The Iliad (tr. Pope) | Page 8

we will detail in the words of Grote [Footnote: Hist. of Greece, vol. ii.
p. 191, sqq.]--
"Half a century ago, the acute and valuable Prolegomena of F. A. Wolf, turning to
account the Venetian Scholia, which had then been recently published, first opened
philosophical discussion as to the history of the Homeric text. A considerable part of that
dissertation (though by no means the whole) is employed in vindicating the position,
previously announced by Bentley, amongst others, that the separate constituent portions
of the Iliad and Odyssey had not been cemented together into any compact body and
unchangeable order, until the days of Peisistratus, in the sixth century before Christ. As a
step towards that conclusion, Wolf maintained that no written copies of either poem
could be shown to have existed during the earlier times, to which their composition is
referred; and that without writing, neither the perfect symmetry of so complicated a work
could have been originally conceived by any poet, nor, if realized by him, transmitted
with assurance to posterity. The absence of easy and convenient writing, such as must be
indispensably supposed for long manuscripts, among the early Greeks, was thus one of
the points in Wolf's case against the primitive integrity of the Iliad and Odyssey. By
Nitzsch, and other leading opponents of Wolf, the connection of the one with the other
seems to have been accepted as he originally put it; and it has been considered incumbent
on those who defended the ancient aggregate character of the Iliad and Odyssey, to
maintain that they were written poems from the beginning.
"To me it appears, that the architectonic functions ascribed by Wolf to Peisistratus and

his associates, in reference to the Homeric poems, are nowise admissible. But much
would undoubtedly be gained towards that view of the question, if it could be shown, that,
in order to controvert it, we were driven to the necessity of admitting long written poems,
in the ninth century before the Christian aera. Few things, in my opinion, can be more
improbable; and Mr. Payne Knight, opposed as he is to the Wolfian hypothesis, admits
this no less than Wolf himself. The traces of writing in Greece, even in the seventh
century before the Christian aera, are exceedingly trifling. We have no remaining
inscription earlier than the fortieth Olympiad, and the early inscriptions are rude and
unskilfully executed; nor can we even assure ourselves whether Archilochus, Simonides
of Amorgus, Kallinus, Tyrtaeus, Xanthus, and the other early elegiac and lyric poets,
committed their compositions to writing, or at what time the practice of doing so became
familiar. The first positive ground which authorizes us to presume the existence of a
manuscript of Homer, is in the famous ordinance of Solon, with regard to the rhapsodies
at the Panathenaea: but for what length of time previously manuscripts had existed, we
are unable to say.
"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 ensure the preservation of the poems--the unassisted memory of reciters
being neither sufficient nor trustworthy. But here we only escape a smaller difficulty by
running into a greater; for the existence of trained bards, gifted with extraordinary
memory, [Footnote: It is, indeed not easy to calculate the height to which the memory
may be cultivated. To take an ordinary case, we might refer to that of any first rate actor,
who must be prepared, at a very short warning, to 'rhapsodize,' night after night, parts
which when laid together, would amount to an immense number of lines. But all this is
nothing to two instances of our own day. Visiting at Naples a gentleman of the highest
intellectual attainments, and who held a distinguished rank among the men of letters in
the last century, he informed us that the day before he had passed much time in
examining a man, not highly educated, who had learned to repeat the whole
Gierusalemme of Tasso, not only to recite it consecutively, but also to repeat those
stanzas in utter defiance of the sense, either forwards or backwards, or from the eighth
line to the first, alternately the odd and even lines--in short, whatever the passage
required; the memory, which seemed to cling to the words much more than to the sense,
had it at such perfect command, that it could produce it under any form. Our informant
went on to state that this singular being was proceeding to learn the Orlando Furioso in
the same manner. But even this instance is less wonderful