in fragments, for the golden poet was a citizen of ours, since we Athenians founded Smyrna.” The other statements repeat these words with various minor additions, chiefly intended to explain how the poems had been reduced to this fragmentary condition, and how Peisistratus set to work to restore them. Thus all the authority for the work of Peisistratus “reduces itself to the testimony of a single anonymous inscription” (Nutzhorn p. 40). Now, what is the value of that testimony? It is impossible of course to believe that a statue of Peisistratus was set up at Athens in the time of the free republic. The epigram is almost certainly a mere literary exercise. And what exactly does it say? Only that Homer was recited in fragments by the rhapsodists, and that these partial recitations were made into a continuous whole by Peisistratus; which does not necessarily mean more than that Peisistratus did what other authorities ascribe to Solon and Hipparchus, viz. regulated the recitation.
Against the theory which sees in Peisistratus the author of the first complete text of Homer we have to set the absolute silence of Herodotus, Thucydides, the orators and the Alexandrian grammarians. And it can hardly be thought that their silence is accidental. Herodotus and Thucydides seem to tell us all that they know of Peisistratus. The orators Lycurgus and Isocrates make a great deal of the recitation of Homer at the Panathenaea, but know nothing of the poems having been collected and arranged at Athens, a fact which would have redounded still more to the honour of the city. Finally, the Scholia of the Ven. A contain no reference or allusion to the story of Peisistratus. As these Scholia are derived in substance from the writings of Aristarchus, it seems impossible to believe that the story was known to him. The circumstance that it is referred to in the Scholia Townleiana and in Eustathius, gives additional weight to this argument.
The result of these considerations seems to be that nothing rests on good evidence beyond the fact that Homer was recited by law at the Panathenaic festival. The rest of the story is probably the result of gradual expansion and accretion. It was inevitable that later writers should speculate about the authorship of such a law, and that it should be attributed with more or less confidence to Solon or Peisistratus or Hipparchus. The choice would be determined in great measure by political feeling. It is probably not an accident that Dieuchidas, who attributed so much to Peisistratus, was a Megarian. The author of the Hipparchus is evidently influenced by the anti-democratical tendencies in which he only followed Plato. In the times to which the story of Peisistratus can be traced, the 1st century B.C., the substitution of the “tyrant” for the legislator was extremely natural. It was equally natural that the importance of his work as regards the text of Homer should be exaggerated. The splendid patronage of letters by the successors of Alexander, and especially the great institutions which had been founded at Alexandria and Pergamum, had made an impression on the imagination of learned men which was reflected in the current notions of the ancient despots. It may even be suspected that anecdotes in praise of Peisistratus and Hipparchus were a delicate form of flattery addressed to the reigning Ptolemy. Under these influences the older stories of Lycurgus bringing Homer to the Peloponnesus, and Solon providing for the recitation at Athens, were thrown into the shade.
In the later Byzantine times it was believed that Peisistratus was aided by seventy grammarians, of whom Zenedotus and Aristarchus were the chief. The great Alexandrian grammarians had become figures in a new mythology. It is true that Tzetzes, one of the writers from whom we have this story, gives a better version, according to which Peisistratus employed four men, viz. Onomacritus, Zopyrus of Heraclea, Orpheus of Croton, and one whose name is corrupt (written ἐπικόγκυλος). Many scholars (among them Ritschl) accept this account as probable. Yet it rests upon no better evidence than the other.
The effect of Wolf’s Prolegomena was so overwhelming that, although a few protests were made at the time, the true Homeric controversy did not begin till after Wolf’s death (1824). His speculations were thoroughly in harmony with the ideas and sentiment of the time, and his historical arguments, especially his long array of testimonies to the work of Peisistratus, were hardly challenged.
The first considerable antagonist of the Wolfian school was G. W. Nitzsch, whose writings cover the years 1828–1862, and deal with every side of the controversy. In the earlier part of his Meletemata (1830) he took up the question of written or unwritten literature, on which Wolf’s whole argument turned, and showed that the art of writing must be anterior to Peisistratus. In the later part of the same series of discussions (1837), and in his chief work (Die Sagenpoesie der Griechen, 1852), he investigated the structure of the Homeric poems, and their relation to the other epics of the Trojan cycle. These epics had meanwhile been made the subject of a work which for exhaustive learning and delicacy of artistic perception has few rivals in the history of philology, the Epic Cycle of F. G. Welcker. The confusion which previous scholars had made between the ancient post-Homeric poets (Arctinus, Lesches, &c.) and the learned mythological writers (such as the “scriptor cyclicus” of Horace) was first cleared up by Welcker. Wolf had argued that if the cyclic writers had known the Iliad and Odyssey which we possess, they would have imitated the unity of structure which distinguishes these two poems. The result of Welcker’s labours was to show that the Homeric poems had influenced both the form and the substance of epic poetry.
In this way there arose a conservative school who admitted more or less freely the absorption of pre-existing lays in the formation of the Iliad and Odyssey, and also the existence of considerable interpolations, but assigned the main work of formation to prehistoric times, and to the genius of a great poet. Whether the two epics were by the same author remained an open question; the tendency of this group of scholars was decidedly towards separation. Regarding the use of writing, too, they were not unanimous. K. O. Müller, for instance, maintained the view of Wolf on this point, while he strenuously combated the inference which Wolf drew from it.
The Prolegomena bore on the title-page the words “Volumen I.”; but no second volume ever appeared, nor was any attempt made by Wolf himself to carry his theory further. The first important steps in that direction were taken by Gottfried Hermann, chiefly in two dissertations, De interpolationibus Homeri (Leipzig, 1832), and De iteratis Homeri (Leipzig, 1840), called forth by the writings of Nitzsch. As the word “interpolation” implies, Hermann did not maintain the hypothesis of a congeries of independent “lays.” Feeling the difficulty of supposing that all the ancient minstrels sang of the “wrath of Achilles” or the “return of Ulysses” (leaving out even the capture of Troy itself), he was led to assume that two poems of no great compass dealing with these two themes became so famous at an early period as to throw other parts of the Trojan story into the background, and were then enlarged by successive generations of rhapsodists. Some parts of the Iliad, moreover, seemed to him to be older than the poem on the wrath of Achilles; and thus in addition to the “Homeric” and “post-Homeric” matter he distinguished a “pre-Homeric” element.
The conjectures of Hermann, in which the Wolfian theory found a modified and tentative application, were presently thrown into the shade by the more trenchant method of Lachmann, who (in two papers read to the Berlin Academy in 1837 and 1841) sought to show that the Iliad was made up of sixteen independent “lays,” with various enlargements and interpolations, all finally reduced to order by Peisistratus. The first book, for instance, consists of a lay on the anger of Achilles (1-347), and two continuations, the return of Chryseis (430-492) and the scenes in Olympus (348-429, 493-611). The second book forms a second lay, but several passages, among them the speech of Ulysses (278-332), are interpolated. In the third book the scenes in which Helen and Priam take part (including the making of the truce) are pronounced to be interpolations; and so on. Regarding the evidence on which these sweeping results are founded, opinions will vary. The degree of smoothness or consistency which is to be expected on the hypothesis of a single author will be determined by taste rather than argument. The dissection of the first book, for instance, turns partly on a chronological inaccuracy which might well escape the poet as well as his hearers. In examining such points we are apt to forget that the contradictions by which a story is shown to be untrue are quite different from those by which a confessedly untrue story would be shown to be the work of different authors.
Structure of the Iliad.—The subject of the Iliad, as the first line proclaims, is the “anger of Achilles.” The manner in which this subject is worked out will appear from the following summary in which we distinguish (1) the plot, i.e. the story of the quarrel, (2) the main course of the war, which forms a sort of underplot, and (3) subordinate episodes.
| I. | Quarrel of Achilles with Agamemnon and the Greek army —Agamemnon, having been compelled to give up his prize Chryseis, takes Briseïs from Achilles—Thereupon Achilles appeals to his mother Thetis, who obtains from Zeus a promise that he will give victory to the Trojans until the Greeks pay due honour to her son—Meanwhile Achilles takes no part in the war. |
| II. | Agamemnon is persuaded by a dream sent from Zeus to take the field with all his forces. |
| His attempt to test the temper of the army nearly leads to their return. | |
| Catalogue of the army (probably a later addition). | |
| Trojan muster—Trojan catalogue. | |
| III. | Meeting of the Armies—Paris challenges Menelaus— Truce made. |
| “Teichoscopy,” Helen pointing out to Priam the Greek leaders. | |
| The duel—Paris is saved by Aphrodite. | |
| IV. | Truce broken by Pandarus. |
| Advance of the armies—Battle. | |
| V. | Aristeia of Diomede—his combat with Aphrodite. |
| VI. | —Meeting with Glaucus—Visit of Hector to the |
| (1–311) | city, and offering of a peplus to Athena. |
| (312–529) | Visit of Hector to Paris—to Andromache. |
| VII. | Return of Hector and Paris to the field. |
| Duel of Ajax and Hector. | |
| Truce for burial of dead. | |
| The Greeks build a wall round their camp. | |
| VIII. | Battle—The Trojans encamp on the field. |
