It is in the modern world that the famous Homeric Question begins, if we ignore slight anticipations by Bentley and Vico. with \Voir:. Latin Prolegomena, published in 1795. This was partly called forth by the recent publication of Venetian seholin. revealed how mu•li the true text had been debated by the critics of antiquity. Wolf also collected stray notices in anch.nt authors to the effect that Solon or Hip parehus required the rhapsodists to recite Homer in due succession or from prompting. and that. Pisistratus first reduced the scattered poems of Homer into one body. Ile inferred that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not originally composed as we have them. but. were put together out of pre existing materials. lie confirmed this view by the argument new refuted by facts) that writ ing was unknown. or at least rare, in early Greece, and that a long epic could not have been composed wit limit writing. Since Wolf's time, Laehmann. Hermann. Nitzsch. Grote, Christ, and a host of others have elaborated theories of the eomposition of the /nod. The debate between the partisans of lays stitched together and an orig inal framework expanded and interpolated often degenerated into a logomaeliy. The tendency now is toward the second hypothesis. Proof is in the nature of things unattainable.
The imitation of Homer through Vergil by Tasso. Camiles, and Milton is too large a theme for our space. The critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries elaborated rules for the cor rect epic which have been entertainingly parodied by Macaulay in his prophetic account of the 'Wellingtoniad.' Pope's translation (about 1726) long remained a classic and the model of poetical diction. It of course failed to satisfy the taste of the romantic revival at the end of the cen tury, or to Meet the demands of the new scholar ship born about the same time in Germany. Many attempt, have !well made to it Mar favor: but, despite its artificial rhetoric, it still remains for the majority of English-speaking readers the one poetical translation of Homer. The
early versions of Ilobbes and I igilby are of inter est only to professional students of literature. Chapman is praised on the faith of Keats's noble sonnet, and because of occasional spirited pas sage's and exquisite lines. ]hit the rugged rhythms, the obscurity of the syntax, the fantastic Eliza bethan comeits, and the long uninspired tracts of doggerel make him intolerable in continuous perusal. Cowper. in his blank•verse version, aimed at uniting Miltonie stateliness with fidel ity to Homeric siuuplieity, but succeeded only in being pompons and dull. Sines the publication of Matthew Arnold's classic lectures On Trans lating Homer, we have had. among others, the estimable blank-verse of Lord Derby and of Bryant. amid Way's spirited rendering in rhymed anapwst is hexameter. No definitive trans lation of Homer is possible. for every generation nitist reinterpret him in order to blend Homeric sentiment with its own in the measure demanded by its taste. Of late the majority of readers pre fer the literal prose versions in the slightly ar chaic and consciously simple English of Lang, Leaf, and :Myers (Iliad), and Butcher and Lang (Odyssey).
litnuoGRAI'lly. The needs of the English stu dent. will he best met by .lebb, Introduction to limner (Glasgow. IS87I : Lang. Homer and the Epic (London, Is93) : Seymour, Introduction to the Language and Verse of Homer ( 1889) : and Munro, Homeric Grammar (Oxford, 18911.
Good text editions arc those of Dindorf•Ilentze and railer. A good annotated (English) edition of the Iliad is that of Leaf (London, 1888), aml of the Wyss. y that of Hayman (London, 1882). The fullest Homeric lexicon is the Lexicon Ho meric:n of Ebeling (Leipzig, 1885), or in Eng lish the IIonierie Dictionary, by Iceep-Autenrieth (New York. 1891). For the general study of antiquities. : Buchholz. llo me•i•ehr Realien (2d NI., 3 vols., Leipzig, 1887I ; Ilelbig. Dus Honurische Epos (Leipzig. 18871; and Anderson•Engelmann, Pictorial it Has to Ho me• (New York. 1892). See Emc CIREEK LITERATURE.