"When we use the word Homer, we do not mean a person
historically known to us, like Pope or Milton. We mean in the
main the author, whoever or whatever he was, of the wonderful
poems called respectively, not by the author, but by the
world, the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey.' His name is
conventional, and its sense in etymology is not very different
from that which would be conveyed by our phrase, 'the author.'
… At the first dawn of the historic period, we find the
poems established in popular renown; and so prominent that a
school of minstrels takes the name of 'Homeridæ' from making
it their business to preserve and to recite them. Still, the
question whether the poems as we have them can be trusted,
whether they present substantially the character of what may
be termed original documents, is one of great but gradually
diminishing difficulty. It is also of importance, because of
the nature of their contents. In the first place, they give a
far greater amount of information than is to be found in any
other literary production of the same compass. In the second
place, that information, speaking of it generally, is to be
had nowhere else. In the third place, it is information of the
utmost interest, and even of great moment. It introduces to
us, in the very beginnings of their experience, the most
gifted people of the world, and enables us to judge how they
became such as in later times we know them. … And this
picture is exhibited with such a fulness both of particulars
and of vital force, that perhaps never in any country has an
age been so completely placed upon record. … We are …
probably to conceive of Homer as of a Bard who went from place
to place to earn his bread by his profession, to exercise his
knowledge in his gift of song, and to enlarge it by an
ever-active observation of nature and experience of men. …
It has … been extensively believed that he was a Greek of
Asia Minor. And as there were no Greeks of Asia Minor at the
time of the Trojan War, nor until a wide and searching
revolution in the peninsula had substituted Dorian manners for
those of the earlier Achaian age, which Homer sang, this
belief involves the further proposition that the poet was
severed by a considerable interval of time from the subjects
of his verse. The last-named opinion depends very much upon
the first; and the first chiefly, if not wholly, upon a
perfectly vague tradition, which has no pretence to an
historical character. … The question … has to be decided …
by the internal evidence of the poems. This evidence, I
venture to say, strongly supports the belief that Homer was an
European, and if an European, then certainly also an Achaian
Greek: a Greek, that is to say, of the pre-Doric period, when
the Achaian name prevailed and principally distinguished the
race. … Until the 18th century of our era was near its
close, it may be said that all generations had believed Troy
was actually Troy, and Homer in the main Homer; neither taking
the one for a fable, or (quaintest of all dreams) for a symbol
of solar phenomena, nor resolving the other into a multiform
assemblage of successive bards, whose verses were at length
pieced together by a clever literary tailor. … After
slighter premonitory movements, it was Wolf that made, by the
publication of his 'Prolegomena' in 1795, the serious attack.
… Wolf maintained that available writing was not known at,
or till long after, the period of their composition; and that
works of such length, not intrusted to the custody of written
characters, could not have been transmitted through a course
of generations with any approach to fidelity. Therefore they
could only be a number of separate songs, brought together at
a later date."
_W. E. Gladstone,
Homer (Literature Primers),
chapters 1-2._
{1661}
"Homeric geography is entirely pre-Dorian. Total
unconsciousness of any such event as the Dorian invasion
reigns both in the Iliad and Odyssey. … A silence so
remarkable can be explained only by the simple supposition
that when they were composed the revolution in question had
not yet occurred. Other circumstances confirm this view."
_A. M. Clerke,
Familiar Studies in Homer,
chapter 1._
"It is … in the discoveries of Dr. Schliemann that we have
the impulse which seems to be sending the balance over towards
the belief in the European instead of in the Asiatic origin of
the poems. We now know that at the very point which Homer
makes the chief royal city of Greece there did, in fact, exist
a civilisation which did, in fact, offer just the conditions
for the rise of a poetry such as the Homeric—a great city
'rich in gold,' with a cultivation of the material arts such
as is wont to go hand in hand with the growth of poetry. …
See GREECE: MYCENÆ AND ITS KINGS.
It is no longer possible to doubt that the world which the
poems describe was one which really existed in the place where
they put it. Even in details the poems have received striking
illustration from the remains of Mykenai. … It appears that
we may date the oldest part of the Iliad at least to some time
before the Dorian invasion, which, according to the
traditional chronology, took place about 1000 B. C. … But
the poems can hardly be much earlier than the invasion; for
there are various signs which indicate that the civilisation
which they depict had made some advance beyond that of which
we find the material remains in the 'shaft tombs,' discovered
by Dr. Schliemann in the Acropolis of Mykenai. And the date of
these has now been fixed by Mr. Petrie, from comparison with
Egyptian remains, at about 1150. We can therefore hardly be
far wrong, if the poems were composed in Achaian Greece, in
dating their origin at about 1050 B. C. There still remains
the question of the historical basis which may underlie the
story of the Iliad. The poem may give us a true picture of
Achaian Greece and its civilisation, and yet be no proof that
the armies of Agamemnon fought beneath the walls of Troy. But
here again the discoveries of recent years, and notably those
of Schliemann at Hissarlik, have tended on the whole to
confirm the belief that there is a historic reality behind the
tale of Troy. … The hypothesis that the Iliad and Odyssey
are the work of more than one poet … is one which has been
gaining ground ever since it was seriously taken up and argued
at length by Wolf in his famous 'Prolegomena,' just a century
ago. But it has from the first encountered strong opposition,
and is still regarded, in England at least, as the heretical
view."
_W. Leaf,
Companion to the Iliad,
introd._
"It seems clear that the author or authors of the Iliad and
Odyssey lived long before the time when Æolian, Ionian,
Dorian, were the three great tribal names of Greece, and far
from the coast on which these three names were attached to
successive portions of territory. If we are to decide the
ancient controversy about the birthplace of Homer, we must
turn away from Asia, and set ourselves to consider the claims
of three districts of Greece proper: Thessaly, the home of the
chief hero and the most ancient worship; Bœotia, the ancient
seat of the Muses, and the first in the very ancient (if not
actually Homeric) muster-roll of the ships; and Argolis, the
seat of Achæan empire."
_D. B. Monro,
Homer and the Early History of Greece
(English Historical Review, January, 1886)._
"I hold that the original nucleus of the Iliad was due to a
single Achaean poet, living in Thessaly before the immigration
which partly displaced the primitive Hellenes there. This
primary Iliad may have been as old as the eleventh century B.
C. It was afterwards brought by Achaean emigrants to Ionia,
and there enlarged by successive Ionian poets. The original
nucleus of the Odyssey was also composed, probably, in Greece
proper, before the Dorian conquest of the Peloponnesus; was
carried to Ionia by emigrants whom the conquerors drove out;
and was there expanded into an epic which blends the local
traits of its origin with the spirit of Ionian adventure and
Ionian society."
_R. C. Jebb,
The growth and influence of Classical Greek Poetry,
page 14._
_R. C. Jebb,
Homer: An Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey._
"We accept the Iliad as one epic by one hand. The
inconsistencies which are the basis of the opposite theory
seem to us reconcileable in many places, in others greatly
exaggerated. … To us the hypothesis of a crowd of great
harmonious poets, working for centuries at the Iliad, and
sinking their own fame and identity in Homer's, appears more
difficult of belief than the opinion that one great poet may
make occasional slips and blunders." As for the Odyssey, "we
have … to deal with critics who do not recognise the unity,
the marshalling of incidents towards a given end. We have to
do with critics who find, in place of unity, patchwork and
compilation, and evident traces of diverse dates, and diverse
places of composition. Thus argument is inefficient,
demonstration is impossible, and the final judge must be the
opinion of the most trustworthy literary critics and of
literary tradition. These are unanimous, as against the
'microscope-men,' in favor of the unity of the Odyssey."
_A. Lang,
Homer and the Epic,
chapters 7 and 13._
HOMERITES, The.
See ABYSSINIA: 6TH TO 16TH CENTURIES.
HOMESTEAD ACT, The.
See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1862 (MAY).
HOMILDON HILL, Battle of.
A victory for the English, under "Hotspur," over a raiding
army of the Scots, A. D. 1402. It was won almost entirely by
the English cross-bow. By some historians it is called the
Battle of Humbledon.
See SCOTLAND: A. D. 1400-1436.