Studies on Homer

Sect. 5 — The Probable Trustworthiness of the Text of Homer

Let us now proceed to consider the question, what assumption is it, on the whole, safest to make, or what rule can we most judiciously follow, as our guide in Homeric studies, with reference to the text of the Poems?

Shall we adopt a given form of completely reconstructed text, like that of Mr. Payne Knight?

Shall we, without such adherence to a particular pattern, assume it to be either indisputable or, at least, most probable that an extensive corruption of the text can hardly have been avoided43; and shall we, in consequence, hold the received text provisionally, and subject to excision or to amendment according to any particular theory concerning Homer, his age, its manners and institutions, which we may ourselves have thought fit to follow or construct?

Shall we admit as authoritative, the excisions of Aristarchus or the Alexandrian critics, and the obeli which he has placed against verses which he suspected?

Or shall we proceed, as a general rule, upon the belief, that the received text of Homer is in general sound and trustworthy, so far, at least, as to be very greatly preferable to any reconstructed or altered form whatever, in which it has hitherto been produced or proposed for our acceptance?

My decided preference is for the fourth and last of these alternatives: with the observation, however, in passing, that the third does not essentially differ from it with respect to the great body of the Poems, so far as we know what the Alexandrian text really was.

I prefer this course as by far the safest: as the only one which can be entered upon with such an amount of preliminary assent, as to secure a free and unbiassed consideration of Homeric questions upon a ground held in common: and as, therefore, the only one, by means of which it can be hoped to attain to solid and material results as the reward of inquiry. In order fairly to raise the issue, the two following propositions may be stated as fitting canons of Homeric study:—

1. That we should adopt the text itself as the basis of all Homeric inquiry, and not any preconceived theory, nor any arbitrary standard of criticism, referable to particular periods, schools, or persons.

2. That as we proceed in any work of construction by evidence drawn from the text, we should avoid the temptation to solve difficulties found to lie in our way, by denouncing particular portions of it as corrupt or interpolated: should never set it aside except upon the closest examination of the particular passage questioned; should use sparingly the liberty even of arraying presumptions against it; and should always let the reader understand both when and why it is questioned.

Now, let us consider these rules, and the method which it is proposed by means of them to apply, a. With reference to the failure of other methods.

b. With reference to the antecedent probabilities for or against the general soundness of the text.

c. With reference to the internal evidence of soundness or unsoundness afforded by the text itself.

The first of the two rules has been brought more and more into operation by the believers in Homer as the Poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, in self-defence against the sceptical theories: and it has been both announced and acted upon by Mure with such breadth and completeness, as to leave to those, who adopt it, simply the duty of treading in his footsteps.

Again, as to the second, it may now be hoped that by the force of circumstances it is gradually coming into vogue, though perhaps less, as yet, by a distinct conviction of its reasonableness, than through the utter failure and abortiveness of all other methods. First to theorise rashly (with or without consciousness), and then rudely to excise from the Homeric text whatever clashes with our crude conceptions, is, after all, an essentially superficial and vulgar method of proceeding: and if it was excusable before the evidence touching the Poet and the text had been so greatly confirmed, as it has recently been, by closer scrutiny, it can hardly be forgiven now. The text of Homer cannot be faultless: but, in the first place, it is plain, as far as general consent can make it so, that the poems, as they stand, afford a far better and surer foundation than any other form of them which has been proposed, whether curtailed in their principal members, as by the destructive school, or only amended by free handling in detail. All the recasting processes which have yet been tried, have begotten ten solecisms, or another solecism of tenfold magnitude, for every one that they did away. In fact, the end of schemes, such as that of Lachmann44, has been not to achieve any thing like real progress in a continuous work, but simply to launch so many distinct speculations, isolated, conflicting, each resting on its author’s own hearty approval, and each drawing from the rest of the world no other sign than the shrug or the smile, which seems to be the proper reward of perverted ingenuity.

It would be presumptuous and unjust to treat the remarkable performance of Mr. Payne Knight as one of what may be called—to borrow a phrase from the commercial world—the Homeric bubble-schemes. It was anticipated with eagerness by Heyne. It was hailed by the calm judgment and refined taste of Lord Aberdeen. Yet this was not enough.

ἁμέραι δ’ ἐπίλοιποι
μάρτυρες σοφώτατοι45.

The ordeal of time has not destroyed the value of Mr. Payne Knight’s Prolegomena, but it has been decidedly unfavourable to his text as a practical attempt at reconstruction. With the old text in the right hand, and Mr. Knight’s in the left, who would doubt in which to look for the nearest likeness to Homer? Or who will ever again venture to publish an abridged or re-modelled Iliad?

Apart, however, from the unsatisfactoriness of the results of attempts at reconstruction, have we reason to believe that the text of Homer has, as a whole, been seriously vitiated by interpolation or corruption? The difficulties attending its transmission from the time of the poet are not to be denied. But I think we have scarcely enough considered the amount of means which were available, and which were actually employed, in order to neutralize those difficulties, and achieve the task. Although writing of some description appears to have existed at the epoch of the Poems, it can be probably proved, and may at any rate be fully admitted, that Homer did not write, but recited only. This is the first step: now for the second. I pass by the argument with those, who deny that poems of this length could be transmitted orally at all, as one already disposed of by the general verdict of the world. So, likewise, I leave behind me, at the point where Mure has placed them, all the reasonings of the piecers, who say that there were originally a number of Iliadic and Odyssean songs, afterwards made up into the poems such as we now have them: of the amplifiers, who look upon them as expanded respectively by gradual interpolations and additions from an original of small dimensions; of the separators, who will have just two Homers and no more, one for the Iliad, and one for the Odyssey. I assume for the present purpose the contrary of all these three propositions: and simply invite those who disbelieve them, but who also conceive that the text is generally unsafe and untrustworthy in its detail, to some consideration of that subject.

In attempting to weigh retrospectively the probable fortunes of the Homeric text, I presume that we may establish as our point of departure the judgment delivered by Heyne46, that the manuscripts of Homer are satisfactory: that we possess all, or nearly all, that the Alexandrian critics possessed; and that by the advance of the critical art, we have now probably, on the whole, a better and truer Homer than that of Aristarchus, which is the basis of the modern text. The imperfect state of notation when writing first began to be used, and the changes in pronunciation, have not, we may also suppose with Heyne47, done more than trifling or secondary damage to the copies.

The first serious question is this; how far was Homer mutilated, first, by the rhapsodists, or reciters, before he was put into writing, and secondly, by those who, in order to bring the lays of the Iliad into one body, must, it is assumed, have added and altered much, even if they had no whims of their own, and only sought to do what was needful nexûs et juncturæ causâ. It is, of course, admitted that these lays, even though ideally one as they came from their framer, were in many cases actually separated. And Heyne quotes the Scholiast of Pindar48, complaining by report that Cinæthus and his school had interpolated largely, as well as the passage in which Josephus49 (so he states) gives it as his opinion that the Iliad, from having been pieced together long after it was composed, presented many discrepancies. Now, even if this were the opinion of Josephus, it would have no more pretension to historical authority, than if it had been delivered yesterday. But the fact is, that Josephus mentions it simply as a current notion; φασὶν οὐδὲ τοῦτον... ἀλλὰ διαμνημονευομένην... καὶ διὰ τοῦτο πολλὰς ἐν αὐτῇ σχεῖν τὰς διαφωνίας. Indeed, it cannot be too carefully borne in mind, that if the positive notices of Homer in early times are slight, so as to throw us back very much upon the poems for their own vindication, yet, on the other hand, all the authorities cited on the sceptical side, are chronologically so remote from the question in debate, that they are but opinions and not proofs, and that we may canvass and question them without the smallest scruple, or fear that we are pitting mere theory against legitimate evidence.

It is not to be denied that the condition of the Homeric poems, before they were committed to writing, was one of great danger. But the question may well be asked, how came poems of such length to be preserved at all by mere oral transmission through a period of undefined, and possibly of very great, length? It is plain that nothing but an extraordinary celebrity, and a passionate attachment on the part of the people, could have kept them alive. Now, if we suppose this celebrity and this attachment, let us inquire further, whether they may not have supplied the means of neutralizing and counteracting, in the main, the dangers to which the poems were exposed; and whether it is unreasonable to say, That which could have preserved them in their unity at all, must, in all likelihood, have preserved them in a tolerably genuine state. Fully admitting that the evidence in the case is imperfect, and can only lead to disputable conclusions, I nevertheless ask, What is the most probable supposition respecting the condition of the Homeric poems in the pre-historic times of Greece? Is it not this—that, with due allowance for a different state of circumstances, they were then, what they were in later times; the broad basis of mental culture; the great monument of the glory of the nation, and of each particular State or race; the prime entertainment of those prolonged festive gatherings which were so characteristic of early Greece; that they were not only the special charge and pride of particular poetical schools, but distinct objects of the care of legislators and statesmen; that in this manner they were recognised as among the institutions of the country, and that they had thus to depend for their transmission, not only on the fire of national and poetic feeling, but upon a jealous custody much resembling that which even a comparatively rude people gives to its laws?

I shall attempt a summary of the arguments and testimonies which appear to me to recommend, if they do not compel, the adoption of these conclusions.

1. Heraclides Ponticus, a pupil of Plato, in a fragment περὶ πολιτειῶν, declares that Lycurgus was the first to bring the poetry of Homer into Peloponnesus: τὴν Ὁμήρου ποίησιν, παρὰ τῶν ἀπογόνων Κρεοφύλου λαβὼν, πρῶτος διεκόμισεν εἰς Πελοπόννησον. This testimony is late with reference to the fact it reports, but not late in the history of Greek literature. Of the source from which it was derived by the author who gives it us, we know nothing. No light is thrown upon it by Ælian,50 who adds the epithet ἀθρόαν to ποίησιν. Plutarch enlarges the expression of the tradition, but seems to add little to its matter, except that some portions of Homer were known before Lycurgus brought the whole from Crete.51 It is stated in the Republic of Plato,52 that Creophylus was a companion of Homer. Strabo53 informs us that he was a Samian; and Hermodamas, the master of Pythagoras, is said by Diogenes Laertius54 to have been his descendant. Now, we cannot call any part of these statements history; but they exhibit a body of tradition, of which the members, drawn from scattered quarters, agree with one another, and agree also with the general probability that arises out of a fact so astonishing as is in itself the actual preservation of the poems of Homer. It is in truth this fact that lays the best ground for traditions such as the one in question. If they came before us artificially complete and embellished, that might be made a ground of suspicion. But appearing, as this one does, with an evident absence of design, there is every presumption of its truth. Before considering the full force which attaches to it if it be true, we will draw out the kindred traditions.

2. Of these, the next, and a most important one, is the statement of Herodotus respecting Clisthenes, the ruler of Sicyon, who, when he had been at war with Argos, ῥαψῳδοὺς ἔπαυσε ἐν Σικυῶνι ἀγωνίζεσθαι, τῶν Ὁμηρείων ἐπέων εἵνεκα, ὅτι Ἀργεῖοί τε καὶ Ἄργος τὰ πολλὰ πάντα ὑμνέαται55. He proceeds to say, that Clisthenes sought to banish the memory of Adrastus, as being an Argive hero, from Sicyon. It is not necessary to inquire what these Homeric poems may have included; but the conclusion of Grote, that they were ‘the Thebais and the Epigoni, not the Iliad56,’ seems to me incredible. Nor is it correct that the Iliad fails to supply matter to which the statement may refer. In the Iliad, the name of Argos, though meaning it is true the country rather than a city, is nearly associated with the chief seat of power, and becomes representative of the whole Hellenic race in its heroic infancy. This is surely honour infinitely higher, than any local fame it could derive from the civil feud with Thebes. The Iliad, too, marks most clearly the connexion of Adrastus with Argos—for it names Diomed as the husband of his daughter or granddaughter, Ægialea57; it also marks the subordinate position of Sicyon,

ὅθ’ ἄρ’ Ἄδρηστος πρῶτ’ ἐμβασίλευεν58, by making it a mere town in the dominions of Agamemnon, while Argos figures as a sovereign and powerful city. There may therefore perhaps be room to doubt whether Herodotus meant even to include the Thebais or Epigoni in the phrase ‘Homeric poems.’

But the importance of the passage is not wholly dependent on these considerations. It shows, a. That there were, at Sicyon, State-recitations of Homer six centuries before the Christian era, attended with rewards for the successful performers.

b. That these recitations were in conformity with common use; for they are named as something ordinary and established, which was then set aside, not as a custom peculiar to Sicyon.

c. That the recitations depended upon the Homeric poems, since they were entirely stopped on account of exceptionable matter which the Homeric poems were deemed to contain.

d. That these recitations were in the nature of competitive contests among the rhapsodists, when the best and most approved, of course, would obtain prizes. This implies that the recitations were not single, as if by poet laureates, but that many shared in them.

3. Next to this tradition, and nearly coeval with it, but reported by later authority, is that respecting Solon and Athens. Dieuchidas of Megara, an author of uncertain age, placed by Heyne59 later than Alexander, is quoted in Diogenes Laertius60 as testifying to the following effect concerning Solon: τά τε Ὁμήρου ἐξ ὑποβολῆς γέγραφε ῥαψῳδεῖσθαι. οἷον ὅπου ὁ πρῶτος ἔληξεν, ἐκεῖθεν ἄρχεσθαι τὸν ἐχόμενον. μᾶλλον οὖν Σόλων Ὅμηρον ἐφώτισεν, ἢ Πεισίστρατος. But we have also a better witness, I think, in Lycurgus the orator, contemporary with Demosthenes,61 who gives a most striking account of the political and martial use of the Homeric songs. He says, οὕτω γὰρ ὑπέλαβον ὑμῶν οἱ πατέρες σπουδαῖον εἶναι ποιήτην, ὥστε νόμον ἔθεντο καθ’ ἑκάστην πενταετηρίδα τῶν Παναθηναίων μόνου τῶν ἄλλων ποιήτων ῥαψωδεῖσθαι τὰ ἔπη. ‘It was with these songs in their ears,’ he proceeds, ‘that your fathers fought at Marathon; and so valiant were they then, that from among them their brave rivals, the Lacedæmonians, sought a general, Tyrtæus.’

a. Now, these words appear to carry the traditional origin of this law, as far as the authority of Lycurgus will avail, back to the early part of the seventh century, when Tyrtæus lived.62

b. Thus, at the period when Athens is just beginning to rise towards eminence, she enacts a law that the poems of Homer shall be recited at her greatest festival.

c. This honour she accords to Homer (whatever that name may have imported) alone among poets.

d. This appears, from the connexion with Tyrtæus, to be a tradition of a matter older still than the one mentioned by Dieuchidas. But the two are in thorough accordance. For Dieuchidas does not say that Solon introduced the recitations of Homer, nor does he refer simply to the Panathenaica. He pretty clearly implies, that Solon did not begin the recitations, but that he reformed—(by bringing them into regular succession, which implies a fixed order of the songs)—what had been introduced already; while Lycurgus seems to supply the notice of the original introduction as having occurred before the time even of Tyrtæus.

4. The argument from the sculptures on the chest of Cypselus, representing subjects taken out of the Iliad, refers to a period nearly corresponding with that of Tyrtæus, as Cypselus was probably born about B. C. 700: and tends to show that the Iliad was famous in Corinth at that date.63

5. The next of the specific traditions is that relating to Pisistratus. To his agency it has been the fashion of late years to assign an exaggerated, or even an exclusive, importance. But whereas the testimonies respecting Lycurgus, Clisthenes, and Solon, (as well as the Athenian legislators before him,) are derived from authors probably, or certainly, of the fourth and fifth centuries B. C., we have none at all respecting Pisistratus earlier than the Augustan age.64 Cicero says he first disposed the Homeric books in their present order; Pausanias,65 that he collected them, διεσπασμένα τε καὶ ἀλλαχοῦ μνημονευόμενα; Josephus,66 who, as we have seen, merely refers to the report that the Iliad was not committed to writing until after Homer’s time, is wrongly quoted67 as a witness to the labours of Pisistratus. An ancient Scholion, recently discovered,68 names four poets who worked under that prince. And it may be admitted, that the traditions respecting Pisistratus have this distinctive mark—that they seem to indicate the first accomplishment of a critical and literary task upon Homer’s text under the direct care and responsibility of the sovereign of the country.

Thus, the testimony concerning Pisistratus is of an order decidedly inferior to that which supports the earlier traditions, and cannot with propriety be put into the scale against them where they are in conflict with it; but there is no reason to reject the report that he fixed the particular order of the poems, which the law of Solon may have left open in some degree to the judgment of the reciters, although they were required by it to recite in order.

6. The dialogue, doubtfully ascribed to Plato under the name of Hipparchus, states that that sovereign—

τὰ Ὁμήρου πρῶτος ἐκόμισεν ἐς τὴν γῆν ταυτηνὶ, καὶ ἠνάγκασε τοὺς ῥαψῳδοὺς Παναθηναίοις ἐξ ὑπολήψεως ἐφεξῆς αὐτὰ διιέναι, ὥσπερ νῦν ἔτι οἵδε ποιοῦσι69.

As regards the matter of original introduction, this passage contradicts all the foregoing ones. From the uncertainty who is its author, it must yield to them as of less authority. But this is not all. It is on the very face of it incredible: for it asserts, not that his poetry was first arranged or adjusted, but first brought into the country by Hipparchus. This is in itself absurd: and it is also directly in the teeth of the statement, which can hardly be a pure fiction, that Solon by law required the poems of Homer to be recited at the Panathenæa. As regards the succession in reciting, it is quite possible that he may have put the last hand to the work of his father.

However, the passage may deserve notice as a sign of the general belief that the care of the poems of Homer, and provision for their orderly publication in the only mode then possible, was a fit and usual part of the care of States and their rulers.

The whole mass of the passages which have been cited may be thought to bear primarily on the controversies which I have waived. But they have a most important, even if secondary, bearing upon the question, whether the received text is generally sound in its structure. The dangers which menaced that text of course were referable to two sources: the one, want of due care; and the other, falsification for a purpose: and it is necessary to bring into one view the whole positive evidence with respect to the preservation and publication of the Homeric poems, in order to estimate the amount both of these dangers and of the safeguards against them. I resume the prosecution of this task.

From the word ἀγωνίζεσθαι, applied by Herodotus to the recitations at Sicyon, it is plain that they were matches among the rhapsodists. And as the match did not in the main depend upon the original compositions of the candidates, but on the repetition of what Homer was reputed to have composed, the question arises, on what grounds could the prize be adjudged? Partly, perhaps, for the voice and manner of the rhapsodist; but partly also, nay, we must assume principally, for his comparative fidelity to the supposed standard of his original. And, when we consider the length of the poems, we may the more easily understand how the retentiveness of memory required to give an adequate command of them, might well deserve and receive reward. True, the vanity of a particular rhapsodist might readily induce him to suppose that he could improve upon Homer. But surely such an one would be subject to no inconsiderable check from the vigilance, and the impartial, or more probably the jealous, judgment of his contemporaries and rivals. The aberrations, too, or interpolations, of each one inventor, would be immediately crossed by those of every other; and the intrinsic superiority of the great poet himself, and the extraordinary reverence paid to his name, would thus derive powerful aid from the natural play of human passions. I look upon the circumstance that these recitations were competitive, and probably open to all comers, as one of the utmost importance. Freedom, in such a case, would be far more conservative than restriction.

The force of such considerations is abated indeed, but it is not destroyed, by the fact that poems not composed by Homer were esteemed to be Homeric. We have no means of knowing whether this false estimation reached in general beyond the character of mere vulgar rumour. We find, indeed, that Callinus ascribed the Thebais to Homer, Thucydides the Pythian Hymn, and Aristotle the Margites. But, of these three, the last judgment, for all we know, may have been a true one. The Thebais was judged by Pausanias to be the best of the epics, after the Iliad and Odyssey. It does not therefore follow, that because a poet might assign this to him, he would also have assigned others. Few authors show more slender marks of critical acumen than Herodotus; but even he treats the notions that the Cyprian epic or the Epigoni belonged to Homer in terms such as to show, that they were at most mere speculations, and not established public judgments.70

Now, even in a critical age, it seems to be inevitable, that authors of conspicuous popularity shall be followed on their path, not only by imitators, but, where there is the least hope of even temporary success, by forgers. We see, in the present day, attempts to vent new novels under the name of Walter Scott. I have myself a volume, purchased in Italy, of spurious verses, printed under the name of her great, though not yet famous, modern poet, Giacomo Leopardi. In periods far less critical, impostors would be bolder, and dupes more numerous. But it cannot be shown that a number of other epics, or even that any single one, had been generally ascribed to Homer with the same confidence as the Iliad and Odyssey; nor that the same care, public or private, was taken in any other case for the keeping and restoration of the text.

Again, though the Spartan and Athenian traditions take no specific notice of competition, yet we are justified in supposing that it existed, because the practice can be traced to an antiquity more remote than any of them. It is true that in Homer we have no example of competition among bards actually exhibited; but neither do the poems furnish us with an occasion when it might have been looked for. The ordinary place of the bard was as a member of a king’s or chieftain’s household. At the great assemblages of tribes, or of the Greek race, to which the chiefs repaired in numbers, more bards than one would also probably appear. Some light is thrown upon this subject by the passage relating to Thamyris in the second Book of the Iliad.71 He met his calamity at Dorion, when on a journey; and it caught him Οἰχαλίηθεν ἰόντα παρ’ Εὐρύτου Οἰχαλιῆος. Homer’s usual precision justifies our arguing that, when he says he came, not simply from a place, but also from, or from beside, the lord of a place, the meaning is, that he was attached to that lord as the bard of his court or household. Again, he was on a journey. Whither bound, except evidently to one of these contests? This is fully shown by the lines that follow, for they contemplate a match as then about to take place forthwith. For the form of his boast was not simply that he could beat the Muses, but (to speak in our phraseology) he vauntingly vowed that he would win, even though the Muses themselves should be his rivals.

στεῦτο γὰρ εὐχόμενος νικήσεμεν, εἴπερ ἂν αὐταὶ
Μοῦσαι ἀείδοιεν.

Institutions which embrace competition have, from the character of man’s nature, a great self-sustaining power; and there is no reason to suppose that between the time of Thamyris and that of the Sicyonian rhapsodists this method of recitation had at any time fallen into abeyance. In a fragment of Hesiod72, quoted by the Scholiast on Pindar, we find the phrase ῥάπτειν ἀοιδήν; but on account of its mention of Homer as a contemporary, this fragment is untrustworthy. In other places, however, he distinctly witnesses to the matches and prizes of the bards, and says that at the match held by Amphidamas in Aulis, he himself won a tripod73. Again, Thucydides finds an unequivocal proof of the competition of bards in the beautiful passage which he quotes from the very ancient Hymn to Apollo74.

I do not think it needful to dwell in detail upon the means privately taken for the transmission of the Homeric songs. Cinæthus of Chios (according to the Scholiast on Pindar75, quoting Hippostratus, a Sicilian author of uncertain date), ἐῤῥαψῴδησε τὰ Ὁμήρου ἔπη (about 500 B.C.), for the first time at Syracuse. It may be observed that this passage may probably imply the foundation of public recitations there. Eustathius76, quoting, as Heyne77 observes, inaccurately, charges Cinæthus with having corrupted the Homeric poems; but the words of the Scholiast need not mean more than that he composed certain poems and threw them into the mass of those which were more or less taken to be Homeric. We need not enlarge upon Creophylus78, or upon the Homeridæ mentioned by Pindar, and, according to Strabo, claimed as her own by Chios79. That name appears to be used freely by Plato80, without explanation, as if in his own time they formed a well-known school. According to Athenæus81, quoting Aristocles, a writer of uncertain date, the name Ὁμηρισταὶ was given to the rhapsodists generally.

The Iliad and the Odyssey were known to Herodotus under their present titles, as we find from his references to them. But it is justly argued by Heyne, that there must have been known poems of their scope and subject at the time when the other Cyclic poems were written, which fill up the interval between them, and complete the Troic story82; that is to say, not long after the commencement of the Olympiads.

Again, it is needless to do more than simply touch upon the relation of Homer to Greek letters and culture in general. He was the source of tragedy, the first text-book of philosophers, and the basis of liberal education; so much so, that Alcibiades is said to have struck his schoolmaster for having no MS. rhapsody of the Iliad83, while Xenophon quotes Niceratus as saying that his father made him learn the Iliad and Odyssey, and that he could repeat the whole of them by heart84. Cassander, king of Macedon, according to Athenæus, could do nearly as much. He had by heart τῶν ἐπῶν τὰ πολλά.85

Passing on from this evidence of general estimation, I come to what is more important with respect to the question of the text—that is, the state of the poems at the time of the Alexandrian recensions, as it is exhibited by Villoison, from the Venetian Scholia on the Iliad which he discovered. From this source appears to me to proceed our best warrant for believing in the general soundness of the text.

The first tendencies of the Alexandrian school, as they are represented by Zenodotus, appear to have been towards very free excision and emendation. Aristarchus, its highest authority, is considered to represent a reaction towards more sober handling. The plan of expressing suspicion by obeli was a good one—it raised the question of genuineness without foreclosing it. The passages which he excluded stand in the text, and many among them are not much damaged by the condemnation. One particularly, in the speech of Phœnix,86 appears to me alike beautiful and characteristic. After all, the obelos is generally attached to lines of amplification and poetic ornament; which could be dispensed with, and yet leave the sense not vitally mutilated. But we may quote Aristarchus as a witness, on the whole, to the substantial soundness of the text. For it is plain that the affirmation of all his doubts would still leave us with the substance of the Iliad as it is; while it seems that the judgment of mankind, or rather its feeling, which in such a matter is worth more than its judgment, has refused to go as far as he did, for his doubts or adverse verdicts are recorded, but the lines and passages remain, are still read and taught as Homer, and are not pretended to be distinguishable by any broad mark of intrinsic inferiority. It is not meant that the soundness of each line has been considered and affirmed to be free from doubt, but that it has been felt that, while clear discrimination in detail was impracticable, retention was, on the whole, safer than exclusion. Nor is this because a principle of blind credulity has prevailed. On the contrary, the same judgment, feeling, or instinct, be it what it may, of civilised man, which has found it safest to adhere to the traditional text of Homer, has likewise thought it safest to rule the case of authorship adversely as to the Hymns. Under all the circumstances, I find no difficulty in understanding such accounts as that which tells us that the inquiry, which is the best edition of Homer? was met with the answer, ‘the oldest;’—or such a passage as that of Lucian,87 who introduces Homer in the Shades, declaring that the ἀθετούμεναι στίχες, the suspected and rejected verses, were all his; whereupon, says Lucian, I recognised the abundant frigidity of the school of Zenodotus and Aristarchus. This is in an ironical work; but ironical works are often used as the vehicles of real opinions.

The Venetian Scholiast is full of familiar references to the different editions of the text of the Iliad, as being standards perfectly well known; and he thus exhibits to us, in a considerable degree, the materials which the Alexandrian critics found existing, and with which they went to work upon that poem.

The multitude of editions (ἐκδόσεις) which they had before them, were partly state editions (αἱ πολιτικαὶ, αἱ κατὰ πόλεις, αἱ διὰ τῶν πόλεων, αἱ ἀπὸ τῶν πόλεων), and partly those due to private care (οἱ κατ’ ἄνδρα). These latter seem to have obtained the name in two ways. The first was, when it was taken from particular editors who had revised the text, such as Antimachus (contemporary with Plato), Callimachus, and, above all, Aristotle, who prepared for Alexander the Great the copy ἐκ νάρθηκος, and, again, the edition of Zenodotus, that of Aristophanes, and the two separate editions of Aristarchus, all of the Alexandrian school; or else they were named from the persons who possessed them, and for whom they had been prepared by the care of learned men. Among such possessors was Cassander, king of Macedonia.

The existence of these State editions is a fact full of meaning. It appears to show nothing less than this, that the text was under the charge of the public authorities in the several States. We have particular names for six of these editions through the Venetian Scholiast—those of Marseilles, Chios, Cyprus, Crete, Sinope, Argos. On beholding this list, we are immediately struck by the fact that while it contains names from the far East, like Sinope, and far West, like Marseilles, it does not contain one name of a city in Greece Proper, except Argos, and that a city having perhaps less communion than almost any other considerable place with Greek literature in general. We ask why do not Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Corinth, why do not Syracuse and the great Greek towns of Sicily and Italy, appear with their several Homeric texts? The most likely answer appears to be, not that these six enumerated cities were more distinguished than others by the carefulness of their provisions for the safety of the Homeric text, but that for some reason, possibly from their lying less within the circle of Greek letters at large, they still retained each their particular text, whereas an approximation had been made to a common text,—of which the cities most properly Greek in general availed themselves. For sometimes there are certain signs supplied in the Scholia of a common text prevailing in the State or national, and another in the private editions, and this without reference to the six cities above mentioned. In the supposition of such a tendency to divaricate, there is nothing beyond likelihood; for private editors would be more free to follow their own judgments or conjectures, whereas the public curators would almost, as a matter of course, be more rigidly conservative. At any rate, there are traceable indications before us to this effect; for the Scholiast cites for particular readings—

αἱ ἐκ τῶν πόλεων, xxi. 351.
αἱ ἀπὸ πόλεων, xxii. 51.
αἱ ἀπὸ τῶν πόλεων, xix. 386.

and on the other hand—

αἱ κατ’ ἄνδρα, xxii. 103.

as well as in other places, τινὲς τῶν πολιτικῶν (e. g. xxiv. 30), and αἱ πλείους τῶν κατ’ ἄνδρα (xxiii. 88). It is therefore likely that there was a national text, approximating to uniformity, and used in common by those cities, the principal ones of Greece, which are not quoted as having had texts of their own; for there is no reason, that I am aware of, to suppose that the phrases αἱ πολιτικαὶ, and the rest of those equivalent to it, are confined to the six editions. Now, while the six State editions indicate a care probably dating from very early times for the soundness of the text, the common State recension, if, as appears probable, there was one, indicates a gradual convergence of critical labours and of the public judgment in the generality of those States, of which the people had the oldest, strongest, and most direct interest in the Homeric poems.

There is a third form of common text, less perfect than either of the others, of which abundant traces are found. We find mention of the editions or copies called αἱ κοιναὶ, αἱ δημοτικαὶ, αἱ δημώδεις, and they are sometimes described collectively, as on Iliad ii. 53, ἐν δὲ ταῖς κοιναῖς ἐγέγραπτο καὶ τῇ Ζηνοδοτείῳ, βουλήν. Sometimes the greater part of these κοιναὶ or δημώδεις have a particular reading. They all, of all classes, varied more or less, and are distinguished according to their merits, as φαυλαὶ, εἰκαιότεραι, μέτριαι, χαριέσταται. These ordinary or public (not national) editions, prepared for sale in the open book-market, were probably founded, in the main, on the national text, but being intended for general sale, and not prepared by responsible editors, they were ordinarily inferior. This Venetian Scholiast was himself a critic, and wrote when the Æolic and Ionic dialects were still in use, as appears from his references to them.88

The Scholia to the Odyssey supply the names of some editions besides those which have been mentioned. One of these is the Αἰολὶς, or Αἰολική;89 another is ἡ ἐκ Μουσείου,90 which is explained to refer to the depository near the School at Alexandria; and a third ἡ Κυκλικὴ,91 which is interpreted to mean an edition in which the poems of Homer were placed in a series with those of the Cyclical authors.

On the one hand, then, it may be readily admitted that the Homeric poems were exposed, before they were reduced to writing, to the powerful and various action of disintegrating causes. Among these we may name neglect, inability to cope with the real difficulties of their transmission, the personal vanity of the rhapsodists, and the local vanity of communities. But I think we have also disclosed to us, both by the fragmentary notices of the history of the poems if taken in their collective effect, and by the state of things in and upon which the Alexandrian critics laboured, the operation of an immense amount of restorative counter-agency. All chance of our arriving at a sober judgment must depend upon our duly weighing these two sets of forces in their relation to one another. There were indeed tendencies, which may well be called irresistible, to aberrations from the traditional standard; but there were barriers also insurmountable, which seem to have confined those aberrations within certain limits. They could not proceed beyond a given point without awakening the consciousness, that Homer, the priceless treasure of Greece, and perhaps the first source of its keener consciousness of nationality, was in danger of being disfigured, and deformed, and so lost; and that sense, when once awakened, without doubt generated such reactions as we find exemplified in the proceedings of Pisistratus.

We may indeed derive directly, from the force of the destroying element, when viewed in detail, the strongest proof that there must have been an original standard, by recurrence to which its ravages could from time to time be repaired. For if that element had worked without such means of correction, I do not see how we could now have been in possession of an Iliad and an Odyssey. As with regard to religions after they are parted from their source, the tendency would have been to continually-increasing divergence. The dissimilarities arising from omission, alteration, and interpolation, would have grown, so as to embrace larger and larger portions of the poems, and at this day, instead of merely questioning this or that line in a few places, and comparing this with that reading, we should have been deliberating among a dozen Iliads and a dozen Odysseys, to discover which were the true.

If, then, it be said that the proceedings of Pisistratus or of Solon, bear testimony not to the soundness but to the incessant corruption of the text, my answer is, they bear witness to its corruption, just as the records of the repairs of Westminster Abbey might be said, and truly said, to bear testimony to its disrepair. That partial and local faults, and dislocations, would creep in, is as certain as that wind and weather act upon the stoutest fabric: but when we read of the repairs of a building, we infer that pains were taken to make it habitable; and when we read of the restorations of Homer, we perceive that it was an object of public solicitude to keep the poems in a state of soundness. As, indeed, the building most used will cæteris paribus require the most frequent repairs, so the elementary causes of corruption, by carelessness, might operate most powerfully in a case where the poet might be recited by every strolling minstrel at a local festivity: but it is also clear that in these very cases there would be the greatest anxiety to detect and to eliminate the destructive elements, when once they were seen to be making head. But, in truth, the analogy of a building does not represent the case. Edifices are sometimes disfigured by the parsimony of after-times: but there was no time, so far as we know, when Greece did not rate the value of Homer more highly than the cost of taking care of him. Again, the architects of degenerate ages think, as Bernini did of Michael Angelo, that they can improve upon their designs: but the name of no Greek has been recorded who thought he could improve upon Homer, and the vanity of the nameless was likely to be checked by their companions and competitors.

We have principally had in view the question, whether Homer was, in a peculiar degree, guarded against any profound and radical corruption which might grow out of unchecked carelessness; but the result will be not more unfavourable, if we ask how did he stand in regard to the other great fountain-head of evil, namely, falsification with a purpose? Now, the fact, that in any given case provision is made for jealous custody against any attack from without, affords no proof, or even presumption, against the subsistence of destroying causes within. But the Greeks, as a nation, had no motive to corrupt, and had every motive to preserve the text of Homer. His national office and position have been admirably expressed by Statius, in verses on the Trojan expedition:—

          Tum primùm Græcia vires
Contemplata suas: tum sparsa ac dissona moles,
In corpus vultumque coït92.

His works were the very cradle of the nation; there it first visibly lived and breathed. They were the most perfect expression of every Greek feeling and desire: in the rivalry between the Hellenic race and the (afterwards so called) βάρβαροι of Asia, they gave, in forms the most effective and the most artful, everything worth having to the former, and left the later Greek nothing to add. What void to be filled could even vanity discover, when so many Greek chieftains, inferior, in a degree never measured, to Achilles, were, nevertheless, each of them, too strong for the prince of Trojan warriors?

But it may perhaps be replied that, even supposing that collective Greece could gain nothing by corrupting Homer, yet the relative distribution of honour among the principal States might be affected to the profit of one and the prejudice of another. Now it is plain that, in this delicate and vital point, the sectional jealousies of the Greeks would afford the best possible security to the general contents of the text: something of the same security that the hatred of the Jews and the Samaritans supplied, when they became rival guardians of the books of the Old Testament. Argos, deeply interested for Diomed, and Lacedæmon for Menelaus, and both for Agamemnon, were watchmen alike powerful and keen against Athens, if she had attempted to obtain for herself in the Iliad a place at all proportioned to her after-fame. There were numerous parts of Homer’s Greece, both great and small, that fell into subsequent insignificance, such as Pylos, Ithaca, Salamis, Locris: the relative positions of Thessaly and Southern Greece were fundamentally changed in the historic times. But all, whether they exulted in the longlived honours of their States, or whether they fondly brooded on the recollections of former fame, were alike interested in resisting interlopers who might seek to trespass for their own advantage, as well as in the general object of preserving the priceless national monument from decay. Nor is there any room to suppose, that these questions of primeval honour were indifferent to the later Greeks. The citation from the Catalogue by the Athenian envoys before Gelon in Herodotus (to take a single instance), affords conclusive proof to the contrary: and, even so late as in the day of Pausanias, he tells us that Argolis and Arcadia were the States, which even then were still keenly disputing with Athens the palm of autochthonism.

It, therefore, appears to me that the presumptions of the case are on the whole favourable, and not adverse, to the general soundness of the Homeric text.

I confess myself to be very greatly confirmed in this view of the presumptions, by the scarcely measurable amount of internal evidence which the text supplies to substantiate its own integrity. Almost the whole of the copious materials which recent writers have accumulated to prove the unity and personality of the author, is available to show the soundness of the text. The appeal need not be only to the undisturbed state of the main strata of the poems, the consistent structure and relations of the facts; the general corpus of the poems might have been sound, and yet a bad text would, when subjected to a very searching ordeal on the minutest points, have revealed a multitude of solecisms and errors: but, instead of this, the rigid application of the microscope has only shown more clearly a great perfection in the workmanship. The innumerable forms of refined and delicate coincidence in names and facts, in the use of epithets, the notes of character, the turn of speeches and phrases, and the like, are so many rills of evidence, which combine into a stream of resistless force, in favour of that text which has been found so admirably, as a mirror, to reflect the image and the mind of Homer, and which, like a mirror, could not have reflected it truly unless it had itself been true.

Indeed, I must proceed a step further; and admit that the arguments ab extra, which I have here put forward respecting the historic aims of the poet, his proximity in time to his subject, and the probable soundness of the text, are rather answers to objections, than the adequate materials of affirmative conviction.

After having myself tested the text as to its self-consistency and otherwise, in several thousand places, I find scarcely one or two places in each thousand, where it seems to invite expurgation in order to establish the consistency of its contents. The evidence on which I really place reliance is experimental evidence: and that I find in the poems, accumulated to a degree which no other human work within my knowledge approaches. I do not presume to hope more than that the more remote and general arguments, which have now been used, may assist in removing preliminary barriers to the consideration of the one cardinal and paramount argument, the text itself and its contents.

And here a brief reference must be made to the scepticism in miniature which has replaced the more sweeping incredulity of Wolf and his school. Editors of great weight, refusing to accompany even the Chorizontes in separating the authorship of the poems, nevertheless freely condemn particular passages. I do not deny that there are various passages, of which the genuineness is fair matter for discussion. But I confess that I find such grounds of excision, as those commonly alleged by critics recommending it, very indeterminate, and of a nature to leave it doubtful where their operation is to stop. They generally involve arbitrary assumptions either of construction or of history, or the application of a more rigid and literal rule of consistency than poetry either requires or can endure, or else the capital error, as I cannot but consider it, of bringing Homer to be tried at the bar of later and inferior traditions. And there is a want of common principles, a general insecurity of standing ground, and an appearance of reforming Homer not according to any acknowledged laws of criticism, but according to the humour of each accomplished and ingenious man: which, in a matter of this weight, is no sufficient guarantee. I therefore follow in the line of those, whose recommendation is to draw every thing we can out of the present text; and to see how far its contents may constitute a substantive and consistent whole, in the various branches of information to which they refer. When we have carried this process as far as it will bear, we may find, first that many or some of the seeming discordancies are really embraced within a comprehensive general harmony, and secondly that with a fuller knowledge of the laws of that harmony we may ourselves be in a condition at least of less incapacity to pronounce what is Homeric and what is not. I will only say that were I to venture into this field of criticism, I should be governed less than is usual by discrepancies of fact often very hastily assumed; and much more than is usual by any violence done to the finer analogies of which Homer is so full, and by departures from his regular modes of thought, feeling, and representation.