Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/213

 UNITY OF AUTHORSHIP. 191 Assuming continuity of structure as a presumptive proof, the whole of this Achilleis must be treated as composed by one author. Wolf, indeed, affirmed, that he never read the poem continuously through without being painfully impressed with the inferiority 1 and altered style of the last six books, and Lach- rnann carries this feeling farther back, so as to commence with the seventeenth book. If I could enter fully into this sentiment, I should then be compelled, not to deny the existence of a precon ceived scheme, but to imagine that the books from the eighteenth to the twenty-second, though forming part of that scheme, or Achilleis, had yet been executed by another and an inferior poet. But it is to be remarked, first, that inferiority of poetical merit, to a certain extent, is quite reconcilable with unity of authorship ; and, secondly, that the very circumstances upon which Wolf's unfavorable judgment is built, seem to arise out of increased difficulty in the poet's task, when he came to the crowning cantos of his designed Achilleis. For that which chiefly distinguishes these books, is, the direct, incessant, and manual intervention of the gods and goddesses, formerly permitted by Zeus, = and the repetition of vast and fantastic conceptions to which such super- human agency gives occasion ; not omitting the battle of Achilles against Skamander and Simois, and the burning up of these rivers by Hephaestus. Now, looking at this vein of ideas with the eyes of a modern reader, or even with those of a Grecian critic of the literary ages, it is certain that the effect is unpleasing : the gods, sublime elements of poetry when kept in due proportion, are here somewhat vulgarized. But though the poet here has not suc- ceeded, and probably success was impossible, in the task which he has prescribed to himself, yet the mere fact of his under- taking it, and the manifest distinction between his employment of divine agency in these latter cantos as compared with the 1 Wolf, Prolegomen. p. cxxxvii. " Equidem certe quoties in continent! lectione ad istas partes (i. e. the last six books) deveni, nunquam non in iis talia quaedam sensi, quce nisi ilia tarn mature cum ceteris coaluissent, quovis pignore contendam, dudmn ab eruditis detecta et animadversa fuisse, immo multa cjus generis, ut cum nunc 'O/MipiKUTara habeantur, si tantum- modo in Hymnis legerentur, ipsa sola eos suspicionibus votidas adsperstra essent." Compare the sequel, p. cxxxviii, " nbi nervi deficiant et spiritni Homericns, jejunum et frigidum in locis mnltis," etc