Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/149

Rh marriage hymn and to the dirge for the dead, which in ancient India were chanted by the priest. The bent of the Greeks was to claim poetry and music as public joys ; they would not long have suffered them to remain sacerdotal mysteries. And among the earliest themes on which the lay artist in poetry was employed were probably war-ballads, sung by minstrels in the houses of the chiefs whese ancestors they celebrated.

Such war-ballads were the materials from which the earliest epic poetry of Greece was constructed. By an &quot; epic &quot; poem the Greeks meant a narrative of heroic action in hexameter verse. The term epe meant at first simply &quot; verses &quot; ; it acquired its special meaning only when mele, lyric songs set to music, came to be distinguished from epe, verses not set to music, but merely recited. Epic poetry is the only kind of extant Greek poetry which is older than about 700 B.C. The early epos of Greece is repre sented by the Iliad and the Odyssey, Hesiod, and the Homeric hymns; also by some fragments of the &quot;Cyclic&quot; poets.

Iliad After the Dorian conquest of the Peloponnesus, the tlia /Eolian emigrants who settled in the north-west of Asia Sse) Minor brought with them the warlike legends of their chiefs, the Achaean princes of old. These legends lived in the ballads of the ^Eolic minstrels, and from them passed southward into Ionia, where the Ionian poets gradually shaped them into higher artistic forms. Among the seven places which claimed to be the birthplace of Homer, that which has the best title is Smyrna. Homer himself is called &quot; son of Meles &quot; the stream which flowed though old Smyrna, on the border between ^Eolia and Ionia. The tradition is significant in regard to the origin and character of the Iliad, for in the Iliad we have Achaean ballads worked up by Ionian art. A preponderance of evidence is in favour of the view that the Odyssey also, at least in its earliest form, was composed on the Ionian, coast of Asia Minor. According to the Spartan account, Lycurgus was the first to bring to Greece a complete copy of the Homeric poems, which he had obtained from the Creophyliche, a clan or guild of poets in Samos. A better authenticated tradition connects Athens with early attempts to preserve the chief poetical treasure of the nation. Pisistratus is said to have charged some learned men with the task of collecting all &quot;the poems of Homer&quot;; but it is difficult to decide how much was comprehended under this last phrase, or whether the province of the commission went beyond the mere task of collecting. Nor can it be determined what exactly it was that Solon and Hipparchus respectively did for the Homeric poems. Solon, it has been thought, enacted that the poems should be recited from an authorized text (e v7ro/?oA^s) ; Hipparchus, that they should be recited in a regular order (e itTroAr^ews). At any rate, we know that in the 6th century B.C. a recitation of the poems of Homer was one of the established competitions at the Panathena:a, held once in four years. The reciter was called a rhapsodist, properly one who weaves a long, smoothly-flowing chant, then an epic poet who chants his own or another s poem. The rhapsodi.st did not, like the early minstrel, use the accom paniment of the harp ; he gave the verses in a flowing recita tive, bearing in his hand a branch of laurel, the symbol of Apollo s inspiration. In the 5th century B.C. we find that various Greek cities had their own editions (at TroAiriKai K8o cret9)of the poems, for recitation at theirfestivals. Among these were the editions of Massilia, of Chios, and of Argos. There were also editions bearing the name of the individual editor (al KO.T avSpa), the best known being that which Aristotle prepared for Alexander. The recension of the poems by Aristarchus (156 B.C.) became the standard one, and is probably that on which the existing text is based. The oldest Homeric MS. extant, Venetua A of the Iliad, is of the 10th century; the first printed edition of Homer was that edited by the Byzantine Demetrius Chalcondyles (Florence, 1488). The first Aldine edition appeared twelve years later.

The ancient Greeks were almost unanimous in believing The the Iliad and the Odyssey to be the work of one man, Homer Homer, to whom they also ascribed some extant Lymns, and probably much more besides. Aristotle and Aristarchus seem to have put Homer s date about 1044 B.C., Herodotus about 850 B.C. It was not till about 170 B.C. that the grammarians Hellanicus and Xenon put forward the view that Homer was the author of the Iliad, but not of the Odyssey. Those who followed them in assigning different authors to the two poems were called the Separators (or Chorizontes). Aristarchus combated &quot; the paradox of Xenon,&quot; and it does not seem to have had much acceptance in antiquity. Vico, a Neapolitan (1668-1744), seems to have been the first modern to suggest the composite author ship and oral tradition of the Homeric poems; but this was a pure conjecture in support of his theory that the names of ancient lawgivers and poets are often mere symbols. F. A. Wolf, in the Prolegomena to his edition (1795), was the founder of a scientific scepticism. The Iliad, he said (for he recognized the comparative unity and consistency of the Odyssey}, was pieced together from many small unwritten poems by various hands, and was first committed to writing in the time of Pisistratus. This view was in harmony with the tone of German criticism at the time ; it was welcomed as a new testimony to the superiority of popular poetry, springing from fresh natural sources, to elaborate works of art ; and it at once found enthusiastic adherents. For the course of Homeric controversy since Wolf tl.e reader is referred to the article . The general result has been, not to prove any precise theory of authorship, but rather to establish certain general propositions, and so far to limit the question. It is now generally admitted that the Iliad and the Odyssey, whatever their absolute or rela tive ages, must at least be regarded as belonging to the maturity of a poetical school in Ionia, which had gradually created an epic style. Next, it can no longer be doubted that the Iliad contains elements of various age and origin ; the form and the matter alike show this, though we cannot with certainty point to any one group of these elements as the original nucleus around which our Iliad grew. Compar ing the Odyssey with the Iliad, we perceive greater unity of design and of colouring, and indications of a somewhat later time ; but not even here can we affirm that the poem, as we have it, is the work of one man.

The Ionian school of epos produced a number of poems founded on the legends of the Trojan war, and intended as introductions or continuations to the Iliad and the Odyssey. The grammarian Proclus (140 A.D. ) has preserved the names and subjects of some of these ; but the fragments are very scanty. The Nostoi or Homeward Voyages, by Agias of Troezen, filled up the gap of ten years between the Iliad and the Odyssey ; the Lay of Telegonus, by Eugammon of Cyrene, continued the story of the Odyssey to the death of Odysseus by the hand of Telegonus, the son whom Circe bore to him. Similarly the Cyprian Lays, by Stasinus of Cyprus, was introductory to the Iliad ; the sEthiopis and the Sack of Troy, by Arctinus of Miletus, and the Little Iliad, by Lesches of Mitylene, were supplementary to it. These and many other names of lost epics some taken also from the Theban myths serve to show how prolific was that epic school of which only two great examples remain. The name of epic cycle was properly applied to a prose compilation of abstracts from these epics, pieced together in the order of the events. The compilers were called &quot; cyclic &quot; writers ; and the term has now been transferred to the epic poets whom they used.