Obrazy na stronie
PDF
ePub

66

lates that the poet, being on his voyage to Thebes, to | were such temples at Smyrna, Chios, and Alexandrea; attend a musical or poetical contest at the feast of Sat- and, according to Elian (V. H., 9, 15), the Argives urn in that city, landed in the island of Io, and, while sacrificed to, and invoked the names and presence of sitting on a rock by the seashore, observed some young Apollo and Homer together. But about the beginning fishermen in a boat; that Homer asked them if they of the second century of the Christian era, when the had anything (el Ti exoiev), and that the young wags, struggle between the old and new religion was warm who, having had no sport, had been diligently catch- and active, the tide turned. "Heathenism," says ing, and killing as many as they could catch, of cer- Pope (Essay on Homer), "was then to be destroyed, tain personal companions of a race not even yet ex- and Homer appeared the father of it, whose fictions tinct, answered, "as many as we caught we left; as were at once the belief of the pagan religion, and the many as we could not catch we carry with us." The objections of Christianity against it. He became, catastrophe is, that Homer, being utterly unable to therefore, deeply involved in the question, and not guess the meaning of this riddle, broke his heart out with that honour which hitherto attended him, but as of pure vexation, and that the inhabitants of the island a criminal who had drawn the world into folly. He buried him with great magnificence.-There has been was, on the one hand (Just. Mart., admon. ad gentes), as much doubt and controversy about the age of Ho- accused of having formed fables upon the works of mer as about himself and his poems. According to Moses; as the rebellion of the Giants from the the argument of Wood (Essay on the Original Ge- building of Babel, and the casting of Ate out of nius, &c., of Homer), Haller (Heyne, Excurs. 4, ad Il., Heaven from the fall of Lucifer. He was exposed, on 24), and Mitford (History of Greece, c. 1), he lived the other hand, for those which he is said to invent, about the middle of the ninth century before Christ; as when Arnobius (adv. gentes, lib. 7) cries out, which date agrees exactly with the conjecture of He-This is the man who wounded your Venus, impris rodotus, who wrote B.C. 444, and is founded on the oned your Mars, who freed even your Jupiter by Briassumption that Homer must have lived before the re- areus, and who finds authority for all your vices,' &c. turn of the Heraclide into Peloponnesus, an event Mankind were derided (Tertull., Apollod., c. 14) for which took place within eighty years after the Trojan whatever he had hitherto made them believe; and war. The Newtonian calculation is also adopted, Plato (Arnobius, ib.—Euseb., Præp. Evang., 14, 10), which fixes the capture of Troy as low as B.C. 904. who expelled him his commonwealth, has, of all the The argument is based upon the great improbability philosophers, found the best quarter from the fathers that Homer, so minute as he is in his descriptions of for passing that sentence. His finest beauties began Greece, and so full of the histories of the reigning to take a new appearance of pernicious qualities; and dynasties in its various districts, should never notice because they might be considered as allurements to so very remarkable an occurrence as the almost total fancy, or supports to those errors with which they abolition of the kingly government throughout Greece, were mingled, they were to be depreciated while the and the substitution of the republican form in its stead. contest of faith was in being. It was hence that the Now this national revolution was coincident with, or reading of them was discouraged, that we hear Ruimmediately consequent on, the return of the descend- finus accusing St. Jerome of it, and that St. Augustin ants of Hercules. It is said, also, that the poet men- (Confess., 1, 14) rejects him as the grand master of tions the grandchildren of Æneas as reigning in Troy, fable; though indeed the dulcissime vanus which he in the prophecy of Neptune in the Iliad (20, 308), and applies to Homer, looks but like a fondling manner of that, in another speech of Juno's, he seems to intimate parting with him. Those days are past; and, happily the insecure state of the chief existing dynasties of for us, the obnoxious poems have weathered the storms the race of Pelops; and it is inferred from this, that of zeal which might have destroyed them. Homer will he flourished during the third generation, or upward of have no temples, nor games, nor sacrifices in Chrissixty years after the destruction of Troy. Upon this tendom; but his statue is yet to be seen in the palaces argument Heyne remarks (Excurs., ad Il., 24), that, in of kings, and his name will remain in honour among the first place, a poet who was celebrating heroes of the nations to the world's end. He stands, by prethe Pelopid race had no occasion to notice a revolu- scription, alone and aloof on Parnassus, where it is not tion by which their families were expatriated and their possible now that any human genius should stand with kingdoms abolished; and next, which seems an in- him, the father and the prince of all heroic poets, the surmountable objection, that the Ionic migration took boast and the glory of his own Greece, and the love and place sixty years later than the return of the Heracli- the admiration of all mankind." (Müller, Hist. Greek dæ; yet that Homer was an Ionian, and a resident in, Lit., p. 41, seqq.-Coleridge, Introduction to the Study or at least perfectly conversant with, Ionian Asia, is of the Greek Classic Poets, pt. 1, p. 57, seqq.)—This admitted on all hands, and is indeed incontestable; Homer, then (of the circumstances of whose life we and as he never notices this migration, though it was know so little that may be relied upon), was the person certainly a very remarkable event, and one which he who gave epic poetry its first great impulse. Before must have known, he may just as well, for other or his time, in general, only single actions and adventures the same reasons, have been silent on the subject of a were celebrated in short lays. The heroic mythology revolution by which that migration was caused. The had prepared the way for the poets by grouping the Arundelian marbles place Homer B.C. 907, the Ionian deeds of the principal heroes into large masses, so that migration B.C. 1044, the return of the Heraclide B.C. they had a natural connexion with each other, and re1104, and the capture of Troy B.C. 1184. Heyne ferred to some common fundamental notion. Now, approves of this calculation, as, upon the whole, the as the general features of the more considerable lemost consistent with all the authorities; but it is at gendary collections were known, the poet before the variance with Newton's Chronology, and is therefore time of Homer had the advantage of being able to a calculation, of the exactness of which we can never narrate any one action of Hercules, or of one of the feel confident.-The vicissitudes to which Homer's Argive champions against Thebes, or of the Achæans reputation and influence have been subject, deserves against Troy; and, at the same time, of being certain notice. From the first known collection of the Iliad that the scope and purport of the action (namely, the and Odyssey in the time of the Pisistratida to the pro- elevation of Hercules to the gods, and the fated demulgation of Christianity, the love and reverence with struction of Thebes and Troy) would be present to which the name of Homer was regarded went on con- the minds of his hearers, and that the individual adstantly increasing, till at last public games were insti- venture would thus be viewed in its proper connexion. tuted in his honour, statues dedicated, temples erected, Thus, doubtless, for a long time, the bards were satisand sacrifices offered to him as a divinity. There fied with illustrating single points of the heroic mythol

ogy with brief epic lays; such as in later times were | other, and that they were put together as after menproduced by several poets of the school of Hesiod. It was also possible, if it were desired, to form from them longer series of adventures of the same hero; but they always remained a collection of independent poems on the same subject, and never attained to that unity of character and composition which constitutes one poem. It was an entirely new phenomenon, | which could not fail to make the greatest impression, when a poet selected a subject of the heroic tradition, which (besides its connexion with the other parts of the same legendary circle) had in itself the means of awakening a lively interest and of satisfying the mind; and, at the same time, admitted of such a development, that the principal personages could be represented as acting each with a peculiar and individual character, without obscuring the chief hero and the main action of the poem. One legendary subject of this extent and interest Homer found in the Anger of Achilles, and another in the Return of Ulysses. The former of these gave birth to the Iliad, the latter to the Odyssey. Of the character of these two poems we will treat in separate articles (vid. Ilias, Odyssea). Our attention will now be directed to other parts of the main subject.

tioned. Much of his argument, however, of the impossibility of one man having composed the Iliad in form as we now have it, applies to the theory just stated. Bentley expressed an opinion similar to Wolfe's on the history and compilation of the Iliad. "Homer wrote a sequel of songs and rhapsodies to be sung by himself, for small earnings and good cheer, at festivals and other days of merriment: the Iliad he made for the men, and the Odyssey for the other sex. These loose songs were not collected together in the form of an Epic poem till about 500 years after." (Letter to N. N., by Phileleuth. Lipsiens., § 7.) One of the main arguments insisted upon by those who deny the existence of a Homer, and the unity, consequently, of the Iliad and Odyssey, is the question of writing. It is said that the art of writing, and the use of manageable writing materials, were entirely, or all but entirely, unknown in Greece and the islands at the supposed date of the composition of the Iliad; that, if so, this poem could not have been committed to writing during the time of such its composition; that, in a question of compara tive probabilities like this, it is a much grosser improbability that even the single Iliad, amounting, after all curtailments and expungings, to upward of 15,000 lines, should have been actually conceived and perOrigin and Preservation of the Homeric Poems. fected in the brain of one man, with no other help but Whether the Homeric poems were in reality the his own or others' memory, than that it should be, in work of a single bard or not, their intrinsic merit, and, fact, the result of the labours of several distinct authors; consequently, their rank in Greek literature, must re- that, if the Odyssey be counted, the improbability is main the same, and be equally a worthy object of doubled; that if we add, upon the authority of Thustudious inquiry. The decision of that question can- cydides and Aristotle, the Hymns and Margites, not not in the slightest degree affect our estimate of their to say the Batrachomyomachia, that which was imquality. Whether all the poems that are now attrib- probable becomes absolutely impossible; that all that uted to Homer were his production; whether the Iliad has been so often said as to the fact of as many lines and the Odyssey, both, or one of them only, can lay or more having been committed to memory, is beside claim to such parentage; or whether, lastly, any such the point in question, which is not whether 15,000 or person as Homer, or, indeed, any individual author of 30,000 lines may not be learned by heart from a book the poem ever existed, whichever of these propositions or manuscript, but whether one man can compose a be true, it seems to be a matter of little importance to poem of that length, which, rightly or not, shall be those whose object it is not to spell the inscriptions on thought to be a perfect model of symmetry and conmouldering monuments, but to inhale the breath of an- sistency of parts, without the aid of writing matecient grandeur and beauty amid the undoubted ruins rials; that, admitting the superior probability of such of the great. The Iliad and the Odyssey exist; we a thing in a primitive age, we know nothing analogous have them in our hands; and we should not set them to such a case, and that it so transcends the common the less in honour though we were to doubt the im- limits of intellectual power, as, at the least, to merit, press of any Homer's hand, any more than we should with as much justice as the opposite opinion, the charcease to reverence the genius or the ruins of Rome, acter of improbability.-When it is considered that because shepherds or worse may have laid the first throughout the Homeric Poems, though they appear to stone of her walls. It is this very excellence, howev-embrace the whole circle of the knowledge then poser, of the Homeric poetry, and the apparent peculi- sessed by the Greeks, and enter into so many details arity of the instance, together with the celebrity of the on the arts of life, only one ambiguous allusion occurs controversy, to which the scepticism of some modern to any kind of writing (I., 6, 169), it is scarcely posscholars has given birth, that compels us to devote a sible to avoid the conclusion, that the art, though portion of this article to a notice of the points in ques- known, was still in its infancy, and was very rarely tion. No trace appears of any doubt having ever been practised. But the very poems from which this conentertained of the personal existence of Homer, as the clusion has been drawn would seem to overthrow it, author of the Iliad, till the close of the 17th and be- if it should be admitted that they were originally comginning of the 18th century, when two French writers, mitted to writing; for they would then seem to afHedelin and Perrault, first suggested the outlines of ford the strongest proof, that, at the time of their coma theory respecting the composition of that poem, position, the art had made very considerable progress, which has since been developed with so much learning and that there was no want, either of materials or of and talent by Heyne, Wolfe, and others, that its ori- skill, to prevent it from coming into common use. ginal authors are now almost forgotten. The substance Hence the original form of these poems becomes a of this theory is, that, whether any such person as question of great historical as well as literary imporHomer lived or not, the Iliad was not composed en- tance. The Greeks themselves almost universally, tirely by him or by any other individual, but is a com- and the earliest writers the most unanimously, believed pilation, methodized indeed and arranged by success-them both to have been the work of the same author, ive editors, but still a compilation of minstrelsies, the works of various poets in the heroic age, all having one common theme and direction, the wars of Troy, and the exploits of the several Grecian chiefs engaged in them. Wolfe, in particular, believed that the verses now constituting the Iliad, were written (we should rather say made or invented) by one Homer, but in short rhapsodies, unconnected purposely with each

who, though nothing was known of his life, or even his birthplace, was commonly held to have been an Asiatic Greek. The doubt whether his poems were written from the first, seems hardly to have been seriously entertained by any of the ancients, and in modern times it has been grounded chiefly on the difficulty of reconciling such a fact with the very low degree in which the art of writing is supposed to have been cul

tivated in the Homeric age. It has likewise been first introduction, or a new application of the most im urged, that the structure of the Homeric verses fur-portant of all inventions. Still, however, we are not nishes a decisive proof, that the state of the Greek driven to the necessity of adopting such a view of the language, at the time when these poems were written, subject. It is true, we are perpetually met with diffiwas different from that in which they must have been culties in endeavouring to form a notion of the manner composed. And by others it has been thought incon- in which these great epic poems were composed, at a sistent with the law of continual change, to which all time anterior to the use of writing. But these diffilanguages are subject, that the form in which these culties arise much more from our own ignorance of works now appear should differ so slightly as it does the period, and our own incapability of conceiving a from that of the Greek literature, if it really belonged creation of the mind without those appliances of which to the early period in which they were first recited. the use has become to us a second nature, than in the These difficulties are, it must be owned, in a great general laws of the human intellect. Who can determeasure removed by the hypothesis that each poem inine how many thousand verses a person, thoroughly is an aggregate of parts composed by different authors; impregnated with his subject, and absorbed in the confor then the poet's memory might not be too severely templation of it, might produce in a year, and confide taxed in retaining his work during its progress, and to the faithful memory of disciples, devoted to their might be aided by more frequent recitations. But this master and his art? Wherever a creative genius has hypothesis has been met by a number of objections, appeared, it has met with persons of congenial taste, some of which are not very easily satisfied. The ori- and has found assistants, by whose means it has comginal unity of each poem is maintained by arguments pleted astonishing works in a comparatively short pederived partly from the uniformity of the poetical char-riod of time. Thus the old bard may have been folacter, and partly from the apparent singleness of plan lowed by a number of younger minstrels, to whom it which each of them exhibits. Even those who do not was both a pleasure and a duty to collect and diffuse think it necessary to suppose an original unity of de- the honey which flowed from his lips. But it is at sign in the Iliad, still conceive that all its parts are least certain, that it would be unintelligible how these stamped with the style of the same author. (Clinton, great epics were composed, unless there had been ocFast. Hellen., vol. 3, p. 375, 379.) But with others, casions on which they actually appeared in their infrom the time of Aristotle to our own day, the plan tegrity, and could charm an attentive hearer with the itself has been an object of the warmest admiration; full force and effect of a complete poem. Without a and it is still contended, that the intimate coherence of connected and continuous recitation, they were not the parts is such as to exclude the hypothesis of a finished works; they were mere disjointed fragments, multiplicity of authors. (Vid. Ilias.) If the parts out which might, by possibility, form a whole. But where of which the Iliad or the Odyssey. was formed are were there meals or festivals long enough for such supposed to have been at first wholly independent of recitations? What attention, it has been asked, could each other, the supposition that they could have been be sufficiently sustained, in order to follow so many so pieced together as to assume their present appear- thousand verses?-If, however, the Athenians could ance is involved in almost insurmountable difficulties. at one festival hear in succession about nine tragedies, For how, it may be asked, did the different poets in three satyric dramas, and as many comedies, without each instance happen to confine themselves to the ever thinking that it might be better to distribute this same circle of subjects, as to the battles before Troy, enjoyment over the whole year, why should not the and the return of Ulysses? Must we suppose, with a Greeks of earlier times have been able to listen to the modern critic (Hermann, Wiener-Jahrbücher, vol. 54), Iliad and Odyssey, and perhaps other poems, at the that in the Iliad and Odyssey we see the joint labours same festival? At a later date, indeed, when the of several bards, who drew their subjects from an ear-rhapsodist was rivalled by the player on the lyre, the lier Iliad and an earlier Odyssey, which contained no dithyrambic minstrel, and by many other kinds of pomore than short narratives of the same events, but yet etry and music, these latter necessarily abridged the had gained such celebrity for their author, that the time allowed to the epic reciter; but, in early times, greatest poets of the succeeding period were forced to when the epic style reigned without a competitor, it adopt his name, and to content themselves with filling would have received an undivided attention. Let us up his outline? This would be an expedient only to beware of measuring, by our loose and desultory readbe resorted to in the last emergency. Or must we ing, the intension of mind with which a people enthu adopt the form which this hypothesis, by giving it a siastically devoted to such enjoyments, hung with dedifferent turn, has been made by others to assume, that light on the flowing strains of the minstrel. In short, the Iliad and Odyssey, after the main event in each there was a time (and the Iliad and Odyssey are the had formed the subject of a shorter poem, grew un-records of it) when the Greek people, not indeed at der the hands of successive poets, who, guided in part by popular tradition, supplied what had been left wanting by their predecessors, until in each case the curiosity of their hearers had been gratified by a finished whole? (Thirlwall's Greece, vol. 1, p. 246.) This supposition is involved in still greater difficulty than the former, for we have here a race of bards, who, though living at different periods, and though the language was, during all this time, undergoing changes of some kind or other, yet write all of them in a manner so similar, and display so few, if any, discrepances, that their various productions, when collected together, wear all the appearance of a poem by a single bard.-According to every hypothesis, the origin of the Homeric poetry is wrapped in mystery; as must be the case with the beginning of a new period, when that which precedes it is very obscure. And it would certainly be no unparalleled or surprising coincidence, if the production of a great work, which formed the most momentous epoch in the history of Greek literature, should have concurred with either the

meals, but at festivals, and under the patronage of their hereditary princes, heard and enjoyed these and other less excellent poems as they were intended to be heard and enjoyed, namely, as complete wholes. Whether they were at this early period ever recited for a prize, and in competition with others, is doubtful, though there is nothing improbable in the supposition. But when the conflux of rhapsodists to the contests became perpetually greater; when, at the same time, more weight was laid on the art of the reciter than on the beauty of the well-known poem which he recited; and when, lastly, in addition to the rhapsodizing, a number of other musical and poetical performances claimed a place, then the rhapsodists were permitted to repeat separate parts of poems, in which they hoped to excel; and the Iliad and Odyssey (as they had not yet been reduced to writing) existed for a time only as scattered and unconnected fragments. (Wolf's Prolegomena, p. cxliii.) And we are still indebted to the regulator of the contest of rhapsodists at the Panathenea (whether it was Solon or Pisistratus) for having

the verses, set out the Iliad and Odyssey." (Elian, V. H., 13, 14.)—"We praise Pisistratus," observes Libanius, "for his collection of the verses made by Homer." (Liban., Pan. in Iul., vol. 1, p. 170, ed. Reiske.)-"The poetry of the Iliad," says Eustathius, "is one continuous body throughout, and well fitted together; but they who put it together, under the direction, as is said, of Pisistratus," &c. (Wolf, Pro

compelled the rhapsodists to follow one another, according to the order of the poem, and for having thus restored these great works, which were falling into fragments, to their pristine integrity. It is indeed true, that some arbitrary additions may have been made to them at this period; which, however, we can only hope to be able to distinguish from the rest of the poem, by first coming to some general agreement as to the original form and subsequent destiny of the Ho-legom., p. cxliii., in not.)—That this collection was meric compositions. (Müller, Hist. Gr. Lit., p. 62, seq.)

Introduction of the Homeric Poems into Greece. Two different accounts are given on this head. 1. First, it is said that Lycurgus, the Spartan legislator, met with the poems of Homer during his travels in Asia, and, being charmed with them, carried them with him by some means, and in some shape or other, back to his native city. The authority for this is a passage of a fragment of Heraclides Ponticus, in which he says that Lycurgus, “having procured the poetry of Homer from the descendants of Creophylus, first introduced it into the Peloponnesus." Elian (V. H., 13, 14) repeats this with advantage: "Lycurgus the Spartan first carried the poetry of Homer in a mass into Greece." Plutarch (Vit. Lycurg.) finishes off the story in his usual manner. "There (in Asia) Lycurgus first fell in with the poems of Homer, probably in the keeping of the descendants of Cleophylus; he wrote them out eagerly, and collected them together for the purpose of bringing them hither into Greece; for there was already at that time an obscure rumour of these verses among the Greeks, but some few only possessed some scattered fragments of this poetry, which were circulated in a chance manner. Lycurgus had the principal hand in making it known." This Creophylus or Cleophylus, a Samian, is said to have been Homer's host in Samos, and a poet himself. The nucleus of fact in this story may probably consist in this; that Lycurgus became more acquainted with *he Homeric verses among the Ionian rhapsodists, and succeeded in introducing, by means of his own or others' memory, some connected portions of them into Western Greece. That he wrote them all out is, as we may see, so far as the original authority goes, due to the ingenious biographer alone. But the better founded account of the introduction, or, at least, of the formal collection of the Homeric verses, though not inconsistent with the other, is, that, after Solon had directed that the rhapsodists should, upon public occasions, recite in a certain order of poetical narration, and not confusedly, the end before the beginning, as had been the previous practice, Pisistratus, with the help of a large body of the most celebrated poets of his age, made a regular collection of the different rhapsodies which passed under Homer's name, committed them all to writing, and arranged them very much in the series in which we now possess them. The division of the rhapsodies into books corresponding with the letters of the Greek alphabet, was probably the work of the Alexandrean critics many centuries afterward. Now the authorities for attributing this primary reduction into form to Pisistratus, are numerous and express, and a few quotations from them will be the most satisfactory way of putting the student in possession of the opinions of the ancients upon this subject." Who," says Cicero, "was more learned in that age, or whose eloquence is reported to have been more refined by literature than that of Pisistratus, who is said first to have disposed the books of Homer, which were before confused, in the order in which we now have them?" (Cic., de Orat., 3, 34.)—“ Pisistratus," observes Pausanias, "collected the verses of Homer, which were dispersed, and retained in different places by memory." (Pausanias, 7, 26.)" Afterward," remarks Ælian, “Pisistratus, having collected

made with the assistance, and probably by the principal operation of the contemporary poets, rests also upon good authority. Pausanias, in speaking of v. 573, in the second book of the Iliad, says that Pisistratus, or some one of his associates, had changed the name through ignorance. "Afterward," remarks Suidas, "this poetry was put together and set in order by many persons, and in particular by Pisistratus." (Suid., s. v. "Ounpos.) The great poets with whom Pisistratus lived in friendship, and of whose aid he is supposed to have availed himself on this occasion, were Orpheus of Crotona, said to be the author of the Argonautics, Onomacritus the Athenian, Simonides, and Anacreon. In the dialogue called Hipparchus, attributed to Plato, it is said, indeed, of the younger son of Pisistratus of that name, "that he executed many other excellent works, and particularly he brought the verses of Homer into this country, and compelled the rhapsodists at the Panathenaic festival to go through them all in order, one taking up the other, in the same manner that they do now." There seems, however, no great inconsistency in these statements. They may very reasonably be reconciled, by supposing that this great work of collecting and arranging the scattered verses of the Homeric rhapsodists was begun in an imperfect manner by Solon, principally executed by Pisistratus and his friends, and finished under Hipparchus. This will embrace about eighty years from the date of Solon's law, B.C. 594, to the death of Hipparchus, B.C. 513. It must be remembered, however, that, although the Homeric rhapsodies were undoubtedly committed to writing, and reduced into a certain forin and order of composition, in the age of the Pisistratidæ, the ancient and national practice of recitation still continued in honour, and for a considerable time afterward was, perhaps, the only mode by which those poems were popularly known. But it may readily be believed, that, in proportion as written copies became multiplied, a power of, and taste for, reading generated, and a literature, in the narrow sense of the word, created, this practice of publicly reciting national poetry, which was as congenial as it was indispensable to a primitive and unlettered people, would gradually sink in estimation, become degraded in character, and finally fall into complete disuse. This we find to have been precisely the case from about the year B.C. 430, till the age of the Alexandrean critics, under the polite and civilized government of the Ptolemies. The old manner of reciting was no doubt very histrionic; but after the formation of a regular theatre, and the composition of formal dramas in the time of Eschylus, the heroic verses of the Homeric age must have seemed very unfit vehicles of, or accompaniments to, scenic effect of any kind. In this interval, therefore, are to be placed a third and last race of rhapsodists, now no longer the fellow-poets and congenial interpreters of their originals, but, in general, a low and ignorant sort of men, who were acceptable only to the meanest of the people. Xenophon (Sympos., 3) and Plato (Ion, passim) bear abundant testimony to the contempt with which they were regarded, though the object of the latter in the Ion or Ionian was probably to sketch a true and exalted picture of the duty and the character of a genuine rhapsodist. There were many editions, or Aιopowσɛiç, as they were called, of the Iliad, after this primary one by the Pisistratida. We read of one by Antimachus,

2. Batrachomyomachia.

a poet of Colophon; and of another very celebrated | others, however, the Margites was attributed to Pione by Aristotle, which edition Alexander is said to gres; and Knight is of opinion, from the use of the have himself corrected and kept in a very precious augment in the few lines still preserved, that it was casket, taken among the spoils of the camp of Darius. the work of an Athenian earlier than the time of This edition was called ʼn έk Toυ vúponko. The edi- Xerxes, but long after the lowest time of the compotions by any known individual were called ai kar av-sition of the Iliad. (Coleridge, Introduction, &c., p. Spa, to distinguish them from several editions existing 180.) in different cities, but not attributed to any particular editors. These latter were called ai κarà ñóλɛiç, or ai èk ñóλewv. The Massiliotic, Chian, Argive, Sinopic, Cyprian, and Cretan are mentioned. There are three other names very conspicuous among the multitude of critics, and commentators, and editors of the Iliad in subsequent times; these are Zenodotus, Aristophanes, the inventor of accents, and Aristarchus. This last celebrated man lived in the reign of Ptolemy Philometor, B.C. 150, and, after a collation of all the copies then existing, he published a new edition, or Atópowoc, of the Iliad, divided into books, the text of which, according to the general opinion of critics, has finally prevailed as the genuine diction of Homer. (Coleridge, Introduction, &c., p. 37-55.) In the preface to Gronovius' Thesaurus (vol. 5), there is a particular and curious account of the manner in which Pisistratus put together the poems of Homer. It is taken from the Commentary of Diomedes Scholasticus on the grammar of Dionysius the Thracian, and was first published in the original Greek by Bekker, in the second vol. of his Anecdota Græca (p. 767, seqq.). It is in substance as follows: The poems of Homer were in a fragmentary state, in different hands. One man had a hundred verses; another two hundred; a third a thousand, &c. Thereupon Pisistratus, not being able to find the poems entire, proclaimed all over Greece, that whoever brought to him verses of Homer, should receive so much for each line. All who brought any received the promised reward, even those who brought lines which he had already obtained from others. Sometimes people brought him verses of their own for those of Homer, now marked with an obelus (Tous vuv bbελišoμévovs). After having thus made a collection, he employed 72 grammarians to put together the verses of Homer in the manner they thought best. After each had separately arranged the verses, he brought them all together, and made each show to the whole his own particular work. Having all in a body examined carefully and impartially, they with one accord gave the preference to the compositions of Aristarchus and Zenodotus, and determined still farther, that the former had made the better one of the two. (Bekker, Anec. Græc., l. c.)

Iliad and Odyssey.

For an account of these two poems, and the discussions connected with them, consult the articles Ilias and Odyssea. The remainder of our remarks on the present occasion will be confined to a brief consideration of a few minor productions that are commonly attributed to Homer.

1. Margites.

This poem, which was a satire upon some strenuous blockhead, as the name implies, does not now exist; but it was so famous in former times that it seems proper to select it for a slight notice from among the score of lost works attributed to the hand of Homer. It is said by Harpocration that Callimachus admired the Margites, and. Dio Chrysostom says. (Diss. 53) that Zeno the philosopher wrote a commentary on it. A genuine verse, taken from this poem, is well known: Πόλλ' ἠπίστατο ἔργα, κακῶς δ ̓ ἠπίστατο πάντα. "For much he knew, but everything knew ill.” Two other lines in the same strain are preserved by Aristotle, and one less peculiar is found in the scholiast to the Birds of Aristophanes (v. 914).

By

"The Battle of the Frogs and Mice" is a short mock-heroic poem of ancient date. The text varies in different editions, and is obviously disturbed and corrupt to a great degree. It is commonly said to have been a juvenile essay of Homer's genius; but others have attributed it to the same Pigres mentioned above, whose reputation for humour seems to have invited the appropriation of any piece of ancient wit, the author of which was uncertain. So little did the Greeks, before the era of the Ptolemies, know or care about that department of criticism which is employed in determining the genuineness of ancient writings. As to this little poem being a youthful prolusion of Homer's, it seems sufficient to say, that from the beginning to the end it is a plain and palpable parody, not only of the general spirit, but of numerous passages of the Iliad itself; and, even if no such intention to parody were discoverable in it, the objection would still remain, that, to suppose a work of mere burlesque to be the primary effort of poetry in a simple age, seems to reverse that order in the development of national taste, which the history of every other people in Europe and of many in Asia has almost ascertained to be a law of the human mind. It is in a state of society much more refined and permanent than that described in the Iliad, that any popularity would attend such a ridicule of war and the gods as is contained in this poem; and the fact of there having existed three other poems of the same kind, attributed, for aught we can see, with as much reason to Homer, is a strong inducement to believe that none of them were in reality of the Homeric age. Knight infers, from the usage of the word déros, as a writing tablet, instead of diodépa or a skin, which, according to Herodotus (5, 58), was the material employed by the Asiatic Greeks for that purpose, that this poem was another offspring of Attic ingenuity; and, generally, that the familiar mention of the cock (v. 191) is a strong argument against so ancient a date for its composition.

3. Hymns.

The Homeric Hymns, including the hymn to Ceres and the fragment to Bacchus, which were discovered in the last century at Moscow, and edited by Ruhnken, amount to thirty-three; but with the exception of those to Apollo, Mercury, Venus, and Ceres, they are so short as not to consist of more than about three hundred and fifty lines in all. Almost all modern critics, with the eminent exception of Hermann, deny that any of these hymns belong to Homer. Nevertheless, it is certain that they are of high antiquity, and were commonly attributed by the ancients to Homer with almost as much confidence as the Iliad and Odyssey. Thucydides (3, 104) quotes a passage from the Hymn to Apollo, and alleges the authority of Homer, whom he expressly takes to be the writer, to prove an historical remark; and Diodorus Siculus (3, 66; 4,2), Pausanias (2, 4), and many other ancient authors, cite different verses from these hymns, and always treat them as genuine Homeric remains. On the other I hand, in the Life under the name of Plutarch, nothing is allowed to be genuine but the Iliad and Odyssey; Athenæus (1, 19) suspects one of the Homeridæ or Homeric rhapsodists to be the author of the Hymn to Apollo; and the scholiast to Pindar (Nem. 2) testifies, that one Cynæthus, a Chian rhapsodist, who flourished

« PoprzedniaDalej »