Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) - Volume 2.djvu/522

508 thesis concerning tlie origin of the poems of Homer, the following may be regarded as the most probable conclusion. There can be no doubt that the seed of the Homeric poems was scattered in the time of the heroic exploits which they celebrate, and in the land of the victorious Achaeans, that is, in European Greece. An abundance of heroic lays preserved the records of the Trojan war. It was a puerile idea, which is now completely exploded, that the events are fictitious on which the Iliad and Odys- sey are based, that a Trojan war never was waged, and so forth. Whoever would make such a con- clusion from the intermixture of gods in the battles of men, would forget what the Muses say (lies. Tlmog. "11)—

"iS^ei/ ^^6u56a ivoWa. Aeyetf ervixoKXiv Sixdia, "iS^ei/ ^^6u56a ivoWa. Aeyetf ervixoKXiv Sixdia,

and he would overlook the fact, that these songs were handed down a long time before they attained that texture of truth and fiction which forms one of their peculiar charms. Europe must necessarily have been the country where these songs originated, both because here the victorious heroes dwelt, and because so many traces in the poems still point to these regions. (See above, p. 500, b.) It was here that the old Thracian bards had effected that unity of mythology which, spreading all over Greece, had gradually absorbed and obliterated the discrepancies of the old local myths, and sub- stituted, one general mythology for the whole nation, with Zeus as the supreme ruler, dwelling on the snowy heights of Olympus. Impregnated with this European mythology, the heroic lays were brought to Asia Minor by the Greek colonies, which left the mother-country about three ages after the Trojan war. In European Greece a new race gained the ascendancy, the Dorians, foreign to those who gloried in having the old heroes among their ancestors. The heroic songs, therefore, died away more and more in Europe ; but in Asia the Aeolians fought, conquered, and settled nearly in the same regions in which their fathers had sig- nalised themselves by immortal exploits, the glory ot which was celebrated, and their memory still preserved by their national bards. Their dwelling in the same locality not only kept alive the re- membrance of the deeds of their fathers, but gave a new impulse to their poetry, just as in the middle ages in Germany the foundation of the kingdom of the Hungarians in the East, and their destructive invasions, together with the origin of a new empire of the Burgundians in the West, awakened the old songs of the Niebelungen, after a slumber of centuries. (Gervinus, Poetical Lit. of Germ. vol. i. p. 108.)

Now the Homeric poems advanced a step further. From unconnected songs, they were, for the f^rst time, united by a great genius, who, whether he was really called Homer, or whether the name be of later origin and significant of his work of uniting songs (Welcker, Ep. Cycl. pp. 125, 128 ; Ilgen, Hymn. Horn, praef. p. 23 ; Heyne, cid II. vol. viii. p. 795), was the one individual who conceived in his mind the lofty idea of that poetical unity which we cannot help acknowledging and admiring. What were the peculiar excellencies which distinguislied this one Homer among a great number of contemporary poets, and saved his works alone from oblivion, we do not venture to deter- mine ; but tlie conjecture of Miiller {Greek Lit. p. 47 ; see also Nitzsch, Anm. vol. ii. p, 26 is not improbable, that Homer first undertook to combine into one great unity the scattered and fragmentary poems of earlier bards, and that it was a task which established his great renown. We can now judge of the probability that Homer was an Ionian, who in Smyrna, where lonians and Aeolians were mixed, became acquainted with the subject of his poems, and moulded them into the form which was suited to the taste of his Ionian countrymen. But as a faithful pre- servation of these long works was impossible in an age unacquainted with, or at least not versed in the art of writing, it was a natural consequence, that in the lapse of ages the poems should not only lose the purity with which they proceeded from the mind of the poet, but should also become more and more dismembered, and thus return into their original state of loose independent songs. Their public recitation became more and more fragmentary, and the time at festivals and musical contests formerly occupied by epic rhapso- dists exclusively was encroached upon by the rising lyrical performances and players of the flute and lyre. Yet the knowledge of the unitj' of the dif- ferent Homeric rhapsodies was not entirely lost. Solon, himself a poet, directed the attention of his countrymen towards it ; and Peisistratus at last raised a lasting monument to his high merits, in fixing the genuine Homeric poems by the indeliljle marks of writing, as far as was possible in his time and with his means. That previous to the famous edition of Peisistratus parts of Homer, or the en- tire poems, were committed to writing in other towns of Greece or Asia Minor is not improbable, but we do not possess sufficient testimonies to prove it. We can therefore safely affirm that from the time of Peisistratus, the Greeks had a written Homer, a regular text, the source and foundation of all subsequent editions.

Having established the fact, that there was a Horner^ who must be considered as the author of the Homeric poems, there naturally arises another question, viz. which poems are Homeric? We have seen already that a great number of cyclic poems were attributed to the great bard of the Jm/er of Achilles. Stasinus, the author of the Cypria, was said to have received this poem from Homer as a dowry for his daughter, whom he mar- ried. Creophylus is placed in a similar connection with Homer. But these traditions are utterly groundless ; they were occasioned by the authors of the cyclic poems being at the same time rhapso- dists of the Homeric poems, which they recited along with their own. Nor are the hymns, which still bear the name of Homer, more genuine pro- ductions of the poet of the Iliad than the cyclic poems. They were called by the ancients irpnolfxia, i. e. overtures or preludes, and were sung by the rliapsodists as introductions to epic poems at the festivals of the respective gods, to whom they are addressed. To these rhapsodists the hymns most probably owe their origin. "They exhibit such a diversity of language and poetical tone, that in all probability they contain fragments from every century from the time of Homer to the Persian war." (Miiller, Ihid. p. 74.) Still most of them were reckoned to be Homeric productions by those who lived in a time when Greek literature still flourished. This is easily accounted for ; being recited in connection with Homeric poems, they