352 A Century of Science 



prelude. The theory that the Iliad and Odyssey 

 are mere aggregations of popular ballads, collected 

 and arranged in the time of Pisistratus, was per 

 haps originally suggested by the philosopher Vico, 

 but first attracted general attention in 1795, when 

 set forth by Friedrich August Wolf, one of the 

 most learned and brilliant of modern scholars. 

 Thus eminently respectable in its parentage and 

 quite reasonable on the surface, this ballad theory 

 came to be widely fashionable ; forty years ago it 

 was accepted by many able scholars, though usu 

 ally with large modifications. 



The Wolfians urged that we know absolutely 

 nothing about the man Homer, not even when or 

 where he lived. His existence is merely matter of 

 tradition, or of inference from the existence of the 

 poems. But as the poems know nothing of Do 

 rians in Peloponnesus, their date can hardly be 

 so late as 1100 B. c. What happened, then, when 

 &quot;an edition of Homer&quot; was made at Athens, 

 about 530 B. C., by Pisistratus, or under his orders ? 

 Did the editor simply edit two great poems already 

 six centuries old, or did he make up two poems 

 by piecing together a miscellaneous lot of ancient 

 ballads ? Wolf maintained the latter alternative, 

 chiefly because of the alleged impossibility of com 

 posing and preserving such long poems in the 



