restoration of the text.

Again, though the Spartan and Athenian traditions take no specific notice of competition, yet we are justified in supposing that it existed, because the practice can be traced to an antiquity more remote than any of them. It is true that in Homer we have no example of competition among bards actually exhibited; but neither do the poems furnish us with an occasion when it might have been looked for. The ordinary place of the bard was as a member of a king’s or chieftain’s household. At the great assemblages of tribes, or of the Greek race, to which the chiefs repaired in numbers, more bards than one would also probably appear. Some light is thrown upon this subject by the passage relating to Thamyris in the second Book of the Iliad.[71] He met his calamity at Dorion, when on a journey; and it caught him Οἰχαλίηθεν ἰόντα παρ’ Εὐρύτου Οἰχαλιῆος. Homer’s usual precision justifies our arguing that, when he says he came, not simply from a place, but also from, or from beside, the lord of a place, the meaning is, that he was attached to that lord as the bard of his court or household. Again, he was on a journey. Whither bound, except evidently to one of these contests? This is fully shown by the lines that follow, for they contemplate a match as then about to take place forthwith. For the form of his boast was not simply that he could beat the Muses, but (to speak in our phraseology) he vauntingly vowed that he would win, even though the Muses themselves should be his rivals.

στεῦτο γὰρ εὐχόμενος νικήσεμεν, εἴπερ ἂν αὐταὶ
Μοῦσαι ἀείδοιεν.

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—

αἱ ἐκ τῶν πόλεων, xxi. 351.
αἱ ἀπὸ πόλεων, xxii. 51.
αἱ ἀπὸ τῶν πόλεων, xix. 386.

and on the other hand—

αἱ κατ’ ἄνδρα, xxii. 103.

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:—

Tum primùm Græcia vires
Contemplata suas: tum sparsa ac dissona moles,
In corpus vultumque coït[92].

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.

Sect. 6.—The Place and Authority of Homer in Historical Inquiry.

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

δικαιότερον καὶ ἄρειον,
ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων θεῖον γένος, οἱ καλέονται
ἡμίθεοι προτέρῃ γενεᾷ κατ’ ἀπείρονα γαῖαν[112].

These, he goes on to explain, were the men, partly slain in the Theban and Trojan wars, partly translated by Jupiter to the ends of the earth, the islands of the blest. After this, the scale drops, at once, to the lowest point, the Iron age, the age without either Νέμεσις or Αἰδὼς, the age of sheer wickedness and corruption.

This very curious turn in the arrangement of the Hesiodic Ages, and especially the insertion, in a regular figurative series taken from the metals, of a completely heterogeneous passage, calls for explanation; and I venture to suggest that this passage should be construed as disclosing to us that brilliant halo, which the Homeric poems had cast over an age still recent, so as not only to hold it above the one that followed, but also to raise it even above that which had preceded it; above the age of Bellerophon, of Tantalus, of Sisyphus, of Minos, and even of Hercules. The splendour of the fame of heroes really depended on the Bard. The great Bard of Greece had lifted Achilles and Ulysses to a height surpassing that of the older Heroes, who remained unsung by him; and he had promised Menelaus, in the Fourth Odyssey[113], that very seat in the regions of the blest, to which allusion is here made by Hesiod. While the apparent poetic solecism of this passage is thus accounted for, it becomes, at once, both an emphatic testimony to the immense power exercised by the verse of Homer, and a distinct declaration by Hesiod of the wide social interval, by which he was himself separated from the heroic period; a declaration entirely accordant with the internal evidence of the poems of Hesiod generally, and amounting by implication to the double statement from this poet, that Homer belonged to the heroic age, and that he himself did not belong to it.

The tradition of Hellen and his sons, then, exhibits one of the cases in which we must take our choice between the testimony of Homer, and what are apparently the inventions of the later Greeks.

Another of these cases, which will be my second and last illustration, relates to Helen of Troy.

It has been much disputed whether this celebrated character is to be regarded as historical or fictitious. A writer of no less judgment and authority than the Bishop of St. David’s, adopts the latter alternative, upon various grounds. The strongest among them all, in his view, is, that ‘in the abduction of Helen, Paris only repeats an exploit, also attributed to Theseus[114].’ This exploit, the Bishop thinks, was known to Homer, as he introduces Æthra, the mother of Theseus, in the company of Helen at Troy. And other writers have further developed these ideas, by finding absurdity in the Homeric tale of Helen, on the ground that she must have been eighty years old when the supposed abduction by Paris took place.

Now, the basis of these statements entirely depends upon the assumption that the later traditions are entitled to be treated either as upon a par, or, at any rate, as homogeneous with those of Homer. The tradition which assigns a rape of Helen to Theseus, is only available to discredit the tale of Homer, on the supposition that it rests upon authority like that of Homer. But if it was a late invention, then it is more probably to be regarded as a witness to the fame of the Homeric personages, and the anxiety of Attica to give her hero the advantage of similar embellishments, than as an original tradition which Homer copied, or as a twin report with that which he has handed down.

The tradition of the rape of Helen by Theseus is mentioned by Herodotus[115] as a tale current among the Athenians. He testifies apparently to the fact, that the Deceleans of Attica enjoyed certain immunities in Sparta, and were spared by the Lacedæmonian forces when they invaded Attica; which was ascribed by the Athenians to their having assisted in the recovery of Helen from Theseus, by pointing out to the Tyndaridæ the place of her concealment. Herodotus, however, does not affirm the cause stated by the Athenians, nor the abduction by Theseus, which afterwards became, or had even then become, an established tradition. Isocrates[116] handles it without misgiving, and it is methodized in Plutarch, with a multitude of other particulars, our acceptance of which absolutely requires the rejection of Homer’s historical authority.

And so again with regard to Æthra, the daughter of Pittheus, whom the later ages have connected with Theseus. We have no right to treat her introduction in the company of Helen[117], as a proof that Homer knew of a story connecting Helen with Theseus, unless we knew, which we do not, from Homer, or from authority entitled to compete with Homer, that there was a relation between Æthra and Theseus.

Now, the story of Homer respecting Helen, is perfectly self-consistent: and so is his story respecting Theseus: but the two are separated by an interval of little less than two generations, or say fifty years. For Theseus[118] fought in the wars against the Φῆρες, in which Nestor took part: and he wooed and wedded Ariadne, the aunt of Idomeneus, who was himself nearly or quite one generation older than the Greek kings in general. On the other hand, Homer shows the age of Helen to have been in just proportion to that of Menelaus: for she had a daughter, Hermione, before the abduction, and might, so far as age was concerned, have borne children after their conjugal union was resumed[119]. Why, then, if Homer be the paramount authority, should we, upon testimony inferior to his, introduce conflict and absurdity into two traditions, which he gives us wide apart from one another and each self-consistent, by forging a connexion between them?

I have stated these two cases, not by way of begging the question as to the superiority in kind of Homer’s testimony, but to show how important that question is; and in how many instances the history of the heroic age must be rewritten, if we adopt the principle, that Homer ought to be received as an original witness, contemporary with the manners, nay, perhaps, even with some of the persons he describes, and subject only to such deductions as other original witnesses are liable to suffer: whereas the later traditions rest only upon hearsay; so much so, that they can hardly be called evidence, and should never be opposed, on their own credit, to the testimony of Homer.

In bringing this discussion to a close, I will quote a passage respecting Homer, from the Earl of Aberdeen’s Inquiry into the Principles of Beauty in Grecian Architecture, which, I think, expresses with great truth and simplicity the ground of Homer’s general claim to authority, subject, of course, to any question respecting the genuineness of the received text:

In treating of an age far removed from the approach of regular history, it is fortunate that we are furnished with a guide so unerring as Homer, whose general accuracy of observation, and minuteness of description, are such as to afford a copious source of information respecting almost everything connected with the times in which he composed his work: and who, being nearly contemporary with the events which he relates, and, indeed, with the earliest matter for record in Greece, cannot fall into mistakes and anachronisms in arts, or manners, or government, as he might have done had he lived at a more advanced and refined period[120].

It was said of a certain Dorotheus, that he spent his whole life in endeavours to elucidate the meaning of the Homeric word κλισίη. Such a disproportion between labour and its aim is somewhat startling; yet it is hardly too much to say, that no exertion spent upon any of the great classics of the world, and attended with any amount of real result, is really thrown away. It is better to write one word upon the rock, than a thousand on the water or the sand: better to remove a single stray stone out of the path that mounts the hill of true culture, than to hew out miles of devious tracks, which mislead and bewilder us when we travel them, and make us more than content if we are fortunate enough to find, when we emerge out of their windings, that we have simply returned to the point in our age, from which, in sanguine youth, we set out.

As rules of the kind above propounded can only be fully understood when applied, the application of them has accordingly been attempted, in the work to which these pages form an Introduction. In this view, it may be regarded as their necessary sequel. I commit it to the press with no inconsiderable apprehension, and with due deference to the judgments of the learned: for I do not feel myself to have possessed either the fresh recollection and ready command of the treasures of ancient Greece, or the extended and systematic knowledge of the modern Homeric literature, which are among the essential requisites of qualification to deal in a satisfactory manner with the subject. I should further say, that the poems of Homer, to be rightly and thoroughly sounded, demand undoubtedly a disengaged mind, perhaps would repay even the study of a life. One plea only I can advance with confidence. The work, whatever else it be, is one which has been founded in good faith on the text of Homer. Whether in statement or in speculation, I have desired and endeavoured that it should lead me by the hand: and even my anticipations of what we might in any case expect it to contain have been formed by a reflex process from the suggestions it had itself supplied:

Oh degli altri poeti onore e lume!
Vagliami il lungo studio, e il grande amore
Che m’ ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume;
Tu sei lo mio maestro, e il mio autore[121].

Finally, though sharing the dissatisfaction of others at the established preference given among us to the Latin names of deities originally Greek, and at some part of our orthography for Greek names, I have thought it best to adhere in general to the common custom, and only to deviate from it where a special object was in view. I fear that diversity, and even confusion, are more likely to arise than any benefit, from efforts at reform, made by individuals, and without the advantage either of authority or of a clear principle, as a groundwork for general consent. I am here disposed to say, ‘οὐκ ἀγαθὸν πολυκοιρανίη;’ and again with Wordsworth,

‘Me this unchartered freedom tires.’

Yet I should gladly see the day when, under the authority of Scholars, and especially of those who bear rule in places of education, improvement might be effected, not only in the points above mentioned, but in our solitary and barbarous method of pronouncing both the Greek and the Latin language. In this one respect the European world may still with justice describe the English at least as the penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos.

[II. ETHNOLOGY.]

SECT. I.
Scope of the Inquiry.

Scope of the Inquiry.

I now proceed to attempt, in a series of inquiries, the practical application of the principles which have been stated in the preliminary Essay. The first of these inquiries might on some grounds be deemed the most hazardous. It is an inquiry into the Early Ethnology and Ethnography of Greece: or the Composition of the Greek nation, and the succession and Distribution of its races, according to the text of Homer. The religion, the politics, the manners, the contemporary history, of the Iliad and Odyssey, may justly be considered to form essential parts of the plan of the Poet, and to have been distinctly contemplated by his intention. But into anterior legends he only dips at times: and of the subject of the succession and distribution of races it probably formed no part of his purpose to treat at all; so that in the endeavour to investigate it we are entirely dependent, so far as he is concerned, upon scattered and incidental notices.

But here it is, that the extraordinary sureness and precision of the mind of Homer stands us in such admirable stead. Wherever, amidst the cloud and chaos of pre-Homeric antiquity, he enables us to discern a luminous point, that point is a beacon, and indicates ground on which we may tread with confidence. The materials, which at a first glance appear upon the face of the poems to be available for our purpose, may indeed be but slender. But the careful gathering together of many dispersed indications, and the strict observation of their relative bearings has this effect, that each fragment added to the stock may both receive illustration from what is already known, and may give it in return, by helping to explain and establish relations hitherto doubtful or obscure. And as the total or gross accumulation grows, the nett result increases in a more rapid ratio: as a single known point upon a plane tells us of nothing besides itself, but two enable us to draw a line, and three a triangle, and each further one as it is added to construct a multitude of figures: or as in the map-puzzles, constructed to provoke the ingenuity of children, when once a very few countries have been laid in their right places, they serve as keys to the rest, and we can lay out with confidence the general order. Even so I am not without hope that, as to some parts at least of this ethnical examination, the Homeric indications may, when brought together, warrant our applying to them words used by Cicero for another purpose: est enim admirabilis continuatio seriesque rerum, ut aliæ ex aliis nexæ, et omnes inter se aptæ conligatæque videantur[122].

I must not, however, step over the threshold of the investigation without giving warning, that we have to meet at the outset an opinion broadly pronounced, and proceeding from a person of such high authority as Mr. Grote, our most recent historian of Greece, to the effect that these inquiries are futile. This intimation is so important that it shall stand in his own words. “In going through historical Greece,” says Mr. Grote, “we are compelled to accept the Hellenic aggregate with its constituent elements as a primary fact to start from, because the state of our information does not enable us to ascend any higher. By what circumstances, or out of what pre-existing elements, this aggregate was brought together and modified, we find no evidence entitled to credit[123].” And then, in condemnation particularly of Pelasgic inquiries, he resumes: “if any man is inclined to call the unknown ante-Hellenic period of Greece by the name of Pelasgic, it is open to him to do so: but this is a name carrying with it no assured predicates, no way enlarging our insight into real history, nor enabling us to explain—what would be the real historical problem—how or from whom the Hellens acquired that stock of dispositions, aptitudes, arts, &c. with which they began their career.... No attested facts are now present to us—none were present to Herodotus and Thucydides even in their age, on which to build trustworthy affirmations respecting the ante-Hellenic Pelasgians.”

In answer to these passages, which raise the question no less broadly than fairly, it may first be observed, that at least Herodotus and Thucydides did not think what we are thus invited to think for them, and that of the judgment of the latter, as an inquirer into matters of fact, Mr. Grote has himself justly expressed the highest opinion[124]. Mr. Grote, placing in one category all that relates to the legendary age, finds it as a whole intractable and unhistorical, with a predominance of sentimental attributes quite unlike the practical turn and powers of the Greek mind in later times[125]. But has not this disturbance of equilibrium happened chiefly because the genuine though slender historic materials of the heroic age, supplied by the poems of Homer, have been overborne and flooded by the accumulations made by imagination, vanity, resentment, or patriotism, during a thousand years? Even of the unsifted mass of legend, to which the distinguished historian refers, it may be doubted, whether it is not, when viewed as a whole, bewildering, formless, and inconsistent, rather than sentimental. It has been everywhere darkened by cross purposes, and by the unauthorized meddling of generations, which had ceased to sympathize with the heroic age. At any rate, I crave permission to try what we can make of that age in the matter of history, by dealing first and foremost with him who handled it for the purposes of history, apart from those, I mean the after poets, tragedians, and logographers, to whom it was little more than a romance.

I trust that the recent examples of men so learned and able as Bishop Thirlwall and K. O. Müller, neither of whom have thought subjects of this kind too uninviting to reward inquiry, may avail both to prevent the interposition of a preliminary bar to the discussion, and to protect it against an adverse prejudgment. By anticipation I can reasonably make no other answer to a condemnatory sentence, than that which is conveyed in the words ‘let us try.’ But at any rate, est operæ pretium: the stake is worth the venture. He would be indeed a worthless biographer who did not, so far as his materials carried him, pursue the life of a hero back to the nursery or even the cradle: and the same faithful and well-grounded instincts invest with a surpassing interest all real elucidation of the facts and ideas, that make up the image of the Greek nation either in its infancy or even in its embryo.

There are three and only three names of ordinary use in the Iliad, by which the poet designates the people that had been banded together against Troy. This same people afterwards became famous in history, perhaps beyond all others, first by the name of Hellenes, which was self-applied; and secondly by the name of Greeks, which they acquired from their Italian conquerors and captives. Greece is now again become Hellas.

These names, prominent far beyond all others, are,

1. Δαναοὶ, Danaans.

2. Ἀργεῖοι, Argeians or Argives.

3. Ἀχαιοὶ, Achæans.

They are commonly treated as synonymous. It appears at least to have been assumed that they are incapable of yielding any practical results to an attempt at historic analysis and distribution. To try this question fully, is a main part of my present purpose. Thus much at least is clear: that they seem to be the equivalents, for the Troic period, of the Hellenic name in later times.

But there are other names, of various classes, which on account of their relations to the foregoing ones it is material to bring into view.

First, there are found in Homer two other designations, which purport to have the same effect as the three already quoted. They are

1. Παναχαιοὶ, Panachæans.

2. Πανέλληνες, Panhellenes.

Next come three names of races, whose relations to the foregoing appellations will demand scrutiny. These are

1. Πελασγοὶ, Pelasgians.

2. Ἕλληνες, Hellenes.

3. Θρῇκες, Thracians, or rather Thraces.

Lastly, there are a more numerous class of names, which are local in this sense, that Homer only mentions them in connection with particular parts of Greece, but which being clearly tribal and not territorial, stand clearly distinguished from the names which owed, or may have owed, their origin to the different cities or districts of the country, such as Phocian (Il. ii. 517), Rhodian (654), Elian (Il. xi. 670), or Ithacan (Odyssey passim): and likewise from the names which already were, or afterwards came to be, in established connection with those of districts, though they have no appearance of having been originally territorial: such as Arcadian (Il. ii. 603, 611), Bœotian (Il. ii. 494), Athenian (Il. ii. 546, 551).

Of the class now before us there are some which are of importance in various degrees with regard to the views of primitive history to be gathered from the Homeric poems. As such I rank

1. Καδμεῖοι, Cadmeans, in Thebes, Il. iv. 388 and elsewhere: and with this, as an equivalent, Καδμείωνες, Il. iv. 385 and elsewhere.

2. Ἰάονες, Ionians, in Athens, Il. xiii. 685.

3. Δωριέες, Dorians, in Crete, Od. xix. 177. A town Dorion is also mentioned in the Catalogue as within the territories of Nestor, Il. ii. 594.

4. Κεφάλληνες, Cephallenes, in the islands under Ulysses, Il. ii. 631.

5. Ἐφυροὶ, Ephyri, in Thessaly, Il. xiii. 301.

6. Σελλοὶ or Ἑλλοὶ, Helli, in northern Thessaly, Il. xvi. 234.

7. Καύκωνες, Caucones, in southern Greece, Od. iii. 366: (and among the Trojan allies, Il. x. 429, xx. 329.)

8. Ἐπεῖοι, Epeans, in Elis, Il. ii. 619, and on the opposite or northern coast and islands of the Corinthian Gulf: compare Il. ii. 627, and xiii. 691.

9. Ἄβαντες, Abantes, in Eubœa, Il. ii. 536.

10. Μυρμίδονες, Myrmidones, in Phthia, Il. ii. 684.

11. Κουρῆτες, Curetes, in Ætolia, Il. ix. 529.

12. Φλεγύαι, Phlegyæ, in Thessaly, Il. xiii. 301.

13. Φῆρες, in Thessaly, Il. i. 267, 8, ii. 733, 4.

And lastly it may be mentioned that in the single word Γραῖα, used (Il. ii. 498) to designate one of the numerous Bœotian towns, we have an isolated indication of the existence in the heroic times of the germ of the names Greece and Greek, which afterwards ascended to, and still retain, such extraordinary fame.

The Homeric text will afford us means of investigation, more or less, for the greater part of these names, but the main thread of the inquiry runs with these five; Pelasgians, Hellenes, Danaans, Argeians, Achæans.

In conjunction with the present subject, I shall consider what light is thrown by Homer on the relations of the Greeks with other races not properly Greek: the Lycians, the Phœnicians, the Sicels, the Egyptians, the people of Cyprus, and finally the Persians. The name of the Leleges will be considered in conjunction with that of the Caucones.

SECT. II.

The Pelasgians; and with these,

a. Arcadians. b. Γραικοὶ or Græci. c. Ionians. d. Athenians. e. Egyptians. f. Thraces. g. Caucones. h. Leleges.

It will be most convenient to begin with the case of the Pelasgians: and the questions we shall have to investigate will be substantially reducible to the following heads:

1. Are the Pelasgians essentially Greek?

2. If so, what is their relation to the Hellenes, and to the integral Greek nation?

3. What elements did they contribute to the formation of the composite body thus called?

4. What was their language?

5. What was the derivation of their name?

6. By what route did they come into Greece?

The direct evidence of the Homeric poems with respect to the Pelasgians is scattered and faint. It derives however material aid from various branches of tradition, partly conveyed in the Homeric poems, and partly extraneous to them, particularly religion, language, and pursuits. Evidence legitimately drawn from these latter sources, wherever it is in the nature of circumstantial proof, is far superior in authority to such literary traditions as are surrounded, at their visible source, with circumstances of uncertainty.

The Pelasgians.

I. The first passage, with which we have to deal, is that portion of the Catalogue of the Greek armament, where Homer introduces us to the contingent of Achilles in the following lines:

Νῦν αὖ τοὺς ὅσσοι τὸ Πελασγικὸν Ἄργος ἔναιον,
Οἵ τ’ Ἄλον οἵ τ’ Ἀλόπην οἵ τε Τρηχῖν’ ἐνέμοντο,
Οἵ τ’ εἶχον Φθίην ἠδ’ Ἑλλάδα καλλιγύναικα,
Μυρμιδόνες δὲ καλεῦντο καὶ Ἕλληνες καὶ Ἀχαιοὶ,
Τῶν αὖ πεντήκοντα νεῶν ἦν ἀρχὸς Ἀχιλλεύς[126].

All evidence goes to show, that Thessaly stood in a most important relation to the infant life of the Greek races; whether we consider it as the seat of many most ancient legends; as dignified by the presence of Dodona, the highest seat of religious tradition and authority to the Greeks; as connected with the two ancient names of Helli and Pelasgi: or lastly in regard to the prominence it retained even down to and during the historic age in the constitution of the Amphictyonic Council[127]. All these indications are in harmony with the course of Greek ethnological tradition.

Now the Catalogue of the Greek armament is divided into three great sections.

The first comprises Continental Greece, with the islands immediately adjacent to the coast, and lying south of Thessaly. The second consists of the Greek islands of the Ægean. The third is wholly Thessalian: and it begins with the lines which have been quoted.

The Pelasgians: Pelasgic Argos.

What then does Homer mean us to understand by the phrase τὸ Πελασγικὸν Ἄργος in this passage? Is it

1. A mere town, or town and district, like Alos, Alope, and others which follow; or is it

2. A country comprising several or many such?

And if the latter, does it describe

1. That country only over which Peleus reigned, and which supplied the Myrmidon division; or

2. A more extended country?

First let us remark the use of the article. It is not the manner of Homer to employ the article with the proper names of places. We may be sure that it carries with it a distinctive force: as in the Trojan Catalogue he employs it to indicate a particular race or body of Pelasgians[128] apart from others. Now the distinctive force of the article here may have either or both of two bearings.

1. It may mark off the Argos of the Pelasgians from one or more other countries or places bearing the name of Argos.

2. Even independently of the epithet, the article may be rightly employed, if Argos itself be not strictly a proper name, but rather a descriptive word indicating the physical character of a given region. Thus ‘Scotland’ is strictly a proper name, ‘Lowlands’ a descriptive word of this nature: and the latter takes the article where the former does not require or even admit it. And now let us proceed to make our selection between the various alternatives before us.

Whichever of the two bearings we give to the article, it seems of itself to preclude the supposition that a mere town or single settlement can be here intended: for nowhere does Homer give the article to a name of that class.

Secondly, in almost every place where Homer speaks of an Argos, he makes it plain that he does not mean a mere town or single settlement, but a country including towns or settlements within it. The exceptions to this rule are rare. In Il. iv. 52 we have one of them, where he combines Argos with Sparta and Mycenæ, and calls all three by the name of cities. The line Il. ii. 559 probably supplies another. But in a later Section[129] the general rule will be fully illustrated.

It will also clearly appear, that the name Argos is in fact a descriptive word, not a proper name, and is nearly equivalent to our ‘Lowlands’ or to the Italian ‘campagna.’

Thirdly: in many other places of the Catalogue, Homer begins by placing in the front, as it were, the comprehensive name which overrides and includes the particular names that are to follow; and then, without any other distinctive mark than the use of the faint enclitic copulative τε, proceeds to enumerate parts included within the whole which he has previously named. Thus for instance

οἱ δ’ Εὔβοιαν ἔχον ...
Χαλκίδα τ’ Εἰρετρίαν τε κ.τ.λ.

v. 535, 6.

‘Those who held Eubœa, both Chalcis and Eretria’.... Or in the English idiom we may perhaps write more correctly, ‘Those who held Eubœa, that is to say Chalcis, and Eretria’ ... and the rest.