Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/191

 STRUCTURE OF THE ILIAD. 175 the genius of the organizing poet consists ; nor can we hope, by simply knowing them as they exist in the second stage, ever to divine how they stood in the first. Such, in my judgment, is the right conception of the Homeric epoch, an organizing poetical mind, still preserving that freshness of observation and vivacity of details which constitutes the charm of the ballad. Nothing is gained by studying the Iliad as a congeries of frag- ments once independent of each other : no portion of the poem can be shown to have ever been so, and the supposition introduces difficulties greater than those which it removes. But it is not necessary to affirm that the whole poem as we now read it, belonged to the original and preconceived plan. 1 In this respect, the Iliad produces, upon my mind, an impression totally different from the Odyssey. In the latter poem, the characters and inci- dents are fewer, and the whole plot appears of one projection, from the beginning down to the death of the suitors : none of the parts look as if they had been composed separately, and inserted by way of addition into a preexisting smaller poem. But the Iliad, on the contrary, presents the appearance of a house built upon a plan comparatively narrow, and subsequently enlarged by succes- sive additions. The first book, together with the eighth, and the books from the eleventh to the twenty-second, inclusive, seem to form the primary organization of the poem, then properly an Achilleis : the twenty-third and twenty-fourth books are, perhaps, additions at the tail of this primitive poem, which still leave it nothing more than an enlarged Achilleis. But the books from the second to the seventh, inclusive, together with the tenth, are of a wider and more comprehensive character, and convert the poem 1 Even Aristotle, the great builder- up of the celebrity of Homer as to epical aggregation, found some occasions (it appears) on which he was obliged to be content with simply excusing, without admiring, the poet (Poet. 44 rotf uAAoff aya&olf 6 iroiijT})f f/6vvuv u<jtavisi rb UTOTTOV. ) And Hermann observes justly, in his acute treatise De Interpolationibus Homeri (Opuscula, torn. v. p. 53), "Nisi admirabilis ilia Homericorurn carminum suavitas lectorum animos quasi incantationibus quibusdam captoa tcneret, non tarn facile delitescerent, quse accuratins considerata, et multo minus apte quam quis jure postulet composita esse apparere necesse est." This treatise contains many criticisms on the structure of the Iliad, soma of them very well founded, though there arc many from which I dissent