Appendix a the Catalogue
The date, purpose, and historical value of the Catalogue are matters vigorously disputed, and critics not only vary among themselves, but change their own minds, as is natural, when new facts accrue. Topographical study of the Greek mainland, and new discoveries of prehistoric sites that had been overlooked, necessarily throw new light on Homer’s conception of prehistoric Greece. Thus M. Bérard appears to have found again what learned late Greek geographers had lost, the site of Nestor’s city of Pylos.
Nestor, in Iliad, xi. 664-762,1 telling a long story about his early prowess, gives many topographical details. But he “is clearly ignorant of the geography of the western Peloponnesus,” says a critic. Here the theory is that Nestor’s story is by a late editor of the Iliad, who had read the Catalogue, picked out some places named at random, and thrown them in anywhere.2 But M. Bérard studies the topography on the spot, and finds sites which, he thinks, coincide perfectly with the topography of Nestor, and also, with that of the journey of Telemachus, in the Odyssey, to Pylos, the home of Nestor, and on to Menelaus in Sparta. It is strong corroboration that M. Bérard’s location of Pherae, where Telemachus passes the night on his way to Sparta, and of Pylos itself, makes the topography of Homer intelligible.3
But we must remember that people who deem the Iliad a thing of rags and patches, stitched on, in this case, by some ignoramus of about 540 B.C., are eager to find discrepancies everywhere; while the learned and minute French geographer was equally anxious to find proofs of Homer’s accuracy. At all events, if he is right, Nestor does not talk ignorant nonsense.
Geographical and archaeological research produce modifications of opinion, but the critical weathercock veers, less necessarily, with every wind of theory that blows from Germany. Thus Mr. Leaf, in the first edition of his Iliad (vol. i. p. 73), found nothing to prove that the Catalogue “is of late origin.” “It was considered a classical work—The Doomsday Book of Greece, at a very early date.... There seems to be no valid reason for doubting that it, like the bulk of the Iliad and Odyssey, was composed in Achaean times, and carried with the emigrants to the coast of Asia Minor.”
Nothing new has been discovered since Mr. Leaf wrote in this orthodox fashion, nothing new has arisen except the studies of M. Bérard, which, if we accept his view, confirm the accuracy of the Catalogue. But, in 1900, Mr. Leaf abandoned his earlier position.
“The whole perspective of the Catalogue,” he says, “is entirely different from that of the Iliad.” Heroes, as Niese remarks, appear in the Iliad who do nothing in that poem; but play their parts “in other portions of the Epic Cycle.” The conclusion is that “the Catalogue originally formed an introduction to the whole cycle, and was composed for that portion of it which, as worked up into a separate poem, was called the Cypria, and relates the beginning of the tale of Troy, and the mustering of the fleet at Aulis.”4 This contains much debatable matter. What the cycle was before it was “worked up into” separate poems, or whether such a nebulous cycle existed at all, we know not. I must refer the reader to Mr. Allen’s essay on the whole subject, which is too condensed to be summarised in briefer space.5 “The Catalogue was taken by Homer from its time and place in saga to his second Book and to the Troad.” I do not quite understand how a long passage in hexameters could be taken from “saga.” Mr. Allen’s critical remarks on prehistoric Greek topography and territorial divisions, are most valuable; and so is his account of the Dorian and other pretensions which wrought confusion in topographical designations. He has proved, I think, that the Catalogue is a very archaic document, which no later persons were interested in inventing, or would have been able to invent. Beyond that I am unable to go, and we must await the results of excavation on prehistoric sites in Greece. Our information as to the Cypria credits it with no Catalogue of the Achaean ships and men; but it is easy to reply that our accounts are wrong, that the authors spoke of a Cypria made up after the Catalogue was placed in the Iliad.
Notes
1 Leaf, Iliad, vol. i. pp. 465, 466.
2 Leaf, Note to Iliad, xi. 756; Iliad, ii. 615, 617.
3 Bérard, Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée, pp. 108-113.
4 Leaf, vol. i. p. 86.
5 Classical Quarterly, April 1909.