The Alleged Athenian Recension of Homer
Wolf could not but confess that the Iliad, as we possess it, is an unity, better or worse; is a literary structure. How, then, did it come to be what it is, if it were the work of several authors in several ages? Wolf replies, “History speaks! The voice of all antiquity, and, on the whole, the consent of all report bears witness that Pisistratus was the first who had the Homeric poems committed to writing, and brought into that order in which we now possess them.”1
This amazing statement shows that there are classical scholars who mean, when they speak of “History,” something that no historical student means when he uses the same term. About any dealings by Pisistratus with Homer, history is mute as the grave. Not only is there no record—that is, no contemporary public inscription—testifying that Pisistratus or any other person “first had the Homeric poems arranged and committed to writing,” there is not even a hint of a reference to any tradition of this event, in the great Historians of the following century, Herodotus and Thucydides, none in Aristotle, none in Ephorus (in the fourth century B.C.), none in the remains of Aristarchus and other famous Alexandrian grammarians. History is silent even as to a rumour. We know that Dieuchidas, a Megarian historian of the fourth century, said something about its being Solon rather than Pisistratus who did something in connection with Homer. We know this from a mutilated passage in an author of the third century, Diogenes Laertius. That is all.2 Tradition from the time of Pisistratus himself to that of Cicero speaks no articulate and intelligible word as to what, according to Wolf, the voice of all antiquity declares. When we come after five centuries of historic silence to Cicero, we do not find him agreeing with Wolf that Pisistratus first had the poems of Homer committed to writing, but saying that “he is said” (by whom?) “to have been the first to have arranged, in their present order, the books of Homer, previously in disarray?”3
Cicero speaks only of what “is said.” The unvouched for report mentioned by Cicero half a milennium after the date of Pisistratus is not history, of course; is not evidence. Long before Cicero, in the fourth century, Ephorus and Heraclides Ponticus told other stories about the coming of Homer to Sparta, stories equally unhistorical. The author of the pseudo-Platonic dialogue, Hipparchus, represented the second son of Pisistratus as the first to bring Homer to Attica, and to regulate Homeric recitations. None of these writers stands for History, none of them agrees with another; they had no historical knowledge of whatever facts there may have been.
We are in presence (1) of variants of a tradition doubtless founded on fact, namely, that at an unknown date an Act was passed in Athens regulating the recitations of Homeric poetry at the Panathenaic festival; by some accounts an Act limiting the recitations to “Homeric” poetry alone; and (2) of a legend that Pisistratus, or his second son, collected and arranged in a certain order the Homeric poems. The earliest and only good evidence, says Mr. Monro, with regard to the recitation of Homer at Athens, is that of two orators two centuries later than Pisistratus, Lycurgus and Isocrates. The former said in a speech “Our fathers thought Homer such a good poet that they made a law for him alone among poets that his poems should be recited by rhapsodists at every quinquennial holding of the Panathenaea.”4 No date is given, but Lycurgus must apparently be thinking of a date prior to Tyrtaeus, as we shall see later. When Lycurgus says that the poems of Homer alone were to be recited at the festival, he is of so late a date that he probably means the Iliad and Odyssey. If the Act were made in Solon’s time, “Homer” may conceivably include all heroic epic poetry. We know nothing about it.
Isocrates5 says that the ancestors of the Athenians “desired to make Homer’s art honoured, both in contests of music (i.e. of the reciters) and in the education of the young” (Monro, Iliad, vol. i. p. 15). Still later, in a passage with an important lacuna, Diogenes Laertius says that Solon passed a law regulating the recitations,6 the very law which is attributed to Hipparchus by the author of the Dialogue of that name.7 In Sicyon also, in the sixth century, there were recitations of Homer by competing rhapsodists; they were put down by the tyrant Cleisthenes.8
Mr. Monro says that for the existence of an Athenian law about Homeric recitations, whatever the date of that law may have been, we have historical testimony. Indeed, if there were no such law, even rhetoricans of the fourth century could scarcely tell the Athenians that such a law existed. But as to its date and scope, and the name of the statesman who passed it, if any exact information had existed, perhaps there might have been some agreement among the persons who speak of it. If nothing like a History of Literature existed before the fourth century, we can expect no information. If it did exist, it was of no value to Ephorus, Heracleides, and the author of the Hipparchus. They are all at odds.
Mr. Monro says, as every man trained in historical criticism must say, “modern scholars have tried to harmonise these notices, and to assign to (the Spartan) Lycurgus (named by Ephorus), Solon (named by Diogenes Laertius),” Pisistratus, and Hipparchus their several shares in the service done to Homer. “This would be legitimate if there were reason to regard any of the notices as historical. But, in fact, they are merely mythical anecdotes, supplemented by the guesses of scholars.”9 Whatever Homeric critics may think, they will find no trained historian to dissent from Mr. Munro on those points.
Historia silet! History is mute. We only know that from an uncertain period there were quinquennial recitations of “Homer,” and Homer alone, at Athens, and that “Homer” was used in education. Beyond that all is “guesses of scholars.” These guesses vary according to the taste and fancy of the learned.
In this conclusion every one who is accustomed to historical criticism will agree with Mr. Monro. Nothing can be made out of late and contradictory statements; nothing beyond the fact that “Homer” (whatever may be meant by “Homer”) was quinquennially recited, under regulations, at Athens, and entered into public education.
Mr. A. W. Verrall, however, says: “In general, the very last thing that we get from disputants on either side is an exact construction and estimation of what, truly or falsely, is recorded about the history of Homer.” Mr. Verrall writes thus in a Quarterly review of Mr. Murray’s Rise of the Greek Epic, and of my Homer and his Age.
The questions as to what is “recorded” about “the history of Homer,” I had treated in my Homer and the Epic (pp. 35, 38, 67-70), examining the evidence, such as it is, and the opinions of Wolf, Ritschl, and others; and siding with Mr. Monro (I may add, with Blass, Meyer, Nutzhorn, Mr. T. W. Allen, and many others). In Homer and his Age (pp. 46-50), I again went over the old ground, in reference to Mr. Leaf’s changes of opinion.
Mr. Verrall writes:10 “The texts, as we have said, are not treated fairly.” Now really the texts are treated as the historian treats all texts that come into his province. The dates of the alleged events are set beside the dates of the texts concerning them; the texts are remote, contradictory, and unevidential; the best historians, and the historian who most carefully examined the popular traditions concerning Pisistratus and his sons, namely, Thucydides, say nothing about the alleged events.
Mr. Verrall also writes: “The record, such as it is, is hardly ever correctly represented. The most punctilious of scholars (Grote, for example) are in this matter not to be trusted.”11
These are severe reproaches! Mr. Monro is not mentioned: are any of his remarks unfair and untrust-worthy?
Mr. Verrall says: “We cannot but think that the ancient record about the origin of Homer suffers unfairly from certain prepossessions which all would disclaim, but which are more easily disclaimed than abandoned.”
For me, I frankly confess my own prepossessions, but consciousness of his bias is the safeguard of the historian; it compels him to make certain that he adds nothing to and takes nothing from what Mr. Verrall calls “the ancient record,” and I call “the various ancient legends.” Mr. Verrall insists that “internal evidence about the history of a book, if not controlled by record, is liable to infinitely elastic interpretation.” Certainly, but there is no possibility of “control by record” in the case of the history of the Homeric poems.
No historian can agree with Mr. Verrall that “as a matter of record and apart from inference or hypothesis, this Homer of ours... appears as an artificial product of scholarship, the result of a critical process.”12 It is he who insists on the technical term “record”; it is not pedantic, therefore, to reply that “record” there is none. By “record” Mr. Verrall seems to mean, as regards the “artificial product of scholarship,” a statement of opinion made five centuries after the alleged events.
The first testimony, or “record,” cited by Mr. Verrall has nothing to say about our Homer as “an artificial product of scholarship.” It deals merely with the legalised recitation of Homeric poetry, and of that poetry alone, at the Panathenaea. The text is that which Mr. Monro calls “the earliest evidence,” “that of the orators Lycurgus and Isocrates,” in the fourth century.
That is good evidence. Lycurgus could not speak to the Athenians of a law which, to their knowledge, did not exist. Lycurgus, in fact, had been cajoling his Athenian audience with a set of fables about their ancestors, whose patriotism and valour in pre-Homeric times he applauds. Did not Erechtheus in a war with Thrace sacrifice his own daughter in obedience to an oracle, and then defeat the invaders! For this noble action Lycurgus cites a play by Euripides, The Erechtheus!
Lycurgus next says that Athens made a law that the poems of Homer alone should be recited at the Panathenaea; and that, encouraged by the patriotism ascribed by the poet to Hector, the Athenians, in the Persian affair, were ready to die, not for their city only, but for all Hellas. Such men were the Athenians, in public and private life: then comes the story of the Spartans borrowing Tyrtaeus from Athens, and their approval of a Tyrtaean poem adapted in part from Iliad, xxii. 71 ff.
That is all. Mr. Verrall writes: “By Lycurgus this whole educational movement, and the adoption of Homer as the basis of it, is attributed to the Athenians as a people....” What Mr. Verrall says about “a revolution in the method of education not less momentous than any movement in history,”13 has, I think, but scanty warrant in the actual words of Lycurgus. It is Mr. Verrall, not Lycurgus, who compares the effect of Homer on Athens with the effect (“notorious,” as he too truly says) of the Bible upon Scotland. All this about an educational movement, however true it may be, is, I fear, “inference and hypothesis” of Mr. Verrall’s own. Lycurgus speaks of learning courageous patriotism from Homer, all the rest we have to assume; at least I cannot find it in Lycurgus.
Mr. Verrall has next to meet the charge of contradictions among the late writers who attribute to Solon, Pisistratus, and Hipparchus the law about recitations at the Panathenaea. But these texts, except the pseudo-Platonic Hipparchus, say nothing about Homer as “an artificial product of scholarship.” Mr. Verrall declares that Lycurgus and the Hipparchus say nothing about the “arrangement” of the poems, “they speak merely of adoption and compilation.”14 But Lycurgus says nothing about compilation, the Hipparchus says nothing about compilation.
The Hipparchus says, what Lycurgus does not say, “that Hipparchus, son of Pisistratus, first brought the poems of Homer to Attica, and that he obliged the rhapsodists at the Panathenaic festival to recite consecutively, so that the people might hear entire poems, and not merely passages chosen at the will of the reciter.”15
Not a word about “compilation.” The Hipparchus falls into all the errors regarding the history of the Pisistradae that are pointed out by Thucydides.16 Mr. Verrall is not lucky, he chooses a very erroneous anonymous author, and makes him speak of “compilation,” which I do not see that he mentions, and calls his “no late or dubious authority.”17
Next, the Hipparchus attributes to a man who might have been Solon’s great-grandson the law which Diogenes Laertius attributes to Solon. Mr. Verrall palliates the contradictions in a curious way. “These ascriptions have presumably the same measure of truth as the connecting of the Reformation now with one and now writh another of the princes or statesmen of the sixteenth century.”18
I do not know what historian connects the Reformation with one statesman or prince and with one only. But the texts of Mr. Verrall attribute not a religious and political movement dating, in England, from about 1370 to—?, but a single legislative Act, to several statesmen of about four generations. They are not speaking of a prolonged “educational movement,” but of one legislative Act,—about which they really know no particulars.
The correct analogy to this Act is the authorisation of a translation of the Bible in England. No historian attributes that feat to any prince but gentle King Jamie: none says that it was due to Henry VIII., Edward VI., or Elizabeth. The historian cannot assume that when Diogenes Laertius attributes the law on recitations to Solon, and the Hipparchus attributes it to the son of Pisistratus, both authorities mean only that a whole educational movement occurred in the sixth century. The existence of primary education in the Athens of the seventh and sixth centuries is proved by the multitude of inscribed vases with paintings of Homeric, Cyclic, and Attic legends; but Diogenes and the Hipparchus are speaking variously about a single legislative enactment.
Mr. Verrall next supposes that the “Homer” then recited and taught at Athens was probably the whole “Cycle” of Cyclic poems.19 This question he must settle with Mr. Murray, who, we have seen, says that the poetry selected for recitation at the Panathenaea was none but the still fluid lays of which, as I understand, our two epics are the final result; while the Cyclic poems were rejected.
Notes
1 Prolegomena, 2nd edition, 1859, p. 85.
2 See Homer and his Age, pp. 44-50.
3 De Oratore, iii. 34.
4 Leocr. p. 209.
5 Panegyr. c. 42.
6 Diog. Laert. Solon, i. 57.
7 See Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 393. 397.
8 Herodotus, v. 67.
9 Iliad, vol. i. p. 27
10 Quarterly Review, July 1908, p. 76.
11 Ibid. p. 53.
12 Quarterly Review, July 1908, p. 54.
13 Quarterly Review, July 1908, p. 55.
14 Ibid. p. 60.
15 Hipparch, p. 228 B.
16 Thucydides, vi. 57-59; Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 393.
17 Quarterly Review, p. 58.
18 Ibid. p. 58.
19 Quarterly Review, p. 60.