PISISTRATUS AND HIS EDITION OF HOMER. 

 By Samuel Hart Newhall. 



Presented by M. H. Morgan. Received May 13, 1908. 



In dealing with the life and works of any great character in history, 

 especially a man whose figure in the world has conceivably been mag- 

 nified through the mists of distant time, it is essential carefully to 

 discriminate between fact and fable, between a clear statement, how- 

 ever incidental, found in any reliable writer, whether he makes the 

 assertion on his own authority or on that of some author known to 

 us, and a mere tradition to which the writer refers without stating his 

 authority, however prevalent the story may have been in his own life- 

 time, and even for many years previous. For it is possible, though 

 not perhaps probable, that a tradition could be very old and very wide- 

 spread without having the slightest foundation on fact. In dealing, 

 then, with the literary work of Pisistratus, a prominent and influential 

 person in the early days of Hellas, it is especially necessary to distin- 

 guish between uncompromising statements made by authorities con- 

 cerning his work, and mere references to a commonly accepted tradition 

 introduced by such listless preludes as ol iraKaiol (paa-iv and similar ex- 

 pressions. In this article I shall try to make a satisfactory answer to 

 two questions : first, did Pisistratus really do any literary work in 

 connection with the Homeric poems ? and, secondly, how thorough and, 

 so to speak, professional were his services ? that is, did he produce a 

 text edition of the Iliad and the Odyssey 1 These questions are by 

 no means new, but it is time that they were once more considered 

 together, and perhaps something new may be brought forward in 

 answering them. 



First, I desire to present a few passages from the ancient authors 

 which point to a certain amount of literary activity on the part of 

 Pisistratus in connection with the Homeric poems, though they could 

 not be considered indicative of anything so thorough and systematic 

 as a regular edition. Strabo, the geographer, who manifests a wide 

 interest in literature, briefly tells the following story (IX, 394, 10) : 



Kai (j)acnv oi jxev YleKTicrTpaTov, ol 8e 'SoXwva trapeyypa-^avTa iv rai vemv Kara- 

 Xoyat fiera to enos tovto, Atas 8' (k 'EuXcifuvos ayei' 8voKai8(Ka vfjas, e^ijf tovto, 



