Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/238

 Troy. 215 facts from the body of the poetic narrative, which, it was held, Homer had intentionally projected, embellished, and amplified with the introduction of the supernatural, such as the perpetual interventions of the gods in the combats fought by heroes and the like. The Iliad, according to the critics who were also the scholars of that day, had been largely composed on the lines of the y£neid and the Jerusalem Delivered; hence all the passages meant to while away and amuse the fancy were to be rejected as exaggerations not intended to be received as sober fact ; but details bearing upon topography, statistics, and military operations had to be taken literally and implicitly believed. Since the last century, however, the comparative method applied to linguistic studies has been adopted for literature, and the result has been a general shifting of the old standpoint. Epics have been defined as primitive and spontaneous, as opposed to artificial and learned poems ; a distinction which, though holding a large grain of truth, should be clearly grasped and not strained beyond its proper bounds. Wolf, in his famous Prolegomena, was the first to show that the songs which make up the Iliad came into existence in an age ignorant of writing, and that they were preserved for several centuries by memory alone. The labours continued by his successors have led them to distinguish two. periods in the genesis of the Epic : one when the exploits of the Achaean heroes were celebrated in short poetic rhapsodies, wherein each hero in turn played the principal part ; the second when a bard called Homer, endowed with a genius far transcend- ing that of his predecessors or contemporaries, composed the Achylleidy a poem of considerable length, which his successors touched up and developed. It was then taken up by the Rhap- sodes, who carried it from one end to another of the Greek world. The poem began to be written about the time of Solon, when it underwent many improvements and rehandlings at the hand of scholars entrusted with the task, and finally received the form by which, under the name of Iliad, it is known to us. Comparison of the Hindu, Persian, Finnish, Scandinavian, Teutonic, and Prankish Epics one with the other, makes us realize how infinitely small is the fund of historical truth, around which gather and multiply the brilliant crystals of Epic fiction. However insignificant this residuum may be in the above