Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/159

 HOMERIC POEMS. -WRITTEN OR UNWRITTEN. 143 incumbent on those, who defended the ancient aggregate char- acter of the Iliad and Odyssey, to maintain that they were written poems from the beginning. To me it appears that the architectonic functions ascribed by Wolf to Peisistratus and his associates, in reference to the Homeric poems, are nowise admissible. But much would undoubtedly be gained towards that view of the question, if it could be shown that, in order to controvert it, we were driven to the necessity of admitting long written poems in the ninth century before the Christian era. Few things, in my opinion, can be -aore improbable : and Mr. Payne Knight, opposed as he is to the Wolfian hypothesis, admits this no less than Wolf himself. 1 The traces of writing in Greece, even in the seventh century before the Christian era, are exceedingly trifling. We have no remain- ing inscription earlier than the 40th Olympiad, and the early inscriptions are rude and unskilfully executed : nor can we even assure ourselves whether Archilochus, Simonides of Amorgus, Kallinus, Tyrtaeus, Xanthus, and the other early elegiac and lyric 1 Knight, Prolegom. Horn. c. xxxviii-xl. "Haud tamen ullum Homeri- corum carminum exemplar Pisistrati seculo antiquius extitissc, aut sexcen- tcsimo priits anno ante C. N. scriptum fuisse, facile credam : rara enim ct pcrdifficilis crat iis temporibus scriptura ob penuriam material scribendo idonese, quum literas aut lapidibus exarare, aut tabulis ligneis aut laminis metalli alicujus insculpere oporteret Atque ideo memoriter retenta sunt, ct hajc et alia vcterum poetarum carmina, et per urbes et vicos et in principum virorum sedibus, decantata a rhapsodis. Neque mirandura est, ca per tot ssecula sic integra conservata esse, quoniam per eos tradita erant, qui ab omnibus Grsecias et coloniarum regibus et civitatibus mercede satis ampla conduct!, omnia sua studia in iis ediscendis, retinendis, et rite recitandis, conferebant." Compare Wolf, Prolegom. xxiv-xxv. The evidences of early writing among the Greeks, and of written poems even anterior to Homer, may be seen collected in Kreuser (Vorfragen ueber Homeros, pp. 127-1 59, Frankfort, 1828J. His proofs appear to me altogether inconclusive. Nitzsch maintains the same opinion (Histor. Homeri, Fasc. L sect. xi. xvii.xviii.), in my opinion, not more successfully: nor does Franz (Epigraphies Grsec. Introd. s. iv.) produce any new arguments. I do not quite subscribe to Mr. Knight's language, when he says that there is nothing wonderful in the long preservation of the Homeric poems umvritten. It is enough to maintain that the existence, and p:-actical use of Jong manuscripts, by all the rhapsodes, under the condition and circum- stances of the 8th and 9th centuries among the Greeks, would be a greatei wouder