HOMER. 



mentioned as his teachers, according to a late bio- 

 graphy, which is destitute of authority. The many 

 journeys which he is said to have made, not only 

 through Greece, but also through Phoenicia and 

 Egypt, seem to have been attributed to him merely 

 on account of the knowledge of the geography and 

 navigation of his time, displayed in the poem. If 

 Homer was really blind, as Pausanias declares, he 

 certainly cannot have been so from his birth, for it 

 would be impossible for a man born blind to give 

 such descriptions of visible things as he does. Some 

 have represented him as a blind schoolmaster, and 

 others as a blind beggar, who was obliged to sing his 

 songs before the doors of the rich for bread. This 

 assertion is inconsistent with all we know of the 

 ancient Greek bards and their manner of life. If not 

 rich and powerful, they were at least respected and 

 esteemed, and equally welcome in the assemblies of 

 citizens, in the palaces of princes, and at public 

 sacrifices. If, therefore, Homer was, as indeed is 

 probable, a wandering singer, he certainly was no 

 beggar. Of the circumstances of his death, we 

 know as little which can be relied upon. Yet his grave 

 has been shown on the island los (now Nio). So little 

 do we know of Homer ! But what if there never was 

 such a person as Homer? According to an old tra- 

 dition, he is descended, in the fourteenth degree, 

 from a Thracian bard; the names of his mother, 

 father, and grandfather have reference to poetry. 

 What, then, if this genealogy (as is the case with 

 many of the mythological representations of other 

 subjects) is merely an allegorical history of poetry, 

 which was brought from Thrace through Thessaly to 

 Greece, and thence passed to Asia Minor? Homer, 

 in such a case, would be a collective name, and sig- 

 nify an Ionian school of poets, in which poetry was 

 learned and handed down from generation to genera- 

 tion. (See the celebrated Frederic Schlegel's His- 

 tory of the Poetry of the Greeks.} On this supposi- 

 tion, the contradictory accounts of Homer might be 

 explained. 



More distinct information on these points is per- 

 haps contained in the poems which we possess under 

 the name of Homer. Twenty-four poems are ascribed 

 to him, which are lost. Those which are extant are 

 the Iliad, Odyssey, Batrachomyomachia, Hymns, and 

 Epigrams. Criticism decides that all four of these 

 cannot be ascribed to Homer. The Batrachomyo- 

 machia (i. e., the Battle of the Frogs and Mice), a 

 mock-heroic poem, is evidently merely an attempt 

 (and a successful one), to travesty the Iliad and 

 Odyssey ; and its contents, language, and the customs 

 to which it refers, betray a mucli later age than the 

 other Homeric poems. The Hymns are chiefly of an 

 epic character, and essentially different from those of 

 Orpheus, and are only fragments of ancient Cyclic 

 poems, or preludes of rhapsodies ; they are also con- 

 sidered by the more acute critics to be of a much 

 later age than the two great epics, and not to be by 

 the Ionic bard. There remains, then (as the Epi- 

 grams are out of the question), only the two larger 

 poems, the Iliad and Odyssey, from which we can 

 form any judgment of Homer. The whole mass of 

 stories in these poems revolves round two great 

 centres ; the one, a renowned national enterprise, 

 redolent of youthful vigour and the glory of courage 

 (as conceived of by nations in their infancy, very dif- 

 ferent from moral firmness, or even from the military 

 valour of our times); the other, a full picture of 

 domestic life, united with the charming, the wonder- 

 ful of distant countries, and exhibiting a model of 

 sagacity, victorious, at last, over a thousand obstacles. 

 We do not mean that the works exhibit a settled 

 plan, based upon these leading ideas, and to which 

 all the parts are subservient, but that such is the 



result to which we are brought by putting together 

 all the parts of the two poems. Even the ancients 

 felt, that the Odyssey was composed in a very diffe- 

 rent spirit from the Iliad, which has much more fire 

 and elevation. The style of the two poems is diffe- 

 rent. In the Iliad, one book often contains forty 

 similes, whilst the whole Odyssey contains but 

 twenty. Longinus (chap. 33) speaks at length of the 

 difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey ; 

 according to him, the author of the Iliad resembles 

 the rising, and the author of the Odyssey the setting 

 sun. The tone of complaint which prevails in the 

 Odyssey is cited as a confirmation of the supposed 

 old age of the writer. Some Alexandrian scholars 

 received the name of chorizontes (i. e., the separat- 

 ing), because they believed the poems to be by dif- 

 ferent authors. In the Odyssey, the language, ideas, 

 and mythology are different from those of the Iliad. 

 What is done in the Iliad by Iris, is performed in 

 the Odyssey by Mercury. No god or goddess is 

 precisely the same in both poems ; the figures have 

 changed. The Olympus, the notions of the kingdom 

 of the shades, the costume of the gods in their inter- 

 course with mortals, are different; customs, manners, 

 moral notions, the arts and sciences, are advanced. 

 The supposition, therefore, that the two poems belong 

 neither to the same poet, nor to the same age, is 

 obvious, and cannot be entirely rejected. 



Wolf, the famous German philologist, went still 

 farther in his Prolegomena to Homer, and maintained 

 new views respecting the ancient epic poems of the 

 Greeks in general, and the Homeric in particular. 

 Neither the whole Iliad, nor the whole Odyssey, is, 

 according to him, the work of one author, but each 

 was originally a series of songs of different poets. 

 The proofs of this assertion are the following : In the 

 time of Homer, the art of writing, if invented, was at 

 least not in common use among the Greeks, and not 

 Ciirried so far as the writing of books. But if Homer 

 did not know how to write, he could never have 

 conceived the idea of composing works of such 

 extent. The Greeks, in the time of Homer, were 

 not so far advanced in civilization as was necessary 

 for the composition of such a whole ; because, 

 though there is by no means an entire unity of plan 

 in these poems, particularly in the Iliad (as has often 

 been asserted ; in fact, all perfections have been 

 attributed to these poems), yet it is an artificial com- 

 position, and the Odyssej is still more so ; this cir- 

 cumstance does not agree with the state of civilization 

 in which the Greeks must have been at that early 

 period, according to all appearances. In addition to 

 this, there is in the poem itself a great inequality, 

 particularly between the first and last books. From 

 the 19th to the 22d book of the Iliad are traces of a 

 tone of thinking and expression foreign to the pre- 

 ceding part of the work. From the 8th book we 

 perceive marks of the process employed to connect 

 the rhapsodies. Finally, in the time of Homer, the 

 language was not carried to such a grammatical per- 

 fection as it appears in both poems, and according to 

 Hermann (edit. Orph. p. 687), the metre is not the 

 same : thus, for instance, a very great difference in 

 this respect is observable between the 13th and 23d 

 book. 



The result of all these investigations is, that 

 neither of these epics is from one author, nor of 

 the same age. Several parts may be discovered, 

 which form wholes by themselves ; for instance, the 

 7th, 8th, and 9th books form one rhapsody the 

 victories of Hector. Other parts also form wholes 

 of themselves ; some of them were evidently inserted 

 at a later period, as was acknowledged by the 

 ancients ; among them are the catalogue of ships, 

 the games, the episode of Dolon, and others. The 



