Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/180

 164 HISTORY OF GREECT. respecting them or their authors, but we have no one to describe to us the people or the age in which they originated ; our knowl- edge respecting contemporary Homeric society, is collected exclu- sively from the Homeric compositions themselves. We are ignorant whether any other, or what other, poems preceded them, or divided with them the public favor ; nor have we anything better than conjecture to determine either the circumstances under which they were brought before the hearers, or the condi- tions which a bard of that day was required to satisfy. On all these points, moreover, the age of Thucydides 1 and Plato seems to have been no better informed than we are, except in so far as they could profit by the analogies of the cyclic and other epic poems, which would doubtless in many cases have afforded valu- able aid. Nevertheless, no classical scholar can be easy without some opinion respecting the authorship of these immortal poems. An'd the more defective the evidence we possess, the more essential is it that all that evidence should be marshalled in the clearest order, and its bearing upon the points in controversy distinctly understood beforehand. Both these conditions seem to have been often neglected, throughout the long-continued Homeric discussion. To illustrate the first point : Since two poems are compre- hended in the problem to be solved, the natural process would be, first, to study the easier of the two, and then to apply the conclu- sions thence deduced as a means of explaining the other. Now, the Odyssey, looking at its aggregate character, is incomparably more easy to comprehend than the Iliad. Yet most Homeric critics apply the microscope at once, and in the first instance, to the Iliad. To illustrate the second point : What evidence is sufficient to negative the supposition that the Iliad or the Odyssey is a poem originally and intentionally one ? Not simply particular gaps and 1 Plato, Aristotle, and their contemporaries generally, read the most sus picious portions of the Homeric poems as genuine (Nitzsch, Plan und Gang der Odyssee, in the Preface to his second vol. of Comments on the Odyssey, pp. Ix-lxiv). Thucydides accepts the Hymn to Apollo as a composition by tl e autHoi of the Iliad.