Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/141

 WHAT THE EPIC CYCLE. 125 had both been included among them : and this alteration of the meaning of the word has given birth to a mistake as to the pri- mary purpose of the classification, as if it had been designed espe- cially to part off the inferior epic productions from Homer. But while some critics are disposed to distinguish the cyclic poets too pointedly from Homer, I conceive that Welcker goes too much into the other extreme, and identifies the Cycle too closely with that poet. He construes it as a classification deliberately framed to comprise all the various productions of the Homeric epic, with its unity of action and comparative paucity, both of persons and adventures, as opposed to the Hesiodic epic, crowded with separate persons and pedigrees, and destitute of central action as well as of closing catastrophe. This opinion does, indeed, coincide to a great degree with the fact, inasmuch as few of the Hesiodic epics appear to have been included in the Cycle : to say that none were included, would be too much, for we cannot venture to set aside either the Theogony or the JEgimius ; but we may account for their absence perfectly well without supposing any design to exclude them, for it is obvious that their rambling character (like that of the Metamorphoses of Ovid) forbade the -possibility of interweaving them in any continuous series. Con- tinuity in the series of narrated events, coupled with a certain degree of antiquity in the poems, being the principle on which the arrangement called the Epic Cycle was based, the Hesiodic poems generally were excluded, not from any preconceived in- tention, but because they could not be brought into harmony with such orderly reading. What were the particular poems which it comprised, we can- not now determine with exactness. Wclcker arranges them as and without break, as if the whole Constituted one work. But this would not be possible, let the framers do what they might : moreover, in the attempt, the individuality of all the constituent poets must have been sacrificed, in each manner that it would be absurd to discuss their separate merits. The continuity of narrative in the Epic Cycle could not have been more than approximate, as complete as the poems composing it would admit: nevertheless, it would be correct to say that the poems were arranged in series upon this principle and upon no other. The librarians might have arranged in like manner the vast mass of tragedies in their possession (if they had chosen to do so) upon the principle of sequence in the subjects had they done so, the series would have formed a Ti-ugic C ; jik.