152 HISTORY OF GREECE. sistratus, but merely states (what we may accept as the probable fact) that the Homeric poems were originally unwritten, and preserved only in songs or recitations, from which they were at a subsequent period put into writing: hence many of the discrepan- cies in the text. On the other hand, Cicero and Pausanias go farther, and affirm that Peisistratus both collected, and arranged in the existing order, the rhapsodies of the Iliad and Odyssey, (implied as poems originally entire, and subsequently broken into pieces,) which, he found partly confused and partly isolated from each other, each part being then remembered only in its own portion of the Grecian world. Respecting Hipparchus the son of Peisistratus, too, we are told in the Pseudo-Platonic dialogue which bears his name, that he was the first to introduce into Attica, the poetry of Homer, and that he prescribed to the rhap- sodes to recite the parts of the Panathenaic festival in regular sequence. 1 Wolf and William Muller occasionally speak as if they admit- ted something like an Iliad and Odyssey as established aggregates prior to Peisistratus ; but for the most part they represent him or his associates as having been the first to put together Homeric poems which were before distinct and self-existent compositions. And Lachmann, the recent expositor of the same theory, ascribes to Peisistratus still more unequivocally this original integration of parts in reference to the Iliad, distributing the first twenty- two books of the poem into sixteen separate songs, and treating it as ridiculous to imagine that the fusion of these songs, into an order such as we now read, belongs to any date earlier than Peisistratus. 2 be; but Wolf exaggerates when he talks of an unanimous conviction) spoke of Peisistratus as having first put together the fractional parts of the Iliad and Odyssey into entire poems. 1 Plato, Hipparch. p. 228.
- <! Doch ich komme mir bald lacherlich vor, wenn ich noch immcr die
Mciglichkeit geltcn lasse, dass unsere Ilias in dem gegenwUrtigen Zusam- memhange der bedeutenden Theile, und nicht bios der wenigen bedeutend- stcn, jemals vor der Arbeit des Pisistratus gedacht worden sey." (Lachmann, Fernere Betrachtungen (Iber die Ilias, sect, xxviii. p. 32 ; Abhandlungen Ber- lin. Academ. 1841.) How far this admission that for the few most impor- (aiit portions of the Iliad, there did exist an established order of succession prior to Pcisistratua is intended to reach, I do not know; but the language
