Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/149

 PERSONALITY OF HOMER. 133 Homer, then, is no individual man, but the divine or heroic father (the ideas of worship and ancestry coalescing, as they constantly did in the Grecian mind) of the gentile Homerids, and he is the author of the Thebais, the Epigoni, the Cyprian Verses, the Procems, or Hymns, and other poems, in the same sense in which he is the author of the Iliad and Odyssey, as- suming that these various compositions emanate, as perhaps they may, from different individuals numbered among the Homerids. But this disallowance of the historical personality of Homer is quite distinct from the question, with which it has been often confounded, whether the Iliad and Odyssey are originally entire poems, and whether by one author or otherwise. To us, the name of Homer means these two poems, and little else : we desire to know as much as can be learned respecting their date, their original composition, their preservation, and their mode of com- munication to the public. All these questions are more or less complicated one with the other. Concerning the date of the poems, we have no other informa- tion except the various affirmations respecting the age of Homer, such as the Euneitlae, the Lykomida;, the Butadte, the Talthybiadae, the descendants of Cheiron at Pelion, etc., the Hesychidaj (Schol. Sophocl. CEdip. Col. 489), (the acknowledged parallels of the Homendae), may be surely all considered as belonging to the earliest known elements of Grecian history : rarely, at least, if ever, can such gens, with its tripartite character of civil, religious, and professional, be shown to have commenced at any recent period. And in the early times, composer and singer were one person: often at least, though probably not always, the bard combined both functions. The Homeric (loifibe sings his own compositions ; and it is reasonable to imagine that many of the early Homerids did the same. See Niebuhr. Romisch. Gesch. vol. i. p. 324 ; and the treatise, Ueber die Sikeler in der Odyssee, in the Rheinisches Museum, 1828, p. 257; and Boeckh, in the Index of Contents to his Lectures of 1834. " The sage Vyasa (observes Professor Wilson, System of Hindu Mythology, Int. p. Ixii.) is represented, not as the author, but as the arranger and com- piler of the Vedus and the Purunas. His name denotes his character, mean- ing the arranger or distributor ( Welcker gives the same meaning to the name Homer); and the recurrence of many Vyasas, many individuals who new- modelled the Hindu scriptures, has nothing in it that is improbable, except the fabulous intervals by which their labors are separated." Individual authorship and the thirst of personal distinction, are in this case also buried under one great and common name, as in tie case of Homer