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Monday, 2Qth December 1847. 

 Right Rev. BISHOP TERROT, V.P., in the Chair. 

 The following communication was read : 



Examination of some Theories of German Writers, and of 

 Mr Grote, on the Authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey. 

 By Professor Dunbar. 



In the first part of the paper the question was examined, whether 

 the art of writing was known and practised at the time in which 

 Homer is supposed to have lived \ It was found that there was no 

 evidence, either in the Iliad or Odyssey, that it was practised at that 

 time ; but that these poems must have been transmitted orally by 

 the Bards for a period of nearly three centuries. It was then con- 

 sidered whether poems of such a length as the Iliad and Odyssey 

 could have been composed and committed to memory by one man ; 

 and it was shewn, from several examples, that there was no impos- 

 sibility in the matter. Mr Grote''s theory, " that no such poet of the 

 name of Homer ever existed," was then examined, and shewn, from 

 the testimony of sevei'al of the most eminent Greek authors, to be 

 fallacious. It was stated that lays, containing the history of the 

 ancestors of powerful chiefs, were composed by the Bards attached 

 to their families, and that Homer, in all probability, availed himself 

 of them in working up the Iliad and Odyssey. The mode in which 

 these poems were circulated through Greece by the Nomads, was next 

 pointed out, by their reciting them on public occasions in every part 

 of Greece. It was shewn that they were not committed to writing 

 till a little before the age of Solon and Pisistratus. Wolfe and 

 Lachmann's theories were then examined, and shewn to be altogether 

 fallacious. The opinion of Mr Grote that the Iliad was first an 

 Achilleis, and that the books, including the second and the subsequent 

 ones to the eleventh, were the compositions of a later or later poets, 

 was examined, and it was shewn, by a reference to several incidents 

 in these books, that they must have been composed by the same author, 

 and formed a necessary part of the story of the Iliad. It was stated, 

 contrary to Mr Grote's opinion, that the Iliad possessed more unity 

 than the Odyssey, and that internal evidence proved that it was in 

 all probability composed by the author of the Iliad, and not by a 

 piecing together of the lays of later poets. The opinions of some 

 German critics, that the Odyssey was of a later date than the Iliad, 



