Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/128

116 116 HOME R and supported his thesis by ancient authority, and also by the parallel of Ossian. Both these books were translated into German, and their ideas passed into the popular philosophy of the day. Everything in short was ripe for the reception of a book that brought together, with masterly ease and vigour, the old and the new Homeric learning, and drew from it the historical proof that Homer was no single poet, writing according to art and rule, but a name which stood for a golden age of the true spontaneous poetry of genius and nature. The part of the Prolegomena which deals with the original form of the Homeric poems occupies pp. xl.-clx. (in the first edition). Wolf shows how the question of the date of writing meets us on the threshold of the textual criticism of Homer, and accordingly enters into a full discussion, first of the external evidence, then of the indications furnished by the poems. Having satisfied himself that writing was unknown to Homer, he is led to consider the real mode of transmission, and finds this in the Rhapaodists, of whom the Homeridaj were an hereditary school. And then comes the conclu sion to which all this has been tending: &quot;the die is cast&quot; the Hind and Odyssey cannot have been composed in the form in which we know them without the aid of writing. They must therefore have been, as Bentley had said, &quot;a sequel of songs and rhapsodies,&quot; &quot; loose songs not collected together in the form of an epic poem till about 500 years after.&quot; This conclusion he then supports by the character attributed to the &quot;Cyclic&quot; poems (whose want of unity showed that the structure of the Iliad and Odyssey must be the work of a later time), by one or two indications of imperfect con nexion, and by the doubts of ancient critics as to the genuineness of certain parts. These, however, are matters of conjecture. &quot; His- toria loquitur.&quot; The voice of antiquity is unanimous in declar ing that &quot; Pisistratus first committed the poems of Homer to writing, and reduced them to the order in which we now read them.&quot; The appeal of Wolf to the &quot;voice of all antiquity&quot; is by no means borne out by the different statements on the subject. Ac cording to Heraclides Ponticus (pupil of Plato), the poetry of Homer was first brought to the Peloponnesus by Lycurgus, who obtained it from the descendants of Creophylus (Polit., fr. 2). Plutarch in his Life of Lycurgus (c. 4) repeats this story, with the addition that there was already a faint report of the poems in Greece, and that certain detached fragments were in the possession of a few persons (e/ce /crrjCTo 5 ou TroAAo! /afpri nva ffiri, dSr^v TT)S 7ro(7)(recos o;s f TV X e Sia^epofj.ei ris). Again, the Platonic dialogue Hipparchus (which though not genuine is probably earlier than the Alexandrian times) asserts that Hipparchus, son of Pisistratus, iir.it brought the poems to Athens, and obliged the rhapsodists at the Panathensea to follow the order of the text, &quot; as they still do,&quot; instead of reciting portions chosen at will. The earliest authority for attributing any work of the kind to Pisistratus is the well known passage of Cicero (De Orat., 3, 34 : &quot; Quis doctior eisdem temporibus illis, aut cujus eloquentia litteris instructior fuisse traditur quam Pisistrati ? qui primus Homeri libros, confusos antea, sic disposuisse dicitur ut mine habernus&quot;). To the same effect Pausanias (vii. p. 594) says that the change of the name Donoessa to Gonoessa (in H. ii. 573) was thought to have been made by Pisistratus or one of his compan ions, when he collected the poems, which were then in a fragmen- tary condition (Sjeern-acr/ueVa re /cai aAAa dAAaxou fji.i r]fj.ovev6fj.fi a tfdpoifc}. Finally, Diogenes Laertius (i. 57) says that Solon made a law that the poems should be recited with the help of a prompter (e u-Koftorjs), so that each rhapsodist should begin where the last left off; and he argues from this that Solon did more than Pisis tratus to make Homer known. The argument is directed against a certain Dieuchidas of Megara, who appears to have maintained that the verses about Athens in the Catalogue (//. ii. 546-556) were interpolated by Pisistratus. The passage is unfortunately corrupt, but it is at least clear that in the time of Solon, accord ing to Diogenes, there were complete copies of the poems, such as could be used to control the recitations. Hence the account of Diogenes is quite irreconcilable with the notices on which Wolf relied. It is needless to examine the attempts which have been made to harmonize these accounts. Such attempts usually start with the tacit asjumption that each of the persons concerned Lycurgus, Solon, Pisistratus, Hipparchus must have done something for the text of Homer, or for the regulation of the rhapsodists. But we have first to consider whether any of the accounts come to us on such evidence that we are bound to consider them as containing a nucleus of truth. In the first place, the statement that Lycurgus obtained the poems from descendants of Creophylus must be admitted to be purely mythical. But if we reject it, have we any better reason for believing the parallel assertion in the Platonic Hipparchusl It is true that Hipparchus is undoubtedly a real person. On the other hand it is evident that thePisistratidse soon became the subject of many fables. Thucydides notices as a popular mistake the belief that Hipparchus was the eldest son of Pisistratus, and that consequently he was the reigning &quot;tyrant&quot; when he was killed by Aristogiton. The Platonic Hipparchus follows this erroneous version, and may there fore be regarded as representing (at best) mere local tradition. We may reasonably go further, and see in this part of the dialogue a piece of historical romance, designed to put the &quot;tyrant&quot; family in a favourable light, as patrons of literature and learning. Again, the account of the Jfipparchus is contradicted by Diogenes Laertius, who says that Solon provided for the due recitation of the Homeric poems. The only good authorities as to this point are the orators Lycurgus and Isocrates, who mention the law prescribing the recitation, but do not say when or by whom it was enacted. The inference seems a fair one, that the author of the law was really unknown. With regard to the statements which attribute some work in con nexion with Homer to Pisistratus, it was noticed by Wolf that Cicero, Pausanias, and the others who mention the matter do so nearly in tlie same ivords, and therefore appear to have drawn from a common source. This source was in all probability an epigram quoted in two of the short lives of Homer, and there said to have been inscribed on the statue of Pisistratus at Athens. In it Pisistratus is made to say of himself that he &quot;collected Homer, who was formerly sung in fragments (&s -rbi/&quot;O/j.^pof ^Qpoicra criropaSriv rli wplv afi^u^fvov], for the golden poet was a citizen of ours, since we Athenians founded Smyrna. &quot; The other statements repeat these words with various minor additions, chiefly intended to explain how the poems had been reduced to this fragmentary condition, and how Pisistratus set to work to restore them. Thus all the authority for the work of Pisistratus &quot;reduces itself to the testimony of a single anonymous inscription&quot; (Nutzhorn, p. 40). Now, what is the value of that testimony ? It is impossible of course to believe that a statue of Pisistratus was set up at Athens in the time of the free republic. The epigram is almost certainly a mere literary exercise. And what exactly does it say ? Only that Homer was recited in fr cynic nts by the rhapsodists, and that these partial recitations were made into a continuous whole by Pisistratus ; which does not necessarily mean more than that Pisistratus did what other authorities ascribe to Solon and Hipparchus, viz., regulated the recitation. Against the theory which sees in Pisistratus the author of tin 1 first complete text of Homer we have to set the absolute silence of Herodotus, Thucydides, the orators, and the Alexandrian gram marians. And it can hardly be thought that their silence is acci dental. Herodotus and Thucydides seem to tell us all that they know of Pisistratus. The orators Lycurgus and Isocrates make a great deal of the recitation of Homer at the Panathensea, but know nothing of the poems having been collected and arranged at Athens, a fact which would have redounded still more to the honour of the city. Finally, the Scholia of the Ven. A contain no reference or allusion to the story of Pisistratus. As these Scholia are derived in substance from the writings of Aristarchus, it seems impossible to believe that the story was known to him. The circumstance that it is referred to in the later Scholia l^ictoriana, and in Eustathius, gives additional weight to this argument. The result of these considerations seems to be that nothing rests on good evidence beyond the fact that Homer was recited by law at the Panathenaic festival. The rest of the story is probably the result of gradual expansion and accretion. It was inevitable that later writers should speculate about the authorship of such a lav , and that it should be attributed with more or less confidence to Solon or Pisistratus or Hipparchus. The choice would be deter mined in great measure by poliiical feeling. It is probably not an accident that Dieuchidas, who attributed so much to Pisistratus, was a Megarian. The author of the Hipparchus is evidently influenced by the anti-democratical tendencies in which he only followed Plato. In the times to which the story of Pisistratus can be traced, the 1st century B.C., the substitution of the &quot; tyrant &quot; fur the legislator was extremely natural. It was equally natural that the importance of his work as regards the text of Homer should be exaggerated. The splendid patronage of letters by the successors of Alexander, and especially the great institutions which had been founded at Alexandria and Pergamus, had made an impression en the imagination of learned men which was reflected in the current notions of the ancient despots. It may even be suspected that anecdotes in praise of Pisistratus and Hipparchus were a delicate form of flattery addressed to the reigning Ptolemy. Under these influences the older stories of Lycurgus bringing Homer to the Peloponnesus, and Solon providing for the recitation at Athens, were thrown into the shade. In the later Byzantine times it was believed that Pisistratus was aided by seventy grammarians, of whom Zenodotus and Aristarchus were the chief. The great Alexandrian grammarians had become figures in a new mythology. It is true that Tzetzes, one of the writers from whom we have this story, gives a better version, according to which Pisistratus employed four men, viz., Onoma- critus. Zopyrus of lleraclea, Orpheus of Croton, and one -whose name is corrupt (written eiriK6yi&amp;lt;vos). Many scholars (among them Ritschl) accept this account as probable. Yet it rests upon no better evidence than the other. The effect of the Prolegomena was so overwhelming that, although