αἱ πλείους τῶν κατ’ ἄνδρα (xxiii. 88). It is therefore likely that
there was a national text, approximating to uniformity, and used in
common by those cities, the principal ones of Greece, which are not
quoted as having had texts of their own; for there is no reason, that
I am aware of, to suppose that the phrases αἱ πολιτικαὶ, and the rest
of those equivalent to it, are confined to the six editions. Now, while
the six State editions indicate a care probably dating from very early
times for the soundness of the text, the common State recension, if,
as appears probable, there was one, indicates a gradual convergence of
critical labours and of the public judgment in the generality of those
States, of which the people had the oldest, strongest, and most direct
interest in the Homeric poems.
There is a third form of common text, less perfect than either of the
others, of which abundant traces are found. We find mention of the
editions or copies called αἱ κοιναὶ, αἱ δημοτικαὶ, αἱ δημώδεις, and
they are sometimes described collectively, as on Iliad ii. 53, ἐν δὲ
ταῖς κοιναῖς ἐγέγραπτο καὶ τῇ Ζηνοδοτείῳ, βουλήν. Sometimes the greater
part of these κοιναὶ or δημώδεις have a particular reading. They all,
of all classes, varied more or less, and are distinguished according
to their merits, as φαυλαὶ, εἰκαιότεραι, μέτριαι, χαριέσταται. These
ordinary or public (not national) editions, prepared for sale in
the open book-market, were probably founded, in the main, on the
national text, but being intended for general sale, and not prepared
by responsible editors, they were ordinarily inferior. This Venetian
Scholiast was himself a critic, and wrote when the Æolic and Ionic
dialects were still in use, as appears from his references to them.[88]
The Scholia to the Odyssey supply the names of some editions besides
those which have been mentioned. One of these is the Αἰολὶς, or
Αἰολική;[89] another is ἡ ἐκ Μουσείου,[90] which is explained to
refer to the depository near the School at Alexandria; and a third ἡ
Κυκλικὴ,[91] which is interpreted to mean an edition in which the poems
of Homer were placed in a series with those of the Cyclical authors.
On the one hand, then, it may be readily admitted that the Homeric
poems were exposed, before they were reduced to writing, to the
powerful and various action of disintegrating causes. Among these we
may name neglect, inability to cope with the real difficulties of their
transmission, the personal vanity of the rhapsodists, and the local
vanity of communities. But I think we have also disclosed to us, both
by the fragmentary notices of the history of the poems if taken in
their collective effect, and by the state of things in and upon which
the Alexandrian critics laboured, the operation of an immense amount
of restorative counter-agency. All chance of our arriving at a sober
judgment must depend upon our duly weighing these two sets of forces
in their relation to one another. There were indeed tendencies, which
may well be called irresistible, to aberrations from the traditional
standard; but there were barriers also insurmountable, which seem to
have confined those aberrations within certain limits. They could not
proceed beyond a given point without awakening the consciousness,
that Homer, the priceless treasure of Greece, and perhaps the first
source of its keener consciousness of nationality, was in danger of
being disfigured, and deformed, and so lost; and that sense, when once
awakened, without doubt generated such reactions as we find exemplified
in the proceedings of Pisistratus.
We may indeed derive directly, from the force of the destroying
element, when viewed in detail, the strongest proof that there must
have been an original standard, by recurrence to which its ravages
could from time to time be repaired. For if that element had worked
without such means of correction, I do not see how we could now have
been in possession of an Iliad and an Odyssey. As with regard to
religions after they are parted from their source, the tendency would
have been to continually-increasing divergence. The dissimilarities
arising from omission, alteration, and interpolation, would have grown,
so as to embrace larger and larger portions of the poems, and at this
day, instead of merely questioning this or that line in a few places,
and comparing this with that reading, we should have been deliberating
among a dozen Iliads and a dozen Odysseys, to discover which were the
true.
If, then, it be said that the proceedings of Pisistratus or of Solon,
bear testimony not to the soundness but to the incessant corruption
of the text, my answer is, they bear witness to its corruption, just
as the records of the repairs of Westminster Abbey might be said,
and truly said, to bear testimony to its disrepair. That partial and
local faults, and dislocations, would creep in, is as certain as that
wind and weather act upon the stoutest fabric: but when we read of
the repairs of a building, we infer that pains were taken to make it
habitable; and when we read of the restorations of Homer, we perceive
that it was an object of public solicitude to keep the poems in a
state of soundness. As, indeed, the building most used will _cæteris
paribus_ require the most frequent repairs, so the elementary causes of
corruption, by carelessness, might operate most powerfully in a case
where the poet might be recited by every strolling minstrel at a local
festivity: but it is also clear that in these very cases there would
be the greatest anxiety to detect and to eliminate the destructive
elements, when once they were seen to be making head. But, in truth,
the analogy of a building does not represent the case. Edifices are
sometimes disfigured by the parsimony of after-times: but there was no
time, so far as we know, when Greece did not rate the value of Homer
more highly than the cost of taking care of him. Again, the architects
of degenerate ages think, as Bernini did of Michael Angelo, that they
can improve upon their designs: but the name of no Greek has been
recorded who thought he could improve upon Homer, and the vanity of the
nameless was likely to be checked by their companions and competitors.
We have principally had in view the question, whether Homer was, in a
peculiar degree, guarded against any profound and radical corruption
which might grow out of unchecked carelessness; but the result will
be not more unfavourable, if we ask how did he stand in regard to
the other great fountain-head of evil, namely, falsification with a
purpose? Now, the fact, that in any given case provision is made for
jealous custody against any attack from without, affords no proof, or
even presumption, against the subsistence of destroying causes within.
But the Greeks, as a nation, had no motive to corrupt, and had every
motive to preserve the text of Homer. His national office and position
have been admirably expressed by Statius, in verses on the Trojan
expedition:--
Tum primùm Græcia vires
Contemplata suas: tum sparsa ac dissona moles,
In corpus vultumque coït[92].
His works were the very cradle of the nation; there it first visibly
lived and breathed. They were the most perfect expression of every
Greek feeling and desire: in the rivalry between the Hellenic race and
the (afterwards so called) βάρβαροι of Asia, they gave, in forms the
most effective and the most artful, everything worth having to the
former, and left the later Greek nothing to add. What void to be filled
could even vanity discover, when so many Greek chieftains, inferior,
in a degree never measured, to Achilles, were, nevertheless, each of
them, too strong for the prince of Trojan warriors?
But it may perhaps be replied that, even supposing that collective
Greece could gain nothing by corrupting Homer, yet the relative
distribution of honour among the principal States might be affected to
the profit of one and the prejudice of another. Now it is plain that,
in this delicate and vital point, the sectional jealousies of the
Greeks would afford the best possible security to the general contents
of the text: something of the same security that the hatred of the Jews
and the Samaritans supplied, when they became rival guardians of the
books of the Old Testament. Argos, deeply interested for Diomed, and
Lacedæmon for Menelaus, and both for Agamemnon, were watchmen alike
powerful and keen against Athens, if she had attempted to obtain for
herself in the Iliad a place at all proportioned to her after-fame.
There were numerous parts of Homer’s Greece, both great and small,
that fell into subsequent insignificance, such as Pylos, Ithaca,
Salamis, Locris: the relative positions of Thessaly and Southern Greece
were fundamentally changed in the historic times. But all, whether
they exulted in the longlived honours of their States, or whether
they fondly brooded on the recollections of former fame, were alike
interested in resisting interlopers who might seek to trespass for
their own advantage, as well as in the general object of preserving
the priceless national monument from decay. Nor is there any room to
suppose, that these questions of primeval honour were indifferent to
the later Greeks. The citation from the Catalogue by the Athenian
envoys before Gelon in Herodotus (to take a single instance), affords
conclusive proof to the contrary: and, even so late as in the day
of Pausanias, he tells us that Argolis and Arcadia were the States,
which even then were still keenly disputing with Athens the palm of
autochthonism.
It, therefore, appears to me that the presumptions of the case are on
the whole favourable, and not adverse, to the general soundness of the
Homeric text.
I confess myself to be very greatly confirmed in this view of the
presumptions, by the scarcely measurable amount of internal evidence
which the text supplies to substantiate its own integrity. Almost the
whole of the copious materials which recent writers have accumulated to
prove the unity and personality of the author, is available to show the
soundness of the text. The appeal need not be only to the undisturbed
state of the main _strata_ of the poems, the consistent structure
and relations of the facts; the general _corpus_ of the poems might
have been sound, and yet a bad text would, when subjected to a very
searching ordeal on the minutest points, have revealed a multitude of
solecisms and errors: but, instead of this, the rigid application of
the microscope has only shown more clearly a great perfection in the
workmanship. The innumerable forms of refined and delicate coincidence
in names and facts, in the use of epithets, the notes of character,
the turn of speeches and phrases, and the like, are so many rills of
evidence, which combine into a stream of resistless force, in favour of
that text which has been found so admirably, as a mirror, to reflect
the image and the mind of Homer, and which, like a mirror, could not
have reflected it truly unless it had itself been true.
Indeed, I must proceed a step further; and admit that the arguments
_ab extra_, which I have here put forward respecting the historic aims
of the poet, his proximity in time to his subject, and the probable
soundness of the text, are rather answers to objections, than the
adequate materials of affirmative conviction.
After having myself tested the text as to its self-consistency and
otherwise, in several thousand places, I find scarcely one or two
places in each thousand, where it seems to invite expurgation in order
to establish the consistency of its contents. The evidence on which
I really place reliance is experimental evidence: and that I find in
the poems, accumulated to a degree which no other human work within my
knowledge approaches. I do not presume to hope more than that the more
remote and general arguments, which have now been used, may assist in
removing preliminary barriers to the consideration of the one cardinal
and paramount argument, the text itself and its contents.
And here a brief reference must be made to the scepticism in miniature
which has replaced the more sweeping incredulity of Wolf and his
school. Editors of great weight, refusing to accompany even the
Chorizontes in separating the authorship of the poems, nevertheless
freely condemn particular passages. I do not deny that there are
various passages, of which the genuineness is fair matter for
discussion. But I confess that I find such grounds of excision, as
those commonly alleged by critics recommending it, very indeterminate,
and of a nature to leave it doubtful where their operation is to stop.
They generally involve arbitrary assumptions either of construction
or of history, or the application of a more rigid and literal rule
of consistency than poetry either requires or can endure, or else
the capital error, as I cannot but consider it, of bringing Homer
to be tried at the bar of later and inferior traditions. And there
is a want of common principles, a general insecurity of standing
ground, and an appearance of reforming Homer not according to any
acknowledged laws of criticism, but according to the humour of each
accomplished and ingenious man: which, in a matter of this weight,
is no sufficient guarantee. I therefore follow in the line of those,
whose recommendation is to draw every thing we can out of the present
text; and to see how far its contents may constitute a substantive and
consistent whole, in the various branches of information to which they
refer. When we have carried this process as far as it will bear, we may
find, first that many or some of the seeming discordancies are really
embraced within a comprehensive general harmony, and secondly that
with a fuller knowledge of the laws of that harmony we may ourselves
be in a condition at least of less incapacity to pronounce what is
Homeric and what is not. I will only say that were I to venture into
this field of criticism, I should be governed less than is usual by
discrepancies of fact often very hastily assumed; and much more than is
usual by any violence done to the finer analogies of which Homer is so
full, and by departures from his regular modes of thought, feeling, and
representation.
FOOTNOTES:
[42] Il. vi. 445-64; xii. 10-33; xv. 384.
[43] Heyne, Exc. ii. ad Il. Ω. sect. ii., vol. viii. p. 789; Lord
Aberdeen’s Inquiry, p. 65.
[44] In the Berlin Philosophical Transactions, 1839, and Fernere
Betrachtungen, 1843.
[45] Pindar.
[46] Exc. ii. ad Il. Ω, sect. ii. vol. viii. pp. 790, 1.
[47] Exc. ii. ad Il. Ω, sect. ii. vol. viii. pp. 790, 1.
[48] Pind. Nem. ii. 1.
[49] Joseph. contr. Ap. i. 2.
[50] Var. Hist. xiii. 14.
[51] Plut. Lyc. p. 41.
[52] Plat. Rep. x. p. 600, B.
[53] Strabo xiv. p. 946.
[54] viii. 2.
[55] Herod. v. 67.
[56] Hist. Greece, ii. 174 n.
[57] Il. v. 412-15.
[58] Il. ii. 572.
[59] Heyne, Hom. viii., seq.
[60] I. 57.
[61] In Leocritum, 104-8.
[62] Smith’s Dict. ‘Tyrtæus.’
[63] See the Homerus of Archdeacon Williams, pp. 9-11.
[64] Cic. de Or. iii. 34.
[65] Paus. vii. 26. p. 594. add Suidas in voc. Ὅμηρος. Eustath. Il. i.
1.
[66] Contra Ap. i. 2.
[67] Smith’s Dict., Art. ‘Homerus:’ and elsewhere.
[68] Ibid. from Ritschl.
[69] Hipparchus, § 4. (ii. 228.)
[70] Herod. ii. 117. iv. 32.
[71] Il. ii. 594-600.
[72] Fragm. xxxiv.
[73] Op. ii. 268-75.
[74] Hymn. Apoll. 166-73; 146-50.
[75] Schol. Pyth. vi. 4; Nem. ii. 1.
[76] Il. Α. p. 6.
[77] Heyne, viii. p. 811.
[78] Sup.
[79] Pind. Nem. ii. 1, and Strabo, xiv. i. p. 645.
[80] Plat. Phædrus, iii. 252, and Republ. B. 1.; ii. 599.
[81] Athen. iv. p. 174.
[82] Heyne, viii. 814.
[83] Plut. Apoph., p. 186 D.
[84] Xenoph. Sympos. iii. 5.
[85] Athen. xiv. p. 620.
[86] Il. ix. 458-61.
[87] Lucian, Ver. Hist. ii. 117.
[88] Villoison, Proleg. p. xxvii.
[89] Od. xiv. 280.
[90] Od. xiv. 204, and Buttmann _in loc._
[91] xvi. 195, and Buttmann _in loc._
[92] Achilleis, i. 456.
SECT. 6.--_The Place and Authority of Homer in Historical Inquiry._
The principal and final purpose, which I wish to present in the most
distinct manner to the mind of the reader, is that of securing for the
Homeric traditions, estimated according to the effect of the foregoing
considerations, a just measure of relative as well as absolute
appreciation.
It appears to me that there has prevailed in this respect a wide-spread
and long-continued error, assuming various forms, and affecting in very
different degrees, without doubt, the practice of different writers,
but so extended and so rooted, as at this stage in the progress of
criticism to require formal challenge. I mean, that it is an error
to regard and accept all ancient traditions, relating to the periods
that precede regular historic annals, as of equal value, or not to
discriminate their several values with adequate care. Above all, I
strongly contend that we should assign to the Homeric evidence a
primary rank upon all the subjects which it touches, and that we should
make it a rule to reduce all other literary testimony, because of later
origin, to a subordinate and subsidiary position.
Mere rumours or stories of the pre-historic times are not, as such,
entitled to be called traditions. A story of this kind, say in
Apollodorus, may indeed by bare possibility be older than any thing in
Homer; but if it comes to us without the proper and visible criteria
of age, it has no claim upon our assent as a truthful record of the
time to which it purports to refer. Traditions of this class only grow
to be such, as a general rule, for us, at the time when they take a
positive form in the work of some author, who thus becomes, as far as
his time and circumstances permit, a witness to them. It is only from
thenceforward, that their faithful derivation and transmission can be
relied on as in any degree probable.
Again, I cast aside statements with respect to which the poet, being
carried beyond the sphere of his ordinary experience, must, on that
account, not be presumed to speak historically; yet even here, if he is
speaking of matters which were in general belief, he is a witness of
the first class with respect to that belief, which is itself in another
sense a matter of history; and here also those, who have followed him
at a remote date, are witnesses of a lower order.
Or there may be cases, as, for instance, in the stubborn facts of
geography, where the laws of evidence compel us rudely to thrust aside
the declaration of the bard; or cases where his mode of handling his
materials affords in itself a proof that he did not mean to speak
historically, but, in the phrase of Aristotle, ἐκπληκτικῶς, or for
poetic effect.
Or again, it is conceivable, though I do not know whether it has
happened, that Homeric testimony might come into conflict, not with
mere counter-assertion, but with those forms of circumstantial evidence
which are sometimes conclusively elicited by reasoning from positive
_data_ of architecture, language, and ethnology. I claim for Homer no
exemption from the more cogent authority which may attach to reasoning
of this kind.
Clearing the question of these incumbrances, I wish to submit to
the suffrages of those, who may be more competent than myself to
estimate both the proposition and the proof, the following thesis:
that, in regard to the religion, history, ethnology, polity, and life
at large of the Greeks of the heroic times, the authority of the
Homeric poems, standing far above that of the whole mass of the later
literary traditions in any of their forms, ought never to be treated
as homogeneous with them, but should usually, in the first instance,
be handled by itself, and the testimony of later writers should, in
general, be handled in subordination to it, and should be tried by it,
as by a touchstone, on all the subjects which it embraces.
It is generally admitted that Homer is older by some generations than
Hesiod, by many than the authors of the Cyclical Poems; and older
by many centuries than the general mass of our authorities on Greek
antiquity, beginning with Æschylus and Herodotus, and coming down to
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Ælian, Pausanias,
Diogenes Laertius. Nor is it by time alone, that his superior proximity
and weight are to be measured. Of all the ages that have passed since
Homer, it may be truly said that not one has produced a more acute,
accurate, and comprehensive observer. But, above all, writing of the
heroic time, he, and he alone, writes like one who, as from internal
evidence we may confidently assert, stood within its precinct, and was
imbued from head to foot with its spirit and its associations.
It is, of course, quite possible, that in one particular or another,
Homer may be in error, and the later tradition, it is also just
possible, may be correct. But so, also, the evidence of an eye-witness
in a court of justice may be erroneous, while by chance the merest
hearsay may be true. This does not divert men from a careful
classification of evidence according to its presumptive value, where
they have purposes of utility, according to the common and limited
sense of the term, in their view. In regard to the early Greek history,
the practice has often been otherwise; partly in the works of scholars,
and yet more, as we might expect, in the more popular forms of tuition.
It has been to lump together the heterogeneous mass of traditions
embodied in the literature of a thousand years. All that the sport of
fancy and imagination had conceived--all that national, or local, or
personal vanity had suggested--all that motives of policy had forged in
history or religion--or so much of this aggregate as time has spared
to us, has been treated without any systematic recognition of the
different value of different orders of tradition. I admit that it is
towards the close of the Greek literature that we find the principal
professed inquirers into antiquity; and their aim and method may have
redressed, in great part, any inequality between themselves and writers
of the time of Thucydides or Plato. But nothing can cancel, nothing, it
might almost be said, can narrow, the enormous interval, in point of
authority, between Homer, who sang in the heroic age, and those who not
only collected their materials, but formed their thoughts, after it was
closed, and after its floating reminiscences had become subject to the
incessant action of falsifying processes.
For a length of time the temper of our ancient histories was one of
unquestioning reception. But where much was self-contradictory, all
could not be believed. Under these circumstances, it was not unnatural
that those writers who were full and systematic, should be preferred,
rather than that the labour should be undergone of gathering gold in
grains from the pages of Homer, of carefully collecting facts and
presumptions singly from the text, and then again estimating the amount
and effect of their bearings upon one another. Hence the Catalogues
of Apollodorus, or the downright assertions of Scholiasts, have
been allowed to give form to our early histories of Greece; and the
authentic, but usually slighter notices of Homer, have received little
attention, except where, in some detail or other, they might suit
the argument which each particular writer happened to have in hand.
Again, because Herodotus was by profession an historian and nothing
else (at least, I can discern no better reason), more importance
seems to be attached to his notices of prior ages than to the less
formally presented notices of Homer, who, according to the statement of
Herodotus himself, preceded him by four hundred years. I do not mean
by this remark to imply that Herodotus and Homer are particularly at
variance with one another, but only to illustrate what seems to me a
prevailing source of error.