HOMER is merely a name for the unknown authorship of the 'Iliad) and the 'Odyssey,' the two noble epics that stand at the beginning of Greek literature. Poems so exquisite can not really be a beginning either in• thought, language or metre. They presuppose a com plex evolution of legend and a long apprentice ship to the poetic art. But for our knowledge they are still a beginning. We know that •the work of Homer is the most admirable product of human poetry" (Sainte-Bettye); that "the 'Iliad' is the most important poetical monu ment existing" (Matthew Arnold) ; that "the 'Odyssey' is the only long poem that is never dull' (Lowell; that for the teaching and preaching of English literature Homer ranks with Shakespeare and the Authorized Version (Quiller-Couch). But of Homer himself we know nothing save what we deduce from the poems and infer from their descriptions of the Aoidos or bard. The Greeks themselves knew nothing. The eight Greek lives that fill 49 pages of Westermann's Witarum Scriptores' are manifestly late inventions. They are de velopments of anecdotes, old epigrams and pas sages in the hymns attributed to Hence come the patronymic names Melesigenes and Maeonides, the tale of the seven cities that claimed the honor of his birth, "where living Homer begged his daily bread," the conception of the poet as the blind old bard of Scio's rocky isle (Chios), the legend of his poetical contest with Hesiod and of his suicide because of failure to answer the fisherman's riddle, the tradition of a guild, clan or family of "Homerids° who transmitted the poems to posterity.
All older Greek poetry is reminiscent of Homeric language and phrasing, and there is a sense in which all Greek literature and civili zation not to say all European civilization flow from this fountain-head. The earliest mention of Homer's name occurs in the complaint of the philosophic poet, Xenophanes of Colophon, that Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods actions that would he shameful in men. The historian Herodotus, the first extant prose writer to name and discuss Homer, says that he lived 'about four hundred years before my time," i.e., about 850 B.C. This is consonant with the fact that the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey' speak ing of Achieans, Danaans and Hellenes practi cally ignore the historical division of the Greeks into Dorians, Ionians and lEolians and know nothing of the "return of the Heraclidx" and the Ionian colonization of Asia Minor with which the history of Greece begins. Back of thi. historical Greece the new archaeology and the spade of Schliemann and Dorpfeld have re vealed the so-called Mycenaean civilization of Mvcenx, Tiryns, Hissarlik (Troy) and many other sites, and the discoveries of Sir Arthur Evans and others in Crete have carried the hypothetical history of "..Egean" or "Minoan" civilization back to 2000 B.c. These discoveries have added enormously to the interest of the Homeric poems as documents. The civiliza tion portrayed so minutely in the poems and that reconstructed by "Mycenology,* though closely related are not identical. Their precise relation is still undetermined. The immense literature of speculation on this subject, includ ing such delightful romances as Professor Murray's 'Rise of the Greek Epic' and Walter Leaf's 'Homer and History,' leave the Homeric problem precisely where Matthew Arnold found it in 1860. "These are questions which have been discussed with learning, with ingenuity, nay with genius . . but there really exist no data for determining them." The English reader will find all the facts and the German bibliog raphy in Seymour's 'Life in the Homeric Age) (London and New York 1907), and the most reasonable argumentative discussion of the facts and theories in Andrew Lang's three books, 'Homer and the Epic,' 'The World of Homer,' 'Homer and His Age.' Jebb's little
'Homer' though now somewhat out of date is still an admirable summary. Another type of speculation about Homer combines critical analysis of the poems with the ancient tradi tion of their collection, arrangement or recita tion at a later date than their composition. Passages in Cicero, the Pseudo-Platonic Hip parchus, and Diogenes Laertius speak vaguely of some regulation of the order of the
recitations of Homeric poetry
the Panathenaic festival by Peisistratus or Solon or Hipparchus. The literature of the modern Homeric question beginning with Wolf's famous 'Prolegomena' (1795) interprets this to mean that the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey' were late compilations of traditional ballad or epic material, and seeks to confirm this notion by disintegrating analysis of the defects in the plot of the poems and the inconsistencies be tween their parts. The blown bubble of Wolf's reputation is punctured in Victor Berard's !Un mensonge de la science allemande' (Paris 1917). But apart from the personality of Wolf the entire speculative literature of the Homeric question is a gigantic bluff of modern scholas ticism. It can be defended only as alchemy or scholasticism are approved, on the ground that the by-products of so great an intellectual ef fort have been suggestive and interesting. Neither the facts nor the arguments of any one of the 213 or 30 most prominent books of this literature will endure critical scrutiny. This so-called science always breaks down when challenged by a competent scholar who knows the texts, as may be seen, for example, in many articles published in Classical Philology in the past 10 years. When Huxley enumerated in a list of the achievements of science the fact that °the unity of authorship of the 'Iliad> was sue cessftilly assailed by scientific criticism, he was dogmatizing in dependence on authority about matters which he had net tested and which have now failed to stand the test. There is to-day neither proof nor preponderant probability that the 'Iliad> and the 'Odyssey> are not in. the main the work of one supreme prehistoric Greek poet. The 'Odyssey' as we have it is the best constructed long poem in existence, and the 'Iliad> even if we concede the long re tarding digression in Books II—XI to be a flaw is at least as well constructed as the VEneicl) or Paradise Lost.' The Homeric poems are doubtless °traditional books." So are Shakes. peare's plays, and there is no presumption that Homer followed his sources more closely than Shakespeare followed North's Plutarch or Lodge's Rosalind. The differences between the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey) are less than those between the earliest and the latest poems of Tennyson and Goethe. And while it may be true that in Augustan ages great poets come in clusters there is no example in literature of
poems so great and so like by different authors. The wise student of literature, then, will not waste his time on these idle speculations but will endeavor by loving study of the poems themselves to appreciate their unique combina tion of noble literary art with the charm of an earlier, simpler and more natural humanity. Consult Arnold, Matthew, 'On Translating Homer' ; Pope's Preface to his Translation; Shorey, 'Introduction to edition of Pope's Homer' • Mackail, 'Lectures on Greek Poetry' ; Lang,