561st ORDINARY GENERAL MEETING. 



HELD IN THE CONFERENCE HALL, CENTRAL HALL, 

 WESTMINSTER, ON MONDAY, JANUARY 4th, 1915, 

 AT 4.30 p.m. 



Prof. H. Langhorne Orchard, M.A., took the Chair. 



The Minutes of the preceding Meeting were read and confirmed, and 

 the Secretary announced the election of C. E. Buckland, Esq., CLE., 

 as an Associate of the Institute. 



The Chairman said it was his very pleasing duty to ask Professor 

 Margoliouth, who was well known to the Members of the Victoria 

 Institute, to read a paper on a subject of no ordinary interest, 

 " Homer, his Life and Work." 



THE LIFE AND WORK OF HOMER, 

 By the Rev. Professor D. S. Margoliouth, D.Litt. 



THE speculations called Homeric Criticism were started in the 

 year 1795 by the Halle Professor, F. A. Wolf, who 

 summarized the result of his researches as follows : the 

 'voice of all antiquity, and generally speaking a unanimous tradition , 

 attests the fact that the Homeric Poems were first committed to 

 writing by Pisistratus, tyrant of Athens, who died 527 B.C., and 

 by him arranged in the order wherein they are now read,.* This 

 supposed result can only be characterized by a phrase too 

 harsh for this audience ; for Wolf's main proposition is attested 

 by no ancient writer whatever, and contradicted by many, who 

 either assert or imply that Homer, like other poets, wrote his 

 own works, and indeed in the Ionic alphabet wherein they are 

 written and printed. The only ancient author who speaks of a 

 period of oral transmission is the Israelite, Flavius Josephus, 

 scarcely an authority on Hellenic literary history, and notoriously 

 untrustworthy on all subjects ; he is contradicted by his con- 

 temporaries Plutarch and Dion Chrysostom, and even by his 



* Prolegomena ad Homerum, xxxiii. 



