Homer and Classical Philology | Page 3

the most significant steps of classical philology never
lead away from the ideal antiquity, but to it; and that, just when people are speaking
unwarrantably of the overthrow of sacred shrines, new and more worthy altars are being
erected. Let us then examine the so-called Homeric question from this standpoint, a
question the most important problem of which Schiller called a scholastic barbarism.
The important problem referred to is _the question of the personality of Homer_.
We now meet everywhere with the firm opinion that the question of Homer's personality
is no longer timely, and that it is quite a different thing from the real "Homeric question."
It may be added that, for a given period--such as our present philological period, for
example--the centre of discussion may be removed from the problem of the poet's
personality; for even now a painstaking experiment is being made to reconstruct the
Homeric poems without the aid of personality, treating them as the work of several
different persons. But if the centre of a scientific question is rightly seen to be where the
swelling tide of new views has risen up, i.e. where individual scientific investigation
comes into contact with the whole life of science and culture--if any one, in other words,
indicates a historico-cultural valuation as the central point of the question, he must also,
in the province of Homeric criticism, take his stand upon the question of personality as
being the really fruitful oasis in the desert of the whole argument. For in Homer the
modern world, I will not say has learnt, but has examined, a great historical point of view;
and, even without now putting forward my own opinion as to whether this examination
has been or can be happily carried out, it was at all events the first example of the
application of that productive point of view. By it scholars learnt to recognise condensed
beliefs in the apparently firm, immobile figures of the life of ancient peoples; by it they
for the first time perceived the wonderful capability of the soul of a people to represent
the conditions of its morals and beliefs in the form of a personality. When historical
criticism has confidently seized upon this method of evaporating apparently concrete
personalities, it is permissible to point to the first experiment as an important event in the
history of sciences, without considering whether it was successful in this instance or not.
It is a common occurrence for a series of striking signs and wonderful emotions to
precede an epoch-making discovery. Even the experiment I have just referred to has its
own attractive history; but it goes back to a surprisingly ancient era. Friedrich August

Wolf has exactly indicated the spot where Greek antiquity dropped the question. The
zenith of the historico-literary studies of the Greeks, and hence also of their point of
greatest importance--the Homeric question--was reached in the age of the Alexandrian
grammarians. Up to this time the Homeric question had run through the long chain of a
uniform process of development, of which the standpoint of those grammarians seemed
to be the last link, the last, indeed, which was attainable by antiquity. They conceived the
Iliad and the Odyssey as the creations of one single Homer; they declared it to be
psychologically possible for two such different works to have sprung from the brain of
one genius, in contradiction to the Chorizontes, who represented the extreme limit of the
scepticism of a few detached individuals of antiquity rather than antiquity itself
considered as a whole. To explain the different general impression of the two books on
the assumption that one poet composed them both, scholars sought assistance by referring
to the seasons of the poet's life, and compared the poet of the Odyssey to the setting sun.
The eyes of those critics were tirelessly on the lookout for discrepancies in the language
and thoughts of the two poems; but at this time also a history of the Homeric poem and
its tradition was prepared, according to which these discrepancies were not due to Homer,
but to those who committed his words to writing and those who sang them. It was
believed that Homer's poem was passed from one generation to another viva voce, and
faults were attributed to the improvising and at times forgetful bards. At a certain given
date, about the time of Pisistratus, the poems which had been repeated orally were said to
have been collected in manuscript form; but the scribes, it is added, allowed themselves
to take some liberties with the text by transposing some lines and adding extraneous
matter here and there. This entire hypothesis is the most important in the domain of
literary studies that antiquity has exhibited; and the acknowledgment of the dissemination
of the Homeric poems by word