Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/140

 124 HISTORY OF GREECE. the Odyssey were comprised in the Cycle, so that the denomin.v tion of cyclic poet did not originally or designedly carry with it any association of contempt But as the great and capital poems were chiefly spoken of by themselves, or by the title of their own separate authors, so the general name of poets of the Cycle came gradually to be applied only to the worst, and thus to imply vulgarity or common-place ; the more so, as many of the inferior compositions included in the collection seem to have been anony- mous, and their authors in consequence describable only under some such common designation as that of the cyclic poets. It is in this manner that we are to explain the disparaging sentiment connected by Horace and others with the idea of a cyclic writer, though no such sentiment was implied in the original meaning of the Epic Cycle. The poems of the Cycle were thus mentioned in contrast and antithesis with Homer, 1 though originally the Iliad and Odyssey were much interested in the sequence of epical events. The abstracts which he himself drew up in the form of arguments of several poems, show that he adapted himself to this taste. We cannot collect from his words tha<; he intended to express any opinion of his own respecting the goodness or bad- ness of the cyclic poems. 1 The gradual growth of a contemptuous feeling towards the scn'ptor cyclicus (Horat. Ars. Poetic. 136), which was not originally implied in the name, is well set forth by Lange (Ueber die Kyklisch. Dicht. pp. 53-56). Both Lange (pp. 36-41 ), however, and Ulrici (Geschichte des Griech. Epos, 9te Vorles. p. 418) adopt another opinion with respect to the cycle, which I think unsupported and inadmissible, that the several constituent poems were not received into it entire (i. e. with only such changes as were requi- site for a corrected text), but cut down and abridged in such manner as to produce an exact continuity of narrative. Lange even imagines that the cyclic Odyssey was thus dealt with. But there seems no evidence to coun- tenance this theory, which would convert the Alexandrine literati from critics into logographers. That the cyclic Iliad and Odyssey were the same in the main (allowing for corrections of text) as the common Iliad and Odyssey, is shown by the fact, that Proclus merely names them in the series without giving any abstract of their contents : they were too well known to render such a process necessary. Nor does either the language of Proclus, or that of Caecins as applied to Zenodotus, indicate any transformation applied to the poets whose works are described to have been brought together and put into a certain order. The hypothesis of Lange is founded upon the idea that the (aiu%ov&ia irpayu'iTur) continuity of narrated events must necessarily have been exact