504 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY. 



mission. Jebb ^7 is of the opinion that " it cannot be proved that the 

 Homeric poems were not committed to writing either when originally 

 composed or soon afterwards. For centuries they were known to the 

 Greek world at large chiefly through the mouth of rhapsodes. But that 

 fact is not inconsistent with the fact that the rhapsodes possessed writ- 

 ten copies. On the other hand, a purely oral transmission is hardly 

 conceivable." The judgment of Christ (p. 65) is thus expressed: 

 "Fully one hundred years before the Athenian Tyrants, the Ionic 

 books were reduced to writing, and it would truly be strange if the 

 honor of a written copy should have fallen to the lot of an iambic or 

 elegiac poet sooner than to the great national poet. Also the testi- 

 mony shows that Pisistratus made nothing more than a complete Iliad 

 and Odyssey. Probably before that time certain parts had been re- 

 duced to writing to aid the memory, as, for example, the Catalogue of 

 Ships." 



Perhaps at this point it would not be out of place to make a brief 

 excursus on stories which, for the most part, without mentioning the 

 name of Pisistratus, tell us of other men who are reported to have done 

 work of some kind in connection with the Homeric poems. Since in 

 making this excursus a chronological arrangement of evidence by 

 authors (the system I have adopted up to this point) does not seem 

 necessary or even advisable inasmuch as it would cause confusion 

 through the separation of all passages by different authors, though 

 referring to the same historical personage, I have thought it best to 

 arrange the following passages in the chronological order of the differ- 

 ent persons whose activity is described therein. In La Ptoche's Homer- 

 ische Textlcritik im Altertum (p. 7) there is published an interesting 

 fragment of HeracHdes who lived at about the middle of the second 



century B. C. AuKoCpyos iv Sd^w erfXevTrjae ' Ka\ rrjv 'Oyirjpov ttoitjctiv napa 

 Tcov dTToyovcov Kp(a)(f)vXov Xa^av npcoTos difKop-icrev els 'n.eXoTT6vvr](rov. Tllis, of 



course, is another story entirely, and, even if true, is nothing to influ- 

 ence our belief in the nature of the services that Pisistratus may have 

 performed for Homer at a much later date.*^^ Similar also is a state- 

 ment made about Lycurgus by a much later writer in the second half 

 of the first century a. d. Plutarch (Vol. I, p. 82, 1. 2) tells how 

 Lycurgus, when he was in Asia, realizing that the Homeric poems con- 

 tained educational elements as well as political qualities, determined 

 to bring them |to Athens. Then comes the significant part : ^v yap 



Tis 7S7 86^a T03V inav ap,avpa napa toIs KXXrjcriv, fKeKTr]VTO 8e ov ttoXXoI p-fprj 



3T Homer, Boston, 1887, p. 114. 



38 This fragment is additional evidence for a written Homer before the days 

 of Pisistratus. 



