Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/176

 160 HISTORY OF GREECE. but it we suppose the process to be deferred until t.Lfe lattci half >f the sixth century, if we imagine that Solon, with all hia contemporaries and predecessors, knew nothing about any aggre- gate Iliad, but was accustomed to read and hear only those six- teen distinct epical pieces into which Lachmann would dissect the Iliad, each of the sixteen bearing a separate name of its own, no compilation then for the first time made by the friends of Peisistratus could have effaced the established habit, and planted itself in the general convictions of Greece as the primi- tive Homeric production. Had the sixteen pieces remained dis- united and individualized down to the time of Peisistratus, they would in all probability have continued so ever afterwards ; nor could the extensive changes and transpositions which (ac- cording to Lachmann's theory) were required to melt them down into our present Iliad, have obtained at that late period universal acceptance. Assuming it to be true that such changes and trans- positions did really take place, they must at least be referred to a period greatly earlier than Peisistratus or Solon. The whole tenor of the poems themselves confirms what is here remarked. There is nothing either in the Iliad or Odyssey which savors of modernism, applying that term to the age of Peisistratus ; nothing which brings to our view the alterations, brought about by two centuries, in the Greek language, the coined money, the habits of writing and reading, the despotisms and republican governments, the close military array, the im- proved construction of ships, the Amphiktyonic convocations, the mutual frequentation of religious festivals, the Oriental and Egyptian veins of religion, etc., familiar to the latter epoch. These alterations Onomakritus and the other literary friends of Peisistratus, could hardly have failed to notice even without design, had they then for the first time undertaken the task of piecing together many self-existent epics into one large aggre- gate. 1 Everything in the two great Homeric poems, both in ' V-lf allows both the uniformity of coloring, and the antiquity of color ing, which pervade the Homeric poems ; also, the strong line by which they stand distinguished from the other Greek poets : " Immo congruunt in iis omnia ferme in idem ingenium, in eosdem mores, in eandem formam sentiendi et loqacndi." (Prolegom. p. cclxv; compare p. cxxxviii.; He thinks, indeed, that this harmonr was lestorcd by the ability and care