Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/160

 144 HISTORY OF GREECE. poets, committed their compositions to writing, or at what time the practice of doing so became familiar. The first positive ground, which authorizes us to presume the existence of a manu- script of Homer, is in tin; famous ordinance of Solon with regard to the rhapsodes at the Panathenaea ; but for what length of time, previously, manuscripts had existed, we are unable to say. Those who maintain the Homeric poems to have been written from the beginning, rest their case, not upon positive proofs, nor yet upon the existing habits of society with regard to poetry, for they admit generally that the Iliad and Odyssey were not read, but recited and heard, but upon the supposed necessity that there must have been manuscripts, 1 to insure the preserva- tion of the poems, the unassisted memory of reciters being neither sufficient nor trustworthy. But here we only escape a smaller difficulty by running into a greater ; for the existence of trained bards, gifted with extraordinary memory, is far less astonishing than that of long manuscripts in an age essentially non-reading and non-writing, and when even suitable instruments and materials for the process are not obvious. Moreover, there is a strong positive reason for believing that the bard was under no necessity for refreshing his memory by consulting a manu- script. For if such had been the fact, blindness would have been a disqualification for the profession, which we know that it was not ; as well from the example of Demodokus in the Odyssey, as from that of the blind bard of Chios, in the hymn to the Delian Apollo, whom Thucydides, as well as the general tenor of Grecian legend, identifies with Homer himself. 2 The author of that Hymn, be he who he may, could never have described a 1 See this argument strongly put by Nitzsch, in the prefatory remarks at the beginning of his second volume of Commentaries on the Odyssey (pp. x-xxix). He takes great pains ro discard all idea that the poems were written in order to be read. To the same purpose, Franz (Epigraphies Grjec. Introd. p. 32), who adopts Nitzsch's positions, " Audituris enim, non lecturis, carmina parabant." 3 ; Thucyd. iii. 104. Various commentators on Homer imagined that, under the misfortune of Demodokus, the poet in reality described his own (Schol ad Odyss. 1.1 j Maxim. Tyr. xxxviii. 1 ).
 * Odyss. viii. 65; Hymn, ad Apoll. 172 ; Pscudo-Herodot. Vit. Homer, c.