Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume VIII.djvu/798

 780 HOMER of a number of songs which first existed as de- tached poeras, handed down from generation to generation by a school of rhapsodists or pro- fessional minstrels; the poems were thus not the work of one man, and possibly not the pro- duct of any one age a conclusion grounded partly on the absence of writing until long after the time when these poems first came into existence, and partly on the contradictions of the poems themselves. This opinion had to some extent been entertained before "Wolf by Vico, Casaubon, Perrault, Hedelin, Bentley, Wood, and other scholars; but their views were outweighed by the current opinion of Homer's personality. Since the day of Wolf the question has been amply discussed by the greatest scholars of all lands, but without re- sulting in a definite conclusion. In 1866 F. A. Paley attempted to prove that the Greek lyric, tragic, and comic poets either knew nothing or exceedingly little of our Iliad and Odyssey, or at least preferred to draw their, material from other poems. Some hold that, in order to prove that these poems have from the first been known in their entirety, and that there- fore the Greeks had only one Homer, it must be shown that they were from the first written poems. Barthelemy Saint-IIilaire, in his re- cent Iliade d'Homere traduite en vers fran$ais, attempts to establish that the Homeric age possessed the art of writing ; but against this opinion it has been argued that facilities for writing would lead rather to the rise of con- temporary chroniclers than to the practice of writing down poems. Many historians doubt therefore that poems were written centu- ries before the time of Herodotus, and also that the Greeks had any written literature before the Persian wars. Paley has expressed his conviction that no such literature existed in the time of Pindar ; and the subject has been further examined by Tennell, in a paper on " The First Ages of a written Greek Liter- ature " (" Transactions of the Cambridge Phi- losophical Society," 1868). When people nei- ther wrote nor read, the only way that poems could be made known was by recitation ; and as it cannot be supposed that the whole of the Iliad and Odyssey could be recited on ordinary occasions, recourse is had to hypothesis. Poems were recited in historical times at Athens at the festival of the Panathenrea, and there were contests of rhapsodists at Sicyon, Syracuse, Epidaurus, Orchomenus, Thespias, Acrrephia, Chios, Teos, and Olyrnpia. Such contests are alluded to in the Homeric account of the Thra- cian poet Thamyris, whom the muses struck blind at Dorium because he had boasted that he was able to contend even with them. It has therefore been supposed that such poems as the Iliad and Odyssey were recited at festi- vals by several rhapsodists in succession, and Nitzsch believes that such recitations lasted more than one day. But, as Ihne says, the subject of the rhapsodists is one of the most complicated and obscure of all. Ancient wri- ters agree in ascribing to Pisistratus the merit of having first committed the Homeric poems to writing, and an old Latin scholium, trans- lated from the Greek of Tzetzes and dis- covered by Ritschl in a manuscript of Plau- tus at Rome, gives the names of Onomacritus, Zopyrus, Orpheus, and the corrupted name of Concylus, as those of the four poets who assisted Pisistratus. It seems that before him Solon had undertaken to make such a com- pilation. The Alexandrian critics, however, do not even notice the Pisistratic recension among the many manuscripts of the Homeric poems which they had before them, and Payne Knight and others have inferred from their silence that they either did not possess it or esteemed it of no great authority ; which could not have been the case if it had been, as is alleged, the prime originator of Homeric unity. There is evidence that the contempo- raries of Pisistratus considered his labors val- uable, and that from the Attic manuscript other cities, even Chios, had copies made. Be- sides that of Chios, Alexandria possessed man- uscripts from Argos, Crete, Cyprus, Massilia, and Sinope ; also another called AiohiKfy prob- ably from a predominance of JEolic forms. Other copies were known by the names of the persons who made them, as the famous one made by Aristotle for Alexander the Great. An important epoch in the history of the Ho- meric poems opened in Alexandria, where they were revised by the most celebrated men of learning, as Zenodotus of Ephesus, Aristoph- anes of Byzantium, and above all by Aristar- chus of Samothrace, whose recension is the most esteemed by modern critics, though all we have of it consists of short fragments scat- tered through scholia. Aristarchus's edition became the basis of all subsequent ones, and hence it may be accepted that, generally speak- ing, the text of the Homeric poems such as it has come down to us, and the division of each poem into 24 rhapsodies, are his work. Aris- tarchus was opposed in his criticisms and ex- plications by Crates of Mallus, the founder of the Pergamene school of grammar. The wri- tings of Aristonicus, Didymus, Nicanor, and Herodian seem to have been the sources of the Venetian scholia, published for the first time by Villoison in 1788, through which it was hoped to restore the edition of Aristarchus. The old editions of Homer, as well as the manuscripts, are of little value for the restoration of the text. The first printed edition appeared in 1488, but until the time of Wolf only about seven critical editions had been made. With Wolfs Prolegomena, published in 1795, pre- fixed to the second edition of his Homeri et Homeridarum Opera, begins the modern pe- riod of Homeric criticism. The advocates of the Wolfian theory infer from the history of the Homeric text that the original unconnected songs composing the Iliad and Odyssey were collected and combined by Pisistratus. The work of these critics consists in eliminating