HOMIER, the greatest name in the history of epic poetry, and who stands as high in that department as Shakespeare does in the drama, has come down to ns in modern times unfortunately as little better than a name, and presents materials for biography as scanty as those which he offers for criticism are rich. We are not, however, forced to go to such lengths of doubt in his case as Aristotledid in the case of Orpheus, deny ing that such a man ever existed; for though the Germans, since the days of Heyne, Wolf, and Niebuhr, have indulged themselves in every variety of historical skepticism, and reduced Homer, as well as Cadmus and Hercules, to mere "symbols," the more sober genius of British criticism, with which the moderate views of the best later Ger mans coincide, has pronounced an almost unanimous verdict in favor of the historical reality of the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Not that any reliance is to be placed on the details of the old Greek lives of Horner, which are manifestly fictitious; but the internal evidence of the poems themselves leads to the belief in an authorship such as agrees substantially with the kernel from which these very ancient legendary traditions were developed. The central fact in which all these traditions agree is that the author of these poems was an Asiatic Greek; and though other places are named, the greatest amount of legendary evidence clearly points to Smyrna as the city which had the honor of giving birth to the father of epic poetry. The dialect in which the Iliad and Odyssey are written—the Ionic—is the very variety of Greek which was afterwards used in the same region by Herodotus, the father of history, and by Hippocrates, the first and great: est of Greek physicians; and the allusions to natural.Thenomena, especially the fre quest mention of the strong n.w. wind blowing from Thrace, plainly indicate the w. coast of Asia Minor as the familiar residence of the poet. The chronology of the Homeric poems, both as respects the great central event which they celebrate—the Trojan war—and the age of the poet himself, is much more doubtful; but it is quite cer tain that Homer lived considerably before the recognition of a regularly received record of dates among the Greeks—that is, before the year 770 u.c., the commencement of the calculation by Olympiads. The date given by Herodotus for the age of Homer-400 years before his own time; that is, about 850 n.c.—is probable enough; but considering the entire want of any reliable foundation for chronology in those early times, we must not seek an accuracy in this matter beyond that which was attained by the Greeks themselves, and allow a free margin of at least 200 years from the time of Solomon (1000 B.c.) downwards, during which the singer of the Iliad and Odyssey may have flourished. To throw hint further back than the earliest of these dates would be incon sistent at once with the historical elements its the midst of which his poems move, and with the style of the language which he uses; for this exhibits a luxurious freedom, a rich polish, and an exquisite euphony, which remove it far from that roughness and clumsiness which is wont to characterize languages in their earliest stage of literary development. The Ionic dialect used by Homer is, in fact, a highly cultivated shoot of the old Hellenic stock. and which was in the poet's hands so perfect for the highest poetical purposes as to have remained the model for the epic style during the whole period of the poetical literature of the Greeks.
In endeavoring to form a correct estimate of time position of Homer as a poet, the primary fact from which we must start is that he was not the epic poet of a literary age—like Virgil among the Romans, Tasso among the Italians, or Milton among our selves—but he was decidedly and characteristically an aoidos, or minstrel, a character well known to us from our own mediaeval literature, both in other shapes, and specially as it has been presented to us by the kindred genius of sir Walter Scott. That there is an essential and vital generic distinction between the popular minstrel of an age when books are either not known or little used, and' the cultivated poet of an age which rejoices in all sorts of libraries, and possesses a special class of literary readers, admits of no doubt. The conditions of the work to be done being different, the work itself
cannot possibly be the same. It is quite certain, however, that the great majority of the critics and translators of Homer in this country have not recognized this distinction. The consequence is that they strike an entirely false note, and blow the seraphic trump of Milton when they should be content to take a plain shepherd's pipe in their hands. These critics and translators are no doubt actuated by the very noble desire of redeem ing the author of two such noble poems as the _Wad and the Odyssey from the vulgar fellowship of wandering minstrels and ballad-mongers; but however high the genius of Homer unquestionably soared above the best of the mediaeval ballads to which the English ear is accustomed, it is quite certain both that the materials out of which his great poems were composed were nothing but such popular ballads and tales asdelighted our forefathers before the invention of printing, and that the spirit and tone of the Homeric epos is distinguished from that of the literary epos or epos of culture precisely by those characteristics which distinguish our old ballads from the poetry of worth and Tennyson. Of modern poets, the one who possessed the greatest relation ship to the genuine old minstrel poets was sir Walter Scott; but even in his poetry many peculiarities can be pointed opt which mark the literary writer of a later age. as distinguished from the popular singer of a people's boyhood and lusty youth. In order to understand Homer, therefore, we must look on him as the culmination of the min strel or ballad poetry, in the shape of the minstrel epos; a grand combination of pop ular ballad materials and ballad tone, elevated to the highest pitch of which it is capable. with the architectural form and structure of the epos. To the recognition of this trne character of the I fomeric poems, the present age has been led mainly by the adventu rous and suggestive criticism of the celebrated scholar, Frederick Augustus Wolf. This distinguished German, originally a professor in Halle, afterwards in Berlin. published in the year 1795 the prolegomena to a new recension of the text of Homer, in which he maintained the extreme skeptical view already alluded to, according to which the Iliad is no proper epic poem in the sense that time _eRneid and Paradise Lost are so, but only a skillful compilation of popular ballads, originally separate, and of whose separate exist ence the sharp-eyed critic can now easily adduce satisfactory proof. Now, this theory, commonly called after its author, the Wolfian theory, and which has found, and still finds, not a few most ingenious supporters in Germany, contains an important element of truth, which has too often been summarily rejected, along with the error which it promulgates. It is not credible that poems pervaded by such a wonderful unity of tone and plan as the Iliad, manifestly also inspired by a genius of the highest order, should be resolvable into the mere patchwork of skillful compilers; but it is an important truth to announce that the materials of Homer's poetry were not invented by himself, hut taken up from the living traditions of time people to whom he belonged, and that ever in the grand unity to which his genius has subjected them, their original popular tone and spirit is preserved in a fashion which characteristically distinguishes them from all epic poetry of the literary ages. There can be no doubt that the merits, of Wolf in this regard will soon be as uniVersaV recognized in every other country as they have long been in Germay; but, in the mean time, it is to be lamented that of those who have written most largely on the subject, neither col. M ure nor Mr. Gladstone has been aide to exhibit to English readers the true golden mean in this matter between the extrava gance of the ult•a-Woltians and the falsetto of the anti-Wolfian critics and translators. Among the Germans, Weleker, Nitsch, and K. 0. MfiIler may be named as presenting the best models of judicious and well-balanced criticism in this slippery domain.