Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/189

 STRUCTURE OF THE ILIAD. 173 or little substantive epics, (Lachmann's sixteen songo cover the space only as far as the 22d book, or the death of Hector, and two more songs would have to be admitted for the 23d and 24th books), not only composed by different authors, but by each 1 without any view to conjunction with the rest, we have then no right to expect any intrinsic continuity between them ; and all that continuity which we now find must be of extraneous origin. Where are we to look for the origin ? Lachmann follows Wolf, in ascribing the whole constructive process to Peisistratus and his associates, at a period when the creative epical faculty is admitted to have died out. But upon this supposition, Peisistra- tus (or his associates) must have done much more than omit, transpose, and interpolate, here and there ; he must have gone far to rewrite the whole poem. A great poet might have recast preexisting separate songs into one comprehensive whole, but no mere arrangers or compilers would be competent to do so : and we are thus left without any means of accounting for that degree of continuity and consistence which runs through so large a portion of the Iliad, though not through the whole. The idea that the poem, as we read it, grew out of atoms not originally designed for the places which they now occupy, involves us in new and inex- tricable difficulties, when we seek to elucidate either the mode of coalescence or the degree of existing unity. 2 1 Lachmann seems to admit one case in which the composer of one song manifests cognizance of another song, and a disposition to give what will form a sequel to it. His fifteenth song (the Patrokleia) lasts from xv. 592 down to the end of the 17th book: the sixteenth song (including the four next books, from eighteen to twenty- two inclusive) is a continuation of the fifteenth, but by a different poet. (Fernerc Betrachtungen iiber die Ilias, Abhandl. Berlin. Acad. 1841, sect. xxvi. xxviii. xxix. pp. 24, 34, 42.) This admission of premeditated adaptation to a certain extent breaks up the integrity of the Wolfian hypothesis. beset it ; for their language is wavering in respect to these supposed primary constituent atoms. Sometimes Lachmann tells us, that the original pieces were much finer poetry than the Iliad as we now read it; at another time, that it cannot be now discovered what they originally were : nay, he farther admits, (as remarked in the preceding note,) that the poet of the sixteenth song had cognizance of the fifteenth. But if it be granted that the original constituent songs were so composed, though by different poets, as th.V- the more recent were udupted ;o the earlier
 * The advocates of the Wolfian theory, appear to feel the difficulties which