Homer and His Age

while he regarded the traditions concerning an Homeric school as sufficient basis for an hypothesis, “which we are bound to make in order to expl

of Athenian interpolation. Now Aristarchus must, at least, have known the tradition of the political use of a disputed line, for Aristotle writes (Rhetoric, i. 15) that the Athenians, early in the sixth century, quoted Iliad, II. 558, to prove their right to Salamis. Aristarchus also discussed Iliad, II. 553, 555, to which the Spartans appealed on the question of supreme command against Persia (Herodotus, vii. 159). Again Aristarchus said nothing, or nothing that

at our Iliad was practically edited and first committed to writing under Pisistratus appears to be due to the probability that Aristarchus must have known the tradition. But if he did, there is no proof that he accepted it as historically authentic. There is not, in fact, any proof even that Aristarchus must have known the tradition. He had probably read Dieu

ere the phalanxes of the Athenians were posted.” Aristarchus condemned this line, not (as far as evidence goes) because there was a tradition that the Athenians had interpolated it to prove their point, but because he thought it inconsistent with Iliad, III. 230; IV. 251, which, if I may differ from so great a critic, it is not; these two passages deal, not with the position of the camps, but of the men in the field on a certain occasion. But if Aristarchus had thought the tradition of Athenian interpolation of II. 558 worthy of notice, he might have mentioned it in support of his opi

at where the first reciter left off thence should begin his successor. It was rather Solon, then, than Pisistratus who brought Homer to light ([Greek text: ephotisen]), as Diogenes says in the

.” That Pisistratus did so is Mr. Leafs theory, but there is not a hint about anybody collecting anything in the Greek. Ritschl, indeed, conjecturally supplying the gap in the text of Diogenes, invented the words, “Who collected the Homeric poems, and inserted some things to please the Athenians.” But Mr. Leaf rejects that conjecture as “clearly wrong.” Then why does he adopt, as “the natural sense of the passage,” “it was not Peisistratos but Solon who collected the scattered Homer of his day?” 41 The testimony of Dieuchidas, as far as we can see in the state of the text, “refers,” as

the Iliad (vol. i. p. 37), he says that “nothing convincing has been urged to show” that the Catalogue is “of late origin.” We know, from the story of Solon and the Megarians, that the

ike the bulk of the Iliad and Odyssey, was composed in Achaean times

le,” the compiling of “the whole Cycle” being of uncertain date, but very late indeed, on any theory. The author “studiously p

n of the Catalogue” which, we conceive, must be the latest thing in Homer, if it was composed “for that portion of the whole Cycle which, a

red, proves that Dieuchidas, a writer of the fourth century B.C., alleged that Pisis

ago unfashionable, but in the last few years

d.” 45 Meyer says that the Alexandrians rejected the Pisistratean story “as a worthless fable,” differing here from Mr. Leaf and Wilamowitz; an

nds him talking confidently of the Pisistratidae. They “stitched together the rest of the epic,” but excised some magical formulae which Julius Africanus preserves. Mr. Allen remarks: “The statements abo

ance. Of importance is the want of evidence for the editor, and, as we have

theory of an Homeric “school” and the Wolfian theory that Pisistratus, or Solon, or somebody procured the making of the first written text at Athens in the sixth cen

ted before the mangling. That this has been so long and so stubbornly misunderstood is no credit to German scholarship: blind uncritical credulity on one side, limitless and arbitrary theorising on the other!” We are not solitary sceptics when we decline to accept the theory of Mr. Leaf. It is neither bottomed on evidence no

irst time, a due sequence, was necessary. His opponents hold that the sequence already existed, but was endangered

made” the Iliad; yet his descriptions of the processes and methods of his Pisistratean editor correspond to my idea of the “making” of our Iliad as it stands. See, for example, Mr. Leaf’s Introduction to Iliad, Book II. He will not even insist on the early Attic as the first written text; if it was not, its general acceptance seems to remain