Homer and His Age

ical hypothesis as to how they attained their present plots and forms. These could not come by accident, even if the plots are not good — as all the world held th

00 lines, a “kernel” altered at will by any one who pleased during four centuries, became a constructive whole. If the hypotheses

on a wide knowledge of German Homeric speculation, of the exact science of Grammar, of archaeological discoveries, and of manuscripts. 28 His volumes are, I doubt not, as they certainly deserve to be, on the

deas about the Homeric problem in general. He has altered some of his opinions since the publication of his Companion to the Iliad(1892), but the main lines of his old system are, except on one cruci

rete. 29 The lays are concerned with “good old times”; presumably between 1500 and 1100 B.C. Their pictures of the details of life harmonise more with what we know of the society of that period from the evidence of buildings and recent excavations, than with what we know of the life and the much more rude and barbaric art of the so-called “Dipylon” period of “geometrical” ornament

of apparent anachronism,” of divergence from the more antique picture of life. In these divergences are we to recognise the picture of a later development of the ancient existence of 1500–1200 B.C.? Or have elements of the life of a much later age of Greece (say, 800–550 B.C.) been consciously or unconsciously introduced by the late poets? Here Mr. Leaf recognises a point on which we have insisted, and must keep insisting, for it is o

period is certainly later than the shaft tombs” (discovered at Mycenae by Dr. Schliemann), “but it does not necessarily follow that it is post-Mycenaean. It is quite possible that certain notable differences between the poems and the monuments” (of Mycenae) “in burial, for instance, and in women’s dr

on of Athens. The poems thus spring out of an age of which, except from the poems themselves, we know little or nothing, because, as is shown later, no cairn burials answering to the frequent Homeric descriptions have ever b

nks that much of the detail of the ancient life in the poems had early become so “stereotyped” that no continuator, however late, dared “intentionally to sap” the type, “though he slipped from time to time into involuntary anachronism.” Some poets are also asserted to indulge in voluntary anachronism when, as Mr. Leaf supposes, they equip the ancient warriors with

y to general custom in such cases. When later poets in an uncritical age take up and rehandle the poetic themes of their predecessors, they always give to the stories “a new costume,” as M. Gaston Paris remarks in reference to thirteenth century dealings with French epics of the eleventh century. But, in the critics’ opinion, the late rehandlers of old Achaean lays preserved the archaic modes of life,

nion, (a) the First Book and fifty lines of the Second Book remain intact or, perhaps, are a blend of two versions. (b) The Valour of Agamemnon and Defeat of the Achaeans. Of this there are portions in Book XI., but they were meddled with, altered, and generally doctored, “down to the latest period,” namely, the age of Pisistratus in Athens, the middle of the sixth century B.C. (c) The fight in which, after their defeat, the Achaeans try to save the ships from the torc

poem, as detected by him, is really “the work of a single poet, perhaps the greatest in all the world’s history.” If the original poet did no more than is here allotted to him, especially if he left out the purpose of Zeus

er from Mr. Leaf have a right to hold that the Iliad as it stands contains, and always did contain, a plot of masterly perfection. We need not attend here so closely to Mr. Leaf’s theory in the matter of the First Expansions, (2) and the Second Expansions, (3) but the latest Expansions (4) give the account of The Embassy to Achilles with his refusal of Agamemnon’s Apology(Book IX.), the Ransoming of Hector (Book XXIV.), t

e sane poet could make. Other proofs of multiplex authorship are discovered by the critic’s private sense of what the poem ought to be, by his instinctive knowledge of style, by detection of the poet’s supposed err

old, late, and quite recent, from the mass, evolved

e medley of new songs by many generations of irresponsible hands codified into a plot which used to be reckoned fine? How were the manners, customs, and characters, unus color, preserved in a fairly coherent and uniform aspect? How was the whole Greek world, throughout which all manner of discrepant versions and incongruo

these questions is the first thing n

nt, above all, for two facts: first, the relatively correct preservation of the harmony of the picture of life, of ideas political and religious, of the characters of the heroes, of the customary law

version of the Iliad came to be accepted, “where many rival versions m

, of course, in “Homer’s autograph.” This view Mr. Leaf, we shall see, discards. The second presents the notion of one old sacred college

40 B.C.) “was the first who had the Homeric poems committed to wr

public was everywhere a public of listeners, who heard the lays sung on rare occasions at feasts and fairs, or whenever a strolling rhapsodist took up his pitch, for a day or two, at a street corner. There was, by the theory, no reading public for the Homeric poetry. But, by the time of Pisistratus, a readin

were good, but the words were often silly, more often they were Fescennine —“more dirt than wit.” Burns rewrote the words, which were published in handsome vol

he history of the various towns and districts of Scotland. The heroic lays of Greece were believed, on the other hand, to be a kind of Domesday book of ancient principalities, and cities, and worshipped heroes. Thus it was much easier for a great poet like Burns to supersede with his songs a mass of unconsidered “sculdudery” old lays, in which no man o

nd oral versions fell out of memory. But it would not, of course, explain how, before Pisistratus, during four or five centuries of change, the new poets and reciters, throughout the Greek world, each adding

The Seven against Thebes. How did late continuators, familiar with the serpents, lions, bulls’ heads, crabs, doves, and so forth, on the contemporary shields, keep such picturesque and attractive details out of their new rhapsodies? In mediaeval France, we shall show, the epic

e old Scots orally repeated songs, when Burns published new words to the airs. But Wolf’s theory does not explain the harmony of the pic

eric poetry,” for there must have been some central authority to preserve the text intact when it could not be preserved in writing. Were there no such body

d by human sacrifices and many mystic rites. We are not told that new poems were produced and criticised; it does not appear that this was the case. Pupils attended from three to five years, and then qualified as priests or tohunga 33. Suppose that the Asiatic Greeks, like the Maoris and Zu?is, had Poetic Colleges of a sacred kind

e to be accepted, where many rival versions must, from the necessity of the case, have once existed side by side. The assumption of a school or guild of singers has be

he time of Solon or Pisistratus,” from the rhapsodies existing in the memory of reciters. 36 But Mr. Leaf had previously said 37 that “the legend which connects his” (Pisistratus’s) “name with the Homeric poems is itself probably only conjectural, and of late date.” Now the evidence for Pisistratus which, in 1892, he thoug

as the Cyclic poets made, nor the general “preOdyssean” character of the language and grammar. By the Pisistratean hypothesis there was not, what Mr. Leaf in 1892 justly deemed essential, a school “to maintain a fixed standard,” throughout the changes of four centuries, and against the caprice o

e Homeric poems) “came to be accepted.” His present theory, if admitted, does account for the acceptation of a single version of the poems, the first standard written version, but fails to explain how “the caprice

editor could possibly introduce a harmony which could only have characterised his materials, as Mr. Leaf has justly remarked, if there was an Homeric school “to maintain a fixed standard.” But now such harmo

and madden th

standard.” Such men would certainly not adhere strictly to a

bring harmony of manners, customs, and diction int

are the least careful of men, each would recite in the language and grammar of his day, and introduce the newly evolved words and idioms, the new and fashionable manners, costume, and weapons of his time. When war chariots became obsolete, he would bring in cavalry; when there was no Over–Lord, he would not trouble himself to maintain correctly the character and situation of

the lays known to such strollers as happened to be gathered, in Athens, perhaps at the Panathenaic festival. The répertoire of each stroller would v

s, remove discrepancies, accidentally bring in fresh discrepancies (as always happens), weave transitional passages, look with an antiquarian eye after the too manifest modernisms in language and manners, and so produce the Iliad. That, in the sixth century B.C., any man undertook such a task, and succeeded so well as to impo

old poems and new, Mr. Leaf supposes that “but small and unimportant additions were made after the end of the eighth century or thereabouts,” especially as “the creative and imaginative forces of the Ionian race turned to other forms of expression,” to lyrics and to philosophic poems. But the able Pisistratean editor, after all, we find, introduced quantities of new matter into

and preserved in new copies from generation to generation. Mr. Leaf states his doubt that there were any such texts. “The poems were all this time handed down orally only by tradition among the singers (sic), who used to wander over Greece reciting them at popular festivals. Writing was indeed known through the whole period of epic development” (some four cen

ters had any ancient texts, then texts existed, though not “standard” texts: and by this means the harmony of thought, character, and detail in the poems might be preserved. We do not think that it is “in the highest degree unlike

he characters will be dealt with later; meanwhile it is plain that Mr. Leaf, when he rejects both the idea of written texts prior to 600–540 B.C., and also the idea of a school charged with the duty of “maintaining a fixed sta

umstances no harmony, no unus color, could have survived

t enabled to understand how it came to be what it is. No editor could possibly tinker it into the whole which we possess; none