Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) - Volume 2.djvu/524

510 no mortal dares to resist, much less to attack and wound a god ; Olympus does not resound with everlasting quarrels ; Athene consults humbly the will of Zeus, and forbears offending Poseidon, her uncle, for the sake of a mortal man. Whenever a god inflicts punishment or bestows protection in the Odyssey, it is for some moral desert ; not as in the Iliad, through mere caprice, without any consider- ation of the good or bad qualities of the individual. In the Hiad Zeus sends a dream to deceive Aga- memnon ; Athene, after a general consultation of the gods, prompts Pandarus to his treachery ; Paris, the violator of the sacred laws of hos- pitality, is never upbraided with his crime by the gods ; whereas, in the Odyssey, they ap- pear as the awful avengers of those who do not respect the laws of the hospitable Zeus. The gods of the Iliad live on Mount Olympus ; those of the Odyssey are further removed from the earth ; they inhabit the wide heaven. There is nothing which obliges us to think of the Mount Olympus. In the Iliad the gods are visible to everj one except when they surround themselves with a cloud ; in the Odyssey they are usually invisible, unless they take the shape of men. In short, as Benjamin Constant has well observed (de la Relig. iii.)^ there is more mythology in the Iliad, and more religion in the Odyssey. If we add to all this the differences that exist between the two poems in language and tone, we shall be obliged to admit, that the Odyssey is of considerably later date than the Iliad. Every one who admires the bard of the Iliad, with whom are connected all the associations of ideas which have been formed re- specting Homer, feels naturally inclined to give him credit for having composed the Odyssey also, and is unwilling to fancy another person to be the author who would be quite an imaginary and un- interesting personage. It is no doubt chiefly owing to these feelings that many scholars have tried in various ways to prove that the same Homer is the author of both the poems, although there seem sufficient reasons to establish the contrary. Thus Miiller {Ibid. p. 62) says: "If the completion of the Iliad and Odyssey seems too vast a work for the lifetime of one man, we may perhaps have re- course to the supposition, that Homer, after having sung the Iliad in the vigour of his youthful years, in his old age communicated to some devoted dis- ciple the plan of the Odyssey, which had long been working in his mind, and left it to him for com- pletion." Nitzsch {Amnerk. z.Od. vol. ii. p. 26) has found out another expedient. He thinks, that in the Iliad Homer has followed more closely the old traditions, which represented the former and ruder state of society ; whilst, in the Odyssey, he was more original, and imprinted upon his own inventions his own ideas concerning the gods.

The history of the Homeric poems may be divided conveniently into two great periods : one in which the text was transmitted by oral tradi- tion, and the other of the written text after Peisis- tratus. Of the former we have already spoken : it therefore only remains to treat of the latter. The epoch from Peisistratus down to the establishment of the first critical school at Alexandria, i. e. to Zenodotus, presents very few facts concerning the Homeric poems. Oral tradition still prevailed over writing for along time ; though in the days of Alci- biades it was expected that every schoolmaster would have a copy of Homer with which to teach his boys. (Plut. Aldh. p. 194, d.) Homer became a sort of ground-work for a liberal education, and as hi» influence over the minds of the people thus became still stronger, the philosophers of that age were naturally led either to explain and recommend or to oppose and refute the moral principles and reli- gious doctrines contained in the heroic tales. (Gra- fenhan, Gesch. der Phiiologie^ vol. i. p. 202.) It was with this practical view that Pythagoras, Xenophanes, and Heracleitus, condemned Homer as one who uttered falsehoods and degraded the majesty of the gods ; whilst Theagenes, Metrodorus, Anaxagoras, and Stesimbrotus, expounded the deep wisdom of Homer, which was disguised from the eyes of the common observer under the veil of an apparently insignificant tale. So old is the allegorical explanation, a folly at which the sober Socrates smiled, which Plato refuted, and Ari- starchus opposed with all his might, but which, nevertheless, outlived the sound critical study of Homer among the Greeks, and has thriven luxu- riantly even down to the present day.

A more scientific study was bestowed on Homer by the sophists of Pericles' age, Prodicus, Prota- goras, Hippias, and others. There are even traces which seem to indicate that the aTropiai and AwVeis, such favourite themes with the Alexandrian critics, originated with these sophists. Thus the study of Homer increased, and the copies of his works must naturally have been more and more multiplied. We may suppose that not a few of the literary men of that age carefully compared the best MSS. within their reach, and choosing what they thought best made new editions {8iop6a><T€is). The task of these first editors was not an easy one. It may be concluded from the nature of the case, and it is known by various testimonies, that the text of those days offered enormous discrepancies, not paralleled in the text of any other classical writer. There were passages left out, transposed, added, or so altered, as not easily to be recognised ; nothing, in short, like a smooth vulgate existed before the time of the Alexandrine critics. This state of the text must have presented immense difficulties to the first editors in the infancy of criticism. Yet these early editions were valuable to the Alexandrians, as being derived from good and ancient sources. Two only are known to us through the scholia, one of the poet Antimachus, and the famous one of Aristotle (t) €k rov vdp9r}Kos), which Alexander the Great used to carry about with him in a splendid case {vdpOr]^^) on all his expeditions. Besides these editions, called in the scholia ai kut dvSpa, there were several other old Siopdcia-fis at Alexandria, under the name of ai kutoL Tr6€is, or at e/c TToAewy, or at TroKiTiKai. We know six of them, those of Massilia, Chios, Argos, Sinope, Cyprus, and Crete. It is hardly likely that they were made by public authority in the different states, whose names they bear ; on the contrary, as the persons who had made them were unknown, they were called, just as manuscripts are now, from the places where they had been found. We are acquainted with two more editions, the aloXiiaf, brought most likely from some Aeolian town, and the kvkKikt^, which seems to have been the copy of Homer which formed part of the series of cyclic poems in the Alexandrian library.

All these editions, however, were only prepara- tory to the establishment of a regular and systematic criticism and interpretation of Homer, which began