Essay on the Writings of Hesiod. 5 



mains a subject of very doubtful disputation among critics, (unless indeed 

 we are swayed by some very influential names, to concede that it has been 

 determined in the negative) whether the use of alphabetic writing did or 

 did not prevail in Greece at the date of the Homeric poems, there being 

 only one single apparent allusion to such an art in those compositions ; 

 and that one will admit, without violence, an explanation referring to mere 

 symbolic representations like those of the Egyptians or Mexicans j* but 

 however this may be, it seems certain that not writing but oral recitation 

 was originally,t and continued even till the age of the Pisistratidse, the 

 means by which these poems were preserved. The Aoicoi or bards men- 

 tioned in the Iliad and Odyssey, and whose theme is even then said to 

 have been often the "tale of Troy divine," | were in the following age 

 called Pav/^wcoi Rhapsodists, which etymologically implies the compilers, 

 or by a more literal translation of an homely metaphor the stitchers together, 

 of song ; their profession was that of itinerant minstrels, rambling through 

 the towns and villages of Greece, reciting detached portions of epic 

 poetry, whence these disjecta membra poetce were called Pai^wricti. Tlie 

 most popular of these recitations appear to have been the Homeric poems ; 

 and from this circumstance the reciters were also known under the denomi- 

 nation Homeridae3§ and Pindar, our earliest extant authority on the whole 



* The passage alluded to, is Iliad Z. 169, where Praetus, deceived by the false 

 accusations of his wife against Bellerophon, as having urged lier to the very crime 

 in which he had refused to become her associate, dismisses him as an embassage to 

 his kinsman, the king of the SjTians, charging him with private tablets, inscribed 

 with matter calculated to procure his death ypcr^aQ tvi TrivaKi t^tvkto) Bviio<f>^opa 

 noWa. This folded tablet is, in the following lines, called '^iijJ.a, a term more 

 descriptive of a symbol. 



t This is by no means a modern German theory ; Josephus mentions it as the 

 common account (Contra Appionem, lib. I.) koi ipaaiv ovci tovtov tv ypanjiaai rtju 

 avTu TToitjaiv KaTaXiTrtii' aXKa <)iafivj]fiov(vonevi]v £K t(i)v AiTfiarwj/ vrepov avvTeSrrivai. 



X Od. VIII. 478. 



§ The verb 'Ofit)pioj, however, occurs in the Odyssey itself, 17.468 ; it is usually ex- 

 plained to meet, but seems rather to be" to speak together with," from 'o^sand tpw, or 

 ipibi : thus Hesiod describes the muses as <l>ojvy 'ofxijptvaui, " reciting with accordant 

 voice." — Thcog. 'M. This would undoubtedly give us a sufficient etymon for the title 

 Homcrida; ; and there have not been wanting critics who have considered it more 

 probable, that the Rhapsodists did not derive their name from the author, but that 

 the author himself was a pure fiction of those who first reduced the scattered Rhap- 

 Kodieg, the works of various bards, into more regular epic form ; and coined an 

 appellation for the imaginary single writer of their composite digest, borrowed from 

 that of the Rhapsodists themselves. But when we remember that I'indar speaks 

 repeatedly of the acvtmif; 'Oniipuc as a known poet, and e.vprcssly alludes to his poem 

 on the sufferings of Ulysses, Nem. VII. 2<J ; to his recording tlie bravery of Ajax, 

 Isthm. IV. fi.'J. and (Fyth. IV. 4%i.) cites a whole line of the Iliad, O. 27.— that Hero- 

 dotus i)articularly mentions by name the Iliad and Odyssey as the works of Homer, 

 (critically at the same time rejecting the Cyprian epic also attributed to him) and 

 accurately refers to Bevcral particulars as at present contained in these poems — 



