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Some even ascribed to him several other poems-the Capture of Echalia, the Lesser Iliad, the Phokais, and the Amazonia. The title of the poem called Thebais to be styled Homeric depends upon evidence more ancient than any which can be produced to authenticate the Iliad and the Odyssey, for Kallius, the ancient elegiac poet (B.C. 640), mentioned Homer as the author of it; and his opinion was shared by many competent judges. From the remarkable description given by Herodotus of the expulsion of the Rhapsodes from Sikyon, by the despot Kleisthenes, in the time of Solon (about B.C. 580), we may form a probable judgment that the Thebais and the Epigoni were then rhapsodized at Sikyon as Homeric productions. And it is clear from the language of Herodotus that in his time the general opinion ascribed to Homer both the Cyprian Verses and the Epigoni, though he himself dissents. In spite of such dissent, however, that historian must have conceived the names of Homer and Hesiod to be nearly coextensive with the whole of the ancient epic, otherwise he would hardly have delivered his memorable judgment that they two were the framers of Grecian theogony.

That many different cities laid claim to the birth of Homer (seven is rather below the truth, and Smyrna and Chios are the most prominent among them) is well known; and most of them had legends to tell respecting his romantic parentage, his alleged blindness, and his life of an itinerant bard, acquainted with poverty and sorrow. The discrepancies of statement respecting the date of his reputed existence are no less worthy of remark; for out of the eight different epochs assigned to him, the oldest differs from the most recent by a period of 460 years.

Thus conflicting would have been the answers returned in different portions of the Grecian world to any questions respecting the person of Homer. But there was a poetical gens (fraternity or guild) in the Ionic isle of Chios, who, if the question had been put to them, would have answered in another manner. To them Homer was not a mere antecedent man, of kindred nature with themselves, but a divine or semi-divine eponymus and progenitor, whom they worshipped in their gen

tle sacrifices, and in whose ascendant name and glory the individuality of every member of the gens was merged. The composition of each separate Homerid, or the combined efforts of many of them in conjunction, were the works of Homer. The name of the individual bard perishes, and his authorship is forgotten; but the common gentile father lives and grows in renown, from generation to generation, by the genius of his self-renewing sons.

Such was the conception entertained of Homer by the poetical gens called Homeridæ or Homerids; and in the general obscurity of the whole case I lean toward it as the most plausible conception. Homer is not only the reputed author of the various compositions emanating from the gentile members, but also the recipient of the many different legends and of the divine genealogy which it pleases their imagination to confer upon him. Such manufacture of fictitious personality, and such perfect incorporation of the entities of religion and fancy with the real world, is a process familiar and even habitual in the retrospective vision of the Greeks.

It is to be remarked that the poetical gens here brought to view-the Homerids-are of indisputable authenticity. Their existence and their consideration were maintained down to the historical times in the island of Chios. If the Homerids were still conspicuous even in the days of Akusilaus, Pindar, Hellanikos, and Plato, when their positive production had ceased, and when they had become only guardians and distributers, in common with others, of the treasures bequeathed by their predecessors-far more exalted must their position have been three centuries before, while they were still inspired creators of epic novelty, and when the absence of writing assured to them the undisputed monopoly of their own compositions.

Homer, then, is no individual man, but the divine or heroic father (the idea of worship coalescing, as they constantly did in the Grecian mind) of the gentile Homerids; and he is the author of the Thebais, the Epigoni, the Cyprian Verses, the Proams or Hymns, and other poems, in the same sense in which he is the author of the Iliad and Odyssey-assuming that these various com

positions emanated, as perhaps they may, from different individuals numbered among the Homerids. But this disallowance of the historical personality of Homer is quite distinct from the question, with which it has been often confounded, whether the Iliad and the Odyssey are originally entire poems, and whether by one author or otherwise. To us the name of Homer means these two poems, and little else. We desire to know as much as can be learned respecting their date, their original composition, their preservation, and their mode of communication to the public. All these questions are more or less complicated one with the other.

Concerning the date of the poems, we have no other information except the various affirmations respecting the age of Homer, which differ among themselves (as I have before observed) by an interval of 460 years, and which for the most part determine the date of Homer by reference to some other event, itself fabulous and unauthenticated-such as the Trojan war, the return of the Herakleids, or the Ionic migration. . But the oldest dictum preserved to us respecting the date of Homer-meaning thereby the date of the Iliad and Odyssey-appears to me at the same time the most credible, and the most consistent with the general history of the ancient epic. Herodotus places Homer 400 years before himself; taking his departure not from any fabulous event, but from a point of real and authentic time. Four centuries anterior to Herodotus would be a period commencing with 800 B.C.; so that the composition of the Homeric poems would thus fall in a space between 850 and 800 B.C. We may gather from the language of Herodotus that this was his own judgment opposed to a current opinion which assigned the poet to an earlier epoch.

To place the Iliad and Odyssey at some period between 850 B.C. and 777 B.C. appears to me more probable than any other date anterior or posterior: more probable than the latter, because we are justified in believing these two poems to be older than Arktinus, who comes shortly after the first Olympiad; more probable than the former, because the farther we push the poems back, the more do we enhance the wonder of their VOL. XII.-7

preservation-already sufficiently great-down from such an age and society to the historical times.

The mode in which these poems-and indeed all poems, epic as well as lyric-down to the age (probably) of Pisistratus, were circulated and brought to bear upon the public, deserves particular attention. They were not read by individuals alone and apart, but sung or recited at festivals or to assembled companies. This seems to be one of the few undisputed facts with regard to the great poet; for even those who maintain that the Iliad and Odyssey were preserved by means of writing, seldom contend that they were read.

Those who maintain the Homeric poems to have been written from the beginning, rest their case not upon positive proofs, nor yet upon the existing habits of society with regard to poetry, for they admit generally that the Iliad and Odyssey were not read but recited and heard but upon the supposed necessity that there must have been manuscripts to insure the preservation of the poems-the unassisted memory of reciters being neither sufficient nor trustworthy. But here we escape a smaller difficulty by running into a greater; for the existence of trained bards, gifted with extraordinary memory, is far less astonishing than that of long manuscripts in an age essentially non-reading and non-writing, and when even suitable instruments and materials for the process are not obvious. Moreover, there is a strong positive reason for believing that the bard was under no necessity of refreshing his memory by consulting a manuscript. For if such had been the fact, blindness would have been a disqualification for the profession, which we know that it was not; as well from the example of Demodokus in the Odyssey, as from that of the blind bard of Chios, in the Hymn to the Delian Apollo, whom Thucydides, as well as the general tenor of Grecian legend, identifies with Homer himself. The author of that hymn, be he who he may, could never have described a blind man as attaining the utmost perfection in his art, if he had been conscious that the memory of the bard was only maintained by constant reference to the manuscript in his chest.

But what guarantee have we for the exact trans

mission of the text for a space of two centuries by simply oral means? It may be replied that oral transmission would hand down the text as exactly as, in point of act, it was handed down. The great lines of each poem-the order of the parts, the vein of Homeric feeling, and the general style of locution, and, for the most part, the true words-would be maintained; for the professional training of the rhapsode, over and above the precision of his actual memory, would tend to Homerize his mind (if the expression may be permitted), and to restrain him within the magic circle. On the other hand, in respect to the details of the text, we should expect that there would be wide differences and numerous inaccuracies; and so there really were, as the records contained in the Scholia, together with the passages cited in ancient authors, but not found in our Homeric text, abundantly show.-History of Greece, Part I., Chap. 21.

The First Part of the History of Greece, which treats of "Legendary Greece," occupies about one-eighth of the work. The Second Part, which is devoted to "Historical Greece," begins with the year 776 B. C., and extends to the end of the generation of Alexander of Macedon, about 277 B.C., a period of five centuries. At this period, says Mr. Grote, "an historian accustomed to the Grecian world as described by Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, feels that the life has departed from his subject, and with sadness and humiliation brings his narrative to a close.

THE CHARACTER OF SOLON.

The archonship of the Eupatrid Solon dates in 594 B.C., thirty years after that of Drako. The lives of Solon by Plutarch and Diogenes (especially the former) are our principal sources of information respecting this remarkable man; and while we thank them for what

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