Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/164

 148 HISTORY OF committed to writing, it had ceased to be pronounced, and there- fore never found a place in any of the manuscripts, insomuch that the Alexandrine critics, though they knew of its existence in the much later poems of Alkaeus and Sappho, never recognized it in Homer. The hiatus, and the various perplexities of metre, occasioned by the loss of the Digamma, were corrected by differ- ent grammatical stratagems. But the whole history of this lost letter is very curious, and is rendered intelligible only by the supposition that the Iliad and Odyssey belonged for a wide space of time to the memory, the voice, and the ear, exclusively. At what period these poems, or, indeed, any other Greek poems, first began to be written, must be matter of conjecture, though there is ground for assurance that it was before the time of Solon. If, in the absence of evidence, we may venture upon naming any more determinate period, the question at once suggests itself, what were the purposes which, in that stage of society, a manuscript at its first commencement must have been intended to answer ? For whom was a writen Iliad necessary ? Not for the rhapsodes ; for with them it was not only planted in the memory, but also interwoven with the feelings, and conceived in conjunction with all those flexions and intonations of voice, pauses, and other oral artifices, which were required for emphatic delivery, and which the naked manuscript could never reproduce. Not for the general public, they were accustomed to receive it with its rhapsodic delivery, and with its accompaniments of a solemn and crowded festival. The only persons for whom the written Iliad would be suitable, would be a select few ; studious and curious men, a class of readers, capable of analyzing the complicated emotions which they had experienced as hearers in the crowd, and who would, on perusing the Avritten words, realize in their imaginations a sensible portion of the impression com municated by the reciter. 1 1 Nitzsch and Welcker argue, that because the Homeric poems were heard with great delight and interest, therefore the first rudiments of the art of writing, even while beset by a thousand mechanical difficulties, would be employed to record them. I cannot adopt this opinion, which appears to me to derive all its plausibility from our present familiarity with reading and writing. The first step from the recited to the written poem is really one of great violence, as well as useless for any want then actually felt. 1