Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/174

 158 HISTORY OF GREECE. as of Odysseus and Diomedes), etc., and hence, it has bce concluded, that these portions originally existed as separate poems, beft re they were cemented together into an Iliad. But such references prove nothing to the point ; for until the Iliad was divided by Aristarchus and his colleagues into a given number of books, or rhapsodies, designated by the series of letters in the alphabet, there was no method of calling attention to any particular portion of the poem except by special indication of its subject-matter. 1 Authors subsequent to Peisistratus, such as Herodotus and Plato, who unquestionably conceived the Iliad as a whole, cite the separate fractions of it by designations of this sort. The foregoing remarks on the Woman hypothesis respecting the text of the Iliad, tend to separate two points which are by no means necessarily connected, though that hypothesis, as set forth by Wolf himself, by W. Muller, and by Lachmann, presents the two in conjunction. First, was the Iliad originally projected and composed by one author, and as one poem, or were the different parts composed separately and by unconnected authors, and subsequently strung together into an aggregate? Secondly, assuming that the internal evidence^ of the poem negative the former supposition, and drive us upon the latter, was the con- struction of the whole poem deferred, and did the parts exist only in their separate state, until a period so late as the reign of Peisistratus ? It is obvious that these two questions are essen- tially separate, and that a man may believe the Iliad to have been put together out of preexisting songs, without recognizing the age of Peisistratus as the period of its first compilation. Now, whatever may be the steps through which the poem passed to its ultimate integrity, there is sufficient reason for believing that they had been accomplished long before that period: the friends of Peisistratus found an Iliad already existing and already ancient in their time, even granting that the poem had not been originally born in a state of unity. Moreover, the Alexandrine critics, whose remarks are preserved in the Scholia, do not even notice the Peisistratic recension among the many manuscripts 1 The Homeric Scholiast refers to Quintus Calaber ev T>) 'Apa Which was only one portion ~>f his long poem (Schol. ad Iliad, ii. 220).