Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/187

 STRUCTURE OF THE ODYSSEY. I/] be a secondary formation, out of a preexisting Odyssey of smaller dimensions ; but, if so, the parts of the smaller whole must have been so far recast as to make them suitable members of the larger, and are noway recognizable by us. 2. The subject- matter of the poem not only does not favor, but goes far to ex- clude, the possibility of the Wolfian hypothesis. Its events cannot be so arranged as to have composed several antecedent substantive epics, afterwards put together into the present ag- gregate. Its authors cannot have been mere compilers of pre- existing materials, such as Peisistratus and his friends : they must have been poets, competent to work such matter as they found, into a new and enlarged design of their own. Nor can the age in which this long poem, of so many thousand lines, M r as turned out as a continuous aggregate, be separated from the ancient, productive, inspired age of Grecian epic. Arriving at such conclusions from the internal evidence of the Odyssey, 1 we can apply them by analogy to the Iliad. We learn something respecting the character and capacities of that early age which has left no other mementos except these two poems. Long continuous epics (it is observed by those who support the news of "Volf), with an artistical structure, are inconsistent with the capacities of a rude and non- writing age. Such epics (we may reply) are not inconsistent with the early age of the Greeks, and the Odyssey is a proof of it ; for in that poem the integration of the whole, and the composition of the parts, must have been simultaneous. The analogy of the Odyssey enables us to rebut that preconception under which many ingenious critics sit down to the study of the Iliad, and which induces them to explain all the incoherences of the latter by breaking it up into smaller unities, as if short epics were the only manifestation of poetical 1 Wolf admits, in most unequivocal language, the compact and' artful structure of the Odyssey. Against this positive internal evidence, he sets the general presumption, that no such constructive art can possibly have belonged to a poet of the age of Homer: " De Odyssea maxime, cujas admirabilis summa et compages pro praeclarissimo monumento Grseci ingenii habenda est Unde fit ut Odysseam nemo, cui omnino priscus vatea placeat, nisi perlectam e manu deponere queat. At ilia ars id ipsum est, qnod vix ac ne vix quidem cadere videtur in vatem, singulas tantum rhapsodise decantantem," etc. (Prolegomen. pp. cxviii-cxx ; compare cxii.)