Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/158

 142 HISTORY OF GREECE. the old Epic ; sometimes in short fragments before private companies, by single rhapsodes, sometimes several rhapsode* in continuous succession at a public festival. Respecting the mode in which the Homeric poems were pre- served, during the two centuries (or as some think, longer interval) between their original composition and the period shortly preceding Solon, and respecting their original composition and subsequent changes, there are wide differences of opinion among able critics. Were they preserved with or without being written ? Was the Iliad originally composed as one poem, and the Odyssey in like manner, or is each of them an aggregation of parts originally self-existent and unconnected ? Was the authorship of each poem single-headed or many-headed ? Either tacitly or explicitly, these questions have been generally coupled together and discussed with reference to each other, by inquiries into the Homeric poems ; though Mr. Payne Knight's Prolegomena have the merit of keeping them distinct. Half a century ago, the acute and valuable Prolegomena of F. A. Wolf, turning to account the Venetian Scholia which had then been recently published, first opened philosophical discussion as to the history of the Homeric text. A considerable part of that disser- tation (though by no means the whole) is employed in vindi eating the position, previously announced by Bentley, among others, that the separate constituent portions of the Iliad and Odyssey had not been cemented together into any compact body and unchangeable order until the days of Peisistratus, in the sixth century before Christ. As a step towards that conclusion, Wolf maintained that no written copies of either poem could be shown to have existed during the earlier times to which their composition is referred, and that without writing, neither the perfect symmetry of so complicated a work could have been originally conceived by any poet, nor, if realized by him, trans- mitted with assurance to posterity. The absence of easy and convenient writing, such as must be indispensably supposed for long manuscripts, among the early Greeks, was thus one of the points in Wolf's case against the primitive integrity of the Iliad and Odyssey. By Nitzsch and other leading opponents of Wolf, the connection of the one with the other seems to have been accepted as he originally put it ; and it has been considered