Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/85

63 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 63 without ever thinking that it might be better to distribute this enjoyment over the whole year, why should not the Greeks of earlier times have been able to listen to the Iliad and Odyssey, and, perhaps, other poems, at the same festival ? At a later date, indeed, when the rhapsodist was rivalled by the player on the lyre, the dithyrambic minstrel, and by many other kinds of poetry and music, these latter necessarily abridged the time allowed to the epic reciter ; but in early times, when the epic style reigned without a competitor, it would have obtained an undivided attention. Let us beware of measuring, by our loose and desultory reading, the intension of mind with which a people enthusiastically devoted to such enjoyments*, hung with delight on the flowing strains of the minstrel. In short, there was a time (and the Iliad and Odyssey are the records of it) when the Greek people, not indeed at meals, but at festivals, and under the patronage of their hereditary princes, heard and enjoyed these and other less excellent poems, as they were intended to be heard and enjoyed, viz. as complete wholes. "Whether they were, at this early period, ever recited for a prize, and in competition with others, is doubtful, though there is nothing improbable in the suppo- sition. But when the conflux of rhapsodists to the contests became per- petually greater ; when, at the same time, more weight was laid on the art of the reciter than on the beauty of the well-known poem which he recited ; and when, lastly, in addition to the rhapsodizing, a number of other musical and poetical performances claimed a place, then the rhap- sodists were permitted to repeat separate parts of poems, in which they hoped to excel ; and the Iliad and Odyssey (as they had not yet been reduced to writing) existed for a time only as scattered and unconnected fragments -f. And we are still indebted to the regulator of the contest of rhapsodists at the Panathenaea (whether it was Solon or Pisistratus), for having compelled the rhapsodists to follow one another, according to the order of the poem j, and for having thus restored these great works, which were filling into fragments, to their pristine integrity. It is indeed true that some arbitrary additions may have been made to them at this period ; which, however, we can only hope to be able to distin- guish from the rest of the poem, by first coming to some general agree- ment as to the original form and subsequent destiny of the Homeric compositions. T diurvairftivx, hr^v/uivu, jv uYcpitu.. See the sure testimonies on this point in Wolf's Prolegomena, p. cxliii. i£ vToXri^iu; (or in Diog. Laert. 1£ vTo&*r,s) pa-^tJiut.
 * Above, p. 30, note f f.