Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/175

 AGGREGATE ILIAD AND ODYSSEY. 159 nhich they had before them: and Mr. Payne Knight justly infers from their silence that either they did not possess it, or it was in their eyes of no great authority ;' which could never have been the case if it had been the prime originator of Homeric unity. The line of argument, by which the advocates of "Wolf's hypothesis negative the primitive unity of the poem, consists in exposing gaps, incongruities, contradictions, etc, between the separate parts. Now, if in spite of all these incoherences, standing mementos of an antecedent state of separation, the component poems were made to coalesce so intimately as to appear as if they had been one from the beginning, we can better understand the complete success of the proceeding and the uni- versal prevalence of the illusion, by supposing such coalescence to have taken place at a very early period, during the productive days of epical genius, and before the growth of reading and criti- cism. The longer the aggregation of the separate poems was deferred, the harder it would be to obliterate in men's minds the previous state of separation, and to make them accept the new aggregate as an original unity. The bards or rhapsodes might have found comparatively little difficulty in thus piecing together distinct songs, during the ninth or eighth century before Christ ; 1 Knight, Prolegg. Homer, xxxii. xxxvi. xxxvii. That Pcisistratu3 caused a corrected MS. of the Iliad to be prepared, there seems good reason to believe, and the Scholion on Plautus edited by Ritschl CSCG Die Alexan- drinische Bibliothek, p. 4) specifies the four persons (Onomakritus was one) employed on the task, llitschl fancies that it served as a sort of Vulgate for the text of the Alexandrine critics, who named specially other MSS. (of Chios, Sinopu, Massalia, etc.) only when they diverged from this Vul- gate : he thinks, also, that it formed the original from whence those other MSS. were first drawn, which are called in the Homeric Scholia at Koival, noivo-fpai (pp. 59-60). Welcker supposes the Pcisistratic MS. to have been either lost or carried away when Xerxes took Athens (Der Epische Kyklus, pp. 382-388). Compare Nitzsch, Histor. Homer. Ease. i. pp. 165-167 ; also his commen- tary on Odygs. xi. 604, the alleged interpolation of Onomakritus; and Ulrici, Geschichte der Ilellen. Poes. Part i. s. vii. pp. 252-255. The main facts respecting the Peisistratic recension are collected and discussed by Griifenhan, Geschichte der Philologie, sect. 54-64, voi i. pp. 266-311. Unfortunately, we cannot get beyond mere conjecture and possibility.