BOOKS XI-XXII OF THE ILIAD. 191 have been more or less altered or interpolated, to suit the addi* tions made to it, particularly in the eighth book. But it presents fewer difficulties than any other supposition, and it is the only means, so far as I know, of explaining the difference between one part of the Iliad and another ; both the continuity of struc- ture, and the conformity to the opening promise, -which are manifest when we read the books in the order i. viii. xi. to xxii, as contrasted with the absence of these two qualities in books ii. to vii. ix. and x. An entire organization, preconceived from the beginning, would not be likely to produce any such disparity, nor is any such visible in the Odyssey ;' still less would the result distinguish enlargement from interpolation, the insertion of a new rhapsody from that of a new line,), seems to be a sort of intermediate compromise, towards which the opposing views of Wolf, J. H. Voss, Nitzsch, Hermann, and Boeckh, all converge. Baumgarten-Crusius calls this smaller poem an Achilleis. Wolf, Preface to the Goschcn edit, of the Iliad, pp. xii-xxiii ; Voss, Anti- Symbolik, part ii. p. 234; Nitzsch, Histor. Homeri, Fasciculus i. p. 112 ; and Vorrede to the second volume of his Comments on the Odyssey, p. xxvi : "In the Iliad (he there says) many single portions may very easily be imagined as parts of another whole, or as having been once separately sung." (See Baumgarten-Crusius, Preface to his edition of W. Miiller's Homer ische Vorschulc, pp. xlv-xlix.) Nitzsch distinguishes the Odyssey from the Iliad, and I think justly, in respect to this supposed enlargement. The reasons which warrant us in applying this theory to the Iliad have no bearing upon the Odyssey. If there- ever was an Ur-Odyssee, we have no means of determining what it con- tained. 1 The remarks of 0. Miiller on the Iliad (in his History of Greek Litera- ture) are highly deserving of perusal : with much of them I agree, but there is also much which seems to me unfounded. The range of combination, and the far-fetched narrative stratagem which he ascribes to the primitive author, arc in my view inadmissible (chap. v. 5-11 : <: The internal connection of the Iliad (he observes, 6) rests upon the union of certain parts; and neither the interesting introduction, describing the defeat of the Greeks up to the burning of the ship of Protesilaus, nor the turn of affairs brought about by the death of Patroclus, nor the final pacifi- cation of the anger of Achilles, could be spared from the Iliad, when tha fruitful seed of such a poem had once been sown in the soul of Homer, and had begun to develop its growth. But the plan of the Iliad is certainly very much extended beyond what was actually necessary : and in particular, the preparatory part, consisting of the attempts on the part of the other heroes to ite for the absence of Achilles, has, it must be owned, been drawn out
