The Iliad (tr. Pope) | Page 9

than one as to which we may
appeal to any of our readers that happened some twenty years ago to visit the town of
Stirling, in Scotland. No such person can have forgotten the poor, uneducated man Blind
Jamie who could actually repeat, after a few minutes consideration any verse required
from any part of the Bible--even the obscurest and most unimportant enumeration of
mere proper names not excepted. We do not mention these facts as touching the more
difficult part of the question before us, but facts they are; and if we find so much
difficulty in calculating the extent to which the mere memory may be cultivated, are we,
in these days of multifarious reading, and of countless distracting affairs, fair judges of
the perfection to which the invention and the memory combined may attain in a simpler

age, and among a more single minded people?--Quarterly Review, _l. c.,_ p. 143, sqq.
Heeren steers between the two opinions, observing that, "The Dschungariade of the
Calmucks is said to surpass the poems of Homer in length, as much as it stands beneath
them in merit, and yet it exists only in the memory of a people which is not unacquainted
with writing. But the songs of a nation are probably the last things which are committed
to writing, for the very reason that they are remembered."-- _Ancient Greece._ p. 100.] 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."
The loss of the digamma, that crux of critics, that quicksand upon which even the acumen
of Bentley was shipwrecked, seems to prove beyond a doubt, that the pronunciation of
the Greek language had undergone a considerable change. Now it is certainly difficult to
suppose that the Homeric poems could have suffered by this change, had written copies
been preserved. If Chaucer's poetry, for instance, had not been written, it could only have
come down to us in a softened form, more like the effeminate version of Dryden, than the
rough, quaint, noble original.
"At what period," continues Grote, "these poems, or indeed any other Greek poems, first
began to be written, must be matter of conjecture, though there is ground for assurance
that it was before the time of Solon. If, in the absence of evidence, we may venture upon
naming any more determinate period, the question a once suggests itself, What were the
purposes which, in that state of society, a manuscript at its first commencement must
have been intended to answer? For whom was a written Iliad necessary? Not for the
rhapsodes; for with them it was not only planted in the memory, but also interwoven with
the feelings, and conceived in conjunction with all those flexions and intonations of voice,
pauses, and other oral artifices which were required for emphatic delivery, and which the
naked manuscript could never reproduce. Not for the general public--they were
accustomed to receive it with its rhapsodic delivery, and with its accompaniments of a
solemn and crowded festival. The only persons for whom the written Iliad would be
suitable would be a select few; studious and curious men; a class of readers capable of
analyzing the complicated emotions which they had experienced as hearers in the crowd,
and who would, on perusing the written words, realize in their imaginations a sensible
portion of the impression communicated by the reciter. Incredible as the statement may
seem in an age like the present, there is in all early societies, and there was in early
Greece, a time when no such reading class existed. If we could discover at what time
such a class first began to be formed, we should be able to make a guess at the time when
the old epic poems were first committed to writing. Now the period which may with the

greatest probability be fixed upon as having first witnessed the formation even of