Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/172

 156 HISTORY OF GREECE. the former is as easy, suitable, and promising, as the latter it violent and gratuitous. 1 To sustain the inference, that Peisistratus was the first arch- itect of the Iliad and Odyssey, it ought at least to be shown that no other long and continuous poems existed during the earlier centuries. But the contrary of this is known to be the fact. The ^Ethiopia of Arktinus, which contained nine thousand one hundred verses, dates from a period more than two centuries earlier than Peisistratus : several other of the lost cyclic epics, some among them of considerable length, appear during the century succeeding Arktinus ; and it is important to notice that three or four at least of these poems passed currently under tho name of Homer. 2 There is no greater intrinsic difficulty in 1 That the Iliad or Odyssey were ever recited with all the parts entire, at any time anterior to Solon, is a point which Ritschl denies (Die Alcxandrin. Bibliothek. pp. 67-70). He thinks that before Solon, they were always recited in parts, and without any fixed order among the parts. Nor did Solon determine (as he thinks) the order of the parts : he only checked the license of the rhapsodes as to the recitation of the separate books : it was Pesistra- tus, who, with the help of Onomakritus and others, first settled the order of the parts and hound each poem into a whole, with some corrections and interpolations. Nevertheless, he admits that the parts were originally com- posed by the same poet, and adapted to form a whole amongst each other : but this primitive cntireness (he asserts) was only maintained as a sort of traditional belief, never realized in recitation, and never reduced to an obvi- ous, unequivocal, and permanent fact, until the time of Peisistratus. There is no sufficient ground, I think, for denying all entire recitation previous to Solon, and we only interpose a new difficulty, both grave an I gratuitous, by doing so. 2 The jEthiopis of Arktinus contained nine thousand one hundred verses, as we learn from the Tabula Iliaca: yet Proklus assigns to it only four books. The Ilias Minor had four books, the Cyprian Verses eleven, though we do not know the number of lines in either. Nitzsch states it as a certain matter of fact, that Arktinus recited his own poem alone, though it was too long to admit of his doing so without interrup- tion. (See his Vorrede to the second vol. of the Odyssey, p. xxiv.) There is no evidence for this assertion, and it appears to me highly improbable. In reference to the Romances of the Middle Ages, belonging to the Cycle of the Round Table, M. Fauriel tells us that the German Perceval has nearly twenty-five thousand verses (more than half as long again as the Iliad) ; the Perceval of Christian of Troyes, probably, more ; the German Tristan, of Godfrey cf Strasburff. has more than twenty -three thousand ; sometimes., tbt