174 Be'klcer''s Digammated Text of Homer. 



nuity and acuteness, tliey evince an amount of patient labor which is 

 absohitely marvellous. Thus he goes through the whole extent of 

 the poems to note and collect the verses in which the third foot is 

 without a caesura. In the 15694 verses of the Iliad, he finds only 

 185 which have no caesura in the third foot: in the 12101 of the 

 Odyssey, only 71. Again he goes through the whole exteni of the 

 poems, to mark the cases of bucolic caesura, and observe whether the 

 fourth foot, the one which precedes the caesura, is a dactyl or a spon- 

 dee. Thus in the fifth book of the Iliad he finds 531 bucolic caesuras, 

 of which 4V0 are preceded by dactyls, 61 by spondees : in the elev- 

 enth book, 575 bucolic caesuras, 478 preceded by dactyls, 97 by 

 spondees ; and so on for the other books. These are only specimens 

 of the tasks which this conscientious and indefatigable critic has im- 

 posed upon himself The results of these protracted investigations 

 appear in his last edition of the Iliad and Odyssey, that of 1858. This 

 edition shows a great advance upon his first of 1843. It is in fact 

 constructed on a difierent principle and aims at a different object. 

 The aim of Bekker in his first edition, like that of Wolf before him, 

 was in general to reproduce the Homeric text as it was settled by the 

 great critic Aristarchus about two centuries before Christ, and handed 

 down without intentional variation by subsequent copyists. It was 

 the rule with Wolf, and with Bekker in his first edition, to give the 

 readino-s which certainly or probably belonged to Aristarchus, except 

 in occasional instances where there was unequivocal evidence to show 

 the priority of a diiferent reading. But in his second edition Bekker 

 lias taken a wider range. He ha-s adopted as his guide the princi- 

 ple of analogy, and by the help of it has sought to go back beyond 

 Aristarchus. Relying on analogies presented by a careful study of 

 the Homeric poems, he has departed in many cases from the readings 

 of the manuscripts, even where these could be traced with more or 

 less certainty to Aristarchus himself The general propriety of this 

 method has been disputed in many quarters. It is indeed rather sin- 

 gular in a critic like Bekker, w^ho strenuously maintains the frag- 

 mentary origin of the poems, and who finds evidence of such an 

 *orio-in in the varieties and inconsistencies which they show both as 

 vto grammatical forms and as to the use of words. He expects de- 

 partures from analogy ; he regards them as having an a priori proba- 

 bility ; and yet the tendency of his criticism is to sweep them away 

 from the text, wherever this can be done by gentle means : for he 

 abstains on principle from changes of a violent or extreme character ; 

 he does not treat his text with the despotic ingenuity of a Bentley. 



