Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/208

 192 HISTORY OF GREECE. be explained by supposing integers originally separate, and brought together without any designed organization. And it u to a disproportionate length, so that the suspicion that there were later inser- tions of importance applies with greater probability to the first than to the last books A design manifested itself at an early period to make this poem complete in itself, so that .all the subjects, descriptions, and actions, which could alone give interest to a poem on the entire war, might find a place within the limits of its composition. For this purpose, it is not im- probable that many lays of earlier bards, who had sung single adventures of the Trojan war, were laid under contribution, and the finest parts of them incorporated in the new poem." These remarks of O. Mailer intimate what is (in my judgment) the right view, inasmuch as they recognize an extension of the plan of the poem beyond its original limit, manifested by insertions in the first half; and it is to be observed that, in his enumeration of 'those parts, the union of which is necessary to the internal connection of the Iliad, nothing is mentioned ex- cept what is comprised in books i. viii. xi. to xxii. or xxiv. But his descrip- tion of " the preparatory part" as " the attempts of the other heroes to compensate for the absence of Achilles" is noway borne out by the poet himself. From the second to the seventh book, Achilles is scarcely alluded to ; moreover, the Greeks do perfectly well without him. This portion of the poem displays, not " the insufficiency of all the other heroes without Achilles," as Miiller had observed in the preceding section, but the perfect sufficiency of the Greeks under Diomedes, Agamemnon, etc. to make head against Troy ; it is only in the eighth book that their insufficiency begins to be manifested, and only in the eleventh book that it is consummated by the wounds of the three great heroes. Diomedes is, in fact, exalted to a pitch of glory in regard to contests with the gods, which even Achilles himself never obtains after- wards, and Helenus the Trojan puts him above Achilles (vi. 99) in terrific prowess. Achilles is mentioned two or three times as absent, and Agamem- non, in his speech to the Gwcian agora, regrets the quarrel (ii. 377), but we never hear any such exhortation as, " Let us do our best to make up for the absence of Achilles," not even in the Epipolesis of Agamemnon, where it would most naturally be found. " Attempts to compensate for the absence of Achilles," must, therefore, be treated as the idea of the critic, not of tho poet Though O. Miiller has glanced at the distinction between the two parts of the poem (an original part, having chief reference to Achilles and the Greeks; and a superinduced part, having reference to the entire war), he has not conceived it clearly, nor carried it out consistently. If we are to distin- guish these two points of view at all, we ought to draw the lines at the end of the first book and at the beginning of the eighth, thus regarding the inter- mediate six books as belonging to the picture of the entire tear (or the Iliad us distinguished from the Achilleis) : the point of view of the Achilleis, dropped at the end of the first book, is resumed at the beginning of the eighth