' Esp. 6, 74 ; ^, 70 ; a, 351. The books of the //iad are denoted by the
capital letters of the Greek alphabet, those of the Odj'ssty by the small letters
THE LEGENDARY BARDS 5
Alvov (' Woe for Linos'), and made his imaginary Linos
into an unhappy poet or a murdered prince. Homer's
ancestors, when they are not gods and rivers, tend to
bear names like ' Memory-son ' and ' Sweet-deviser ' ; his
minor connections — the figures among whom the lesser
epics were apt to be divided— have names which are
sometimes transparent, sometimes utterly obscure, but
which generally agree in not being Greek names of any
normal type. The name of his son-in-law, ' Creophylus,'
suggests a comic reference to the ' Fleshpot-tribe ' of
bards with their ' perquisites.' A poet who is much
quoted for the saga-subjects painted on the ' Lesche '
or ' Conversation Hall ' at Delphi, is called variously
' Lesches,' ' Lescheos,' and ' Leschaios ' ; another who
sang of sea-faring, has a name 'Arctinos,' derived, as no
other Greek name is, from the Pole-star. The author
of the Telcgoncia,'^' which ended the Odysseus-saga in a
burst of happy marriages (see p. 48), is suitably named
' Eugamon ' or ' Eugammon.' '
As for ' Homeros ' himself, the word means ' hostage ' :
it cannot be a full Greek name, though it might be
an abbreviated 'pet name,' e.g. for ' Homerodochos '
(' hostage-taker '), if there were any Greek names at
all compounded from this word. As it is, the fact we
must start from is the existence of ' Homeridje,' both
as minstrels in general and as a clan. ' Homeros ' must
bv all analogy be a primeval ancestor, invented to give
them a family unity, as * Doros,' ' Ion,' and * Hellen '
were invented ; as even the League of the ' Amphic-
tyones ' or ' Dwellers - round [Thermopylae] ' had to
provide themselves with a common ancestor called
'Amphictyon' or ' Dweller- round.' That explains
' Crusius, Philol. liv.
6 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
' Homeros,' but still leaves ' Homeridse ' unexplained.
It may be what it professes to be, a patronymic
('Homer-sons'). It is easy to imagine a state of
society in which the Sons of the Hostages, not trusted
to fight, would be used as bards. But it may equally
well be some compound (o/x./}, dp — ) meaning ' fitters
together,' with the termination modified into patronymic
form when the minstrels began to be a guild and to feel
the need of a common ancestor.
It is true that we have many traditional ' lives ' of
the prehistoric poets, and an account of a * contest *
between Homer and Hesiod, our version being copied
from one composed about 400 B.C. by the sophist Alki-
damas, who, in his turn, was adapting some already
existing romance. And in the poems themselves we
have what purport to be personal reminiscences.
Hesiod mentions his own name in the preface to the
TJicogony. In the Erga (1. 633 ff.), he tells how his father
emigrated from Kyme to Ascra. The Homeric Hymn
to Apollo ends in an appeal from the poet to the
maidens who form his audience, to remember him, and
''when any stranger asks ivho is the sweetest of singers and
who delights them most, to anszuer with one voice : ' Tis a
blind man; he dive I Is in craggy Chios ; his songs shall be
the fairest for evermore ^ Unfortunately, these are only
cases of personation. The rhapsode who recited those
verses first did not mean that he was a blind Chian, and
his songs the fairest for evermore ; he only meant that
the poem he recited was the work of that blind Homer
whose songs were as a matter of fact the best. Indeed,
both this passage and the preface to the Theogony are
demonstrably later additions, and the reminiscence in the
Eroa must stand or fall with them. The real bards of
'PERSONALITY' OF HOMER 7
early Greece were all nameless and impersonal ; and we
know definitely the point at which the individual author
begins to dare to obtrude himself — the age of the lyrists
and the Ionian researchers. These passages are not evi-
dence of what Hesiod and Homer said of themselves ;
they are evidence of what the tradition of the sixth
century fabled about them.
Can we see the origin of this tradition ? Only
dimly. There is certainly some historical truth in it.
The lives and references, while varying in all else, ap-
proach unanimity in making Homer a native of Ionia.
They concentrate themselves on two places, Smyrna
and Chios ; in each of these an ^Eolian population had
been overlaid by an Ionian, and in Chios there was
a special clan called ' Homeridae.' We shall see that
if by the ' birth of Homer ' we mean the growth of
the Homeric poems, the tradition here is true. It is
true also when it brings Hesiod and his father over
from Asiatic Kyme to Boeotia, in the sense that the
Hesiodic poetry is essentially the Homeric form brought
to bear on native Boeotian material.
Thus Homer is a Chian or Smyrnaean for historical
reasons ; but why is he blind? Partly, perhaps, we have
here some vague memory of a primitive time when the
able-bodied men were all warriors ; the lame but strong
men, smiths and weapon-makers ; and the blind men,
good for nothing else, mere singers. More essentially,
it is the Saga herself at work. She loved to make her
great poets and prophets blind, and then she was
haunted by their blindness. Homer was her Demo-
docus, '^ whom the Muse greatly loved, and gave him both
good and evil ; she took away his eyes and gave him
sweit minstrelsy.'' {0, 63, 4). It is pure romance — the
8 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
romance which creates the noble bust of Homer in
the Naples Museum ; the romance which one feels in
Callimachus's wonderful story of the Bathing of Pallas,
where it is Teiresias, the prophet, not the poet, who
loses his earthly sight. Other traits in the tradition
have a similar origin — the contempt poured on the
unknown beggar-man at the Marriage Feast till he
rises and sings ; the curse of ingloriousness he lays on
the Ky means who rejected him ; the one epic {Cypria^)
not up to his own standard, with which he dowered his
daughter and made her a great heiress.
The Homeric Poems
If we try to find what poems were definitely regarded
as the work of Homer at the beginning of our tradi-
tion, the answer must be — all that were * Homeric ' or
'heroic ' ; in other words, all that express in epos the two
main groups of legend, centred round Troy and Thebes
respectively. The earliest mention of Homer is by the
poet Callinus {ca. 660 B.C.), who refers to the Thebais * as
his work ; the next is probably by Semonides of Amorgos
(same date), who cites as the words of ' a man of Chios '
a proverbial phrase which occurs in our Iliad, " As the
passijig of leaves is, so is the passing of meny It is possible
that he referred to some particular Chian, and that the
verse in our Iliad \s merely a floating proverb assimilated
by the epos ; but the probability is that he is quoting
our passage. Simonides of Keos (556-468 B.C.), a good
century later, speaks of " Homer and Stesichorus telling
how Meleagros conquered all youths in spear-throwing across
the wild Anauros^ This is not in our Iliad or Odyssey^
WHAT POEMS WERE HOMERIC 9
and we cannot trace the poem in which it comes. Pindar,
a little later, mentions Homer several times. He blames
him for exalting Odysseus — a reference to the Odyssey —
but pardons him because he has told " straiglitly by rod
and plummet the zvJiole prozvess of Aias'' ; especially, it
would seem, his rescue of the body of Achilles, which
was described in two lost epics, the Little Iliad ^ and the
A^thiopis.^ He bids us " remember Homer s tvord : A
good messenger brings honour to any dealing'' — a word, as it
chances, which our Homer never speaks ; and he men-
tions the ^^ HomeridcB, singers of stitched lays T
If ^Eschylus ever called his plays * " slices from the great
banquets of Homer," the banquets he referred to must
have been far richer than those to which we have admis-
sion. In all his ninety plays it is hard to find more than
seven which take their subjects from our Homer, including
the Agamemnon and CJioephoroi^ and it would need some
spleen to make a critic describe these two as 'slices ' from
the Odyssey. What ^schy lus meant by ' Homer ' was the
heroic saga as a whole. It is the same with Sophocles,
who is called ' most Homeric,' and is said by Athenseus
(p. 277) to " rejoice in the epic cycle and make whole
dramas out of it." That is, he treated those epic myths
which AtheucEus only knew in the prose * cycles ' or hand-
books compiled by one Dionysius in the second century
B.C., and by Apollodorus in the first. To Xenophanes
(sixth century) ' Homer and Hesiod ' mean all the epic
tradition, sagas and theogonies alike, just as they do to
Herodotus when he says (ii. 53), that they two " made
the Greek religion, and distributed to the gods their titles
' Athenseus, 347 e.
"^ The others are the Achilles-trilogy {Myrmidons* Nereides* Phryges*),
Penelope* Soul-weighifig*
lo LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
and honours and crafts, and described what they were
like." There Herodotus uses the conventional language ;
but he has already a standard of criticism which is incon-
sistent with it. For he conceives Homer definitely as
the author of the Iliad and Odyssey. He doubts if the
Lay of the Afterborn* be his, and is sure (ii. 117) that
the Cypria * cannot be, because it contradicts the I/iad.
This is the first trace of the tendency that ultimately
prevailed. Thucydides explicitly recognises the //zW, the
Hymn to Apollo, and the Odyssey as Homer's. Aristotle
gives him nothing but the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the
humorous epic Margitesf^ Plato's quotations do not go
beyond the Iliad and the Odyssey ; and it is these two
poems alone which were accepted as Homer's by the
great Alexandrian scholar Aristarchus {ca. 160 B.C.), and
which have remained ' Homeric ' ever since.
How was it that these two were originally selected as
being ' Homer ' in some special degree ? And how was
it that, in spite of the essential dissimilarities between
them, they continued to hold the field together as his
authentic work when so many other epics had been
gradually taken from him? It is the more surprising
when we reflect that the difTerences and inconsist-
encies between them had already been pointed out in
Alexandrian times by the ' Chorizontes ' or ' Separators,'
Xenon and Hellanicus.
Iliad and Odyssey : The Panathenaic
Recitation
A tradition comes to our aid which has been dif-
ferently interpreted by various critics — the story of
PISISTRATUS AND HOMER ii
the recension by Pisistratus, tyrant of Athens, in the
middle of the sixth century. Late writers speak much of
this recension. " Vox totius antiquitatis " is the authority
Wolf claims for it. It is mentioned in varying terms by
Cicero, Pausanias, ^lian, Josephus ; it is referred to as a
well-known fact in a late epigram purporting to be written
for a statue of " Pisistratus, great in counsel, who col-
lected Homer, formerly sung in fragments." Cicero's
account is that Pisistratus "arranged in their present
order the books of Homer, previously confused." The
Byzantine Tzetzes — the name is only a phonetic way
of spelling Caecius — makes the tradition ludicrous by
various mistakes and additions ; his soberest version
says that Pisistratus performed this task " by the help of
the industry of four famous and learned men — Concy-
lus, Onomacritus of Athens, Zopyrus of Heraclea, and
Orpheus of Crotona." Unfortunately, the learned Con-
cylus is also called Epiconcylus, and represents almost
certainly the * Epic Cycle,' eiriKov kvkXov, misread as
a proper name ! And the whole commission has a
fabulous air, and smacks of the age of the Ptolemies
rather than the sixth century. Also it is remarkable that
in our fairly ample records about the Alexandrian critics,
especially Aristarchus, there is no explicit reference to
Pisistratus as an editor.
It used to be maintained that this silence of the
Alexandrians proved conclusively that the story w^as not
in existence in their time. It has now been traced, in a
less developed form, as far back as the fourth century B.C.
It was always known that a certain Dieuchidas of Megara
had accused Pisistratus of interpolating lines in Homer
to the advantage of Athens — a charge which, true or false,
implies that the accused had some special opportunities.
12 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
It was left for Wilamowitz to show that Dieuchidas was a
writer much earlier than the Alexandrians, and to explain
his motive.^ It is part of that general literary revenge
which Megara took upon fallen Athens in the fourth cen-
tury. "Athens had not invented comedy ; it was Megara.
Nor tragedy either ; it was Sikyon. Athens had only fal-
sified aiid interpolated ! " Whether Dieuchidas accepted
the Pisistratus recension as a fact generally believed,
or whether he suggested it as an hypothesis, is not clear.
It appears, however, that he could not find any un-Attic
texts to prove his point by. When he wished to suggest
the true reading he had to use his own ingenuity. It
was he who invented a supposed original form for the
interpolated passage in B, 671 ; and perhaps he who
imagined the existence of a Spartan edition of Homer
by Lycurgus, an uncontaminated text copied out honestly
by good Dorians !
The theory, then, that Pisistratus had somehow ' inter-
polated Homer' was current before Alexandrian times.
Why does Aristarchus not mention it ? We cannot
clearly say. It is possible that he took the fact for
granted, as the epigram does. It is certain, at any rate,
that Aristarchus rejected on some ground or other most
of the lines which modern scholars describe as 'Athenian
interpolations ' ; and that ground cannot have been a
merely internal one, since he held the peculiar belief that
Homer himself was an Athenian. Lastly, it is a curious
fact that Cicero's statement about the recension by Pisis-
stratus seems to be derived from a member of the
Pergamene school, whose founder. Crates, stood almost
alone in successfully resisting and opposing the authority
of Aristarchus. It is quite possible that the latter tended
^ PAi/. Unten, vii. p. 240.
RECITATION AT THE PANATHEN^EA 13
to belittle a method of explanation which was in particular
favour with a rival school.
Dieuchidas, then, knows of Pisistratus having done to
the poems something which gave an opportunity for
interpolation. But most Megarian writers, according to
Plutarch {Solon, 10), say it was Solon who made the
interpolations ; and a widespread tradition credits Solon
w4th a special law about the recitation of * Homer' at the
Festival of the Panathenaea. This law, again, is attributed
to Hipparchus in the pseudo- Platonic dialogue which
bears his name — a work not later than the third century.
Lycurgus the orator ascribes it simply to 'our ances-
tors,' and that is where we must leave it. When a law
w^as once passed at Athens, it tended to become at once
the property of Solon, the great ' Nomothetes.' If
Pisistratus and Hipparchus dispute this particular law,
it is partly because there are rumours of dishonest
dealings attached to the story, partly because the tyrants
were always associated with the Panathenaea.
But what was the law ? It seems clear that the recita-
tion of Homer formed part of the festal observances, and
probable that there was a competition. Again, we know
that the poems were to be recited in a particular way.
But was it e'f vTTo^dXrjq (* by suggestion ') — at any
verse given ? That is almost incredible. Or was it e|
v7ro\r}ylrea)<i ('one beginning where the last left off')?
Or, as Diogenes Laertius airily decides, did the law
perhaps say e^ uTro/JoXr)?, and mean ef vTroXrjyfrico'; ? ^
Our evidence then amounts in the first place to this :
^ One is tempted to add to this early evidence what Herodotus says (vii. 6)
of the banishment of Onomacritus by Hipparchus ; but he was banished for
trafficking in false oracles, an offence of an entirely different sort from interpo-
lating works of literature.
3
14 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
that there was a practice in Athens, dating at latest from
early in the fifth century, by which the Homeric poems
were recited publicly in a prescribed order ; and that the
origin of the practice was ascribed to a definite public
enactment. We find further, that in all non-Athenian
literature down to Pindar, 'Homer' seems to be taken
as the author of a much larger number of poems than
we possess — probably of all the Trojan and Theban epics
— whereas in Attic literature from the fifth century on-
wards he is especially the author of the Iliad and the
Odyssey, the other poems being first treated as of doubt-
ful authorship, afterwards ignored. When we add that in
the usage of all the authors who speak of this Panathenaic
recitation, 'Homer' means simply, and as a matter of
course, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the conclusion inevi-
tably suggests itself that it was these two poems alone
which were selected for the recitation, and that it was
the recitation which gave them their unique position of
eminence as the 'true' Homer.
Why were they selected ? One can see something,
but not much. To begin with, a general comparison
of the style of the rejected epics with that of our two
poems suggests that the latter are far more elaborately
' worked up ' than their brethren. They have more unity ;
they are less like mere lays ; they have more dramatic
tension and rhetorical ornament. One poem only can
perhaps be compared with them, the first which is quoted
as ' Homer's ' in literature, the Thebais : * but the glory
of Thebes was of all subjects the one which could least
be publicly blazoned by Athenians ; Athens would reject
such a thing even more unhesitatingly than Sikyon re-
jected the ' Homer ' which praised Argos.^
1 Hdt V. 67.
HISTORY OF THE TEXT 15
We get thus one cardinal point in the history of the
poems ; it remains to trace their development both be-
fore and after. To take the later history first, our own
traditional explanation of Homer is derived from the
Alexandrian scholars of the third and second centuries
B.C., Zenodotus of Ephesus (born 325 ?), Aristophanes of
Byzantium (born 257 ?), and Aristarchus of Samothrace
(born 215) ; especially from this last, the greatest authority
on early poetry known to antiquity. Our information
about him is mostly derived from an epitome of the works
of four later scholars : Didymus On the Aristarchean Recen-
sion ; Aristonicus On the Signs in the Iliad and Odyssey —
i.e. the critical signs used by Aristarchus ; Herodian On
the Prosody and Accentuation of the Iliad, and Nicanor On
Homeric Punctuation. The two first named were of the
Augustan age ; the epitome was made in the third century
A.D. ; the MS. in u'hich it is preserved is the famous
Venetus A of the tenth century, containing the Iliad but
not the Odyssey.
We can thus tell a good deal about the condition of
Homer in the second century B.C., and can hope to
establish with few errors a text 'according to Aristarchus,'
a text which would approximately satisfy the best literary
authority at the best period of Greek criticism. But we
must go much further, unless we are to be very unworthy
followers of Aristarchus and indifferent to the cause of
science in literature. In the first place, if our comments
come from Aristarchus, where does our received text
come from ? Demonstrably not from him, but from
the received text or vulgate of his day, in correction of
which he issued his two editions, and on which neither
he nor any one else has ultimately been able to exer-
cise a really commanding influence. Not that he
1 6 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
made violent changes ; on the contrary, he seldom or
never 'emended' by mere conjecture, and, though he
marked many lines as spurious, he did not omit them.
The greatest divergences which we find between Aristar-
chus and the vulgate are not so great as those between
the quartos and the folios of Hamlet.
Yet we can see that he had before him a good many
recensions which differed both from the vulgate and from
one another. He mentions in especial three classes of
such MSS. — those of individuals, showing the recension
or notes of poets like Antimachus and Rhianus, or of
scholars like Zenodotus ; those of cities, coming from
Marseilles, Chios, Argos, Sinope, and in general from all
places except Athens, the city of the vulgate ; and, lastly,
what he calls the ' vulgar ' or ' popular ' or ' more care-
less ' texts, among which we may safely reckon ' that of
the many verses ' {fj Trokvcnixo<i).
The quotations from Homer in pre-Alexandrian writers
enable us to appreciate both the extent and the limits
of this variation. They show us first that even in Athens
the vulgate had not established itself firmly before the
year 300 B.C. yEschines the orator, a man of much
culture, not only asserts that the phrase ^rifxr) S'e? arpaTov
rfkOe occurs 'several times in the Iliad,' whereas in our
texts it does not occur at all ; but quotes verbally passages
from and !f with whole lines quite different. And the
third-century papyri bear the same testimony, notably
the fragment of A in the Flinders-Petrie collection pub-
lished in 1891 by Prof. Mahaffy, and the longer piece
from the same book published by M. Nicole in the Revue
de Philologie, 1894. The former of these, for instance,
contains the beginnings or endings of thirty-eight lines of
A between 502 and 537. It omits one of our lines ; con-
TEXT IN FOURTH AND THIRD CENTURIES 17
tains four strange lines ; and has two others in a different
shape from that in our texts : a serious amount of diver-
gence in such a small space. On the other hand, the
variations seem to be merely verbal, and the same applies
to the rest of the papyrus evidence. There is no variation
in matter in any fou-.th-century text.
The summing up of this evidence gives us the last two
stages of the Homeric poems. The canonical statements
of fact and the order of the incidents were fixed by a
gradual process of which the cardinal point is the institu-
tion of the Panathenaic recitations ; the wording of the
text line by line was gradually stereotyped by continued
processes of school repetition and private reading and
literary study, culminating in the minute professional
criticism of Zenodotus and his successors at the Alexan-
drian library.
If we go further back, it is impossible not to be struck
by the phenomenon, that while the Homeric quotations
in most fourth and fifth century writers, even in Aristotle,
for instance, differ considerably from our text, Plato's
quotations^ agree with it almost word for w^ord. One
cannot but combine with this the conclusion drawn by
Grote in another context, that Demetrius of Phalerum,
when summoned by Ptolemy I. to the foundation of the
library at Alexandria, made use of the books bequeathed
by Plato to the Academy .-
This analysis brings us again to the Panathenaic reci-
tation. We have seen that its effects were to establish
the Iliad and the Odyssey as 'Homer' par excellence ; to
fix a certain order of incidents in them ; and, of course,
to make them a public and sacred possession of Athens.
^ Counting Akibiadcs II. as spurious.
^ Grote, Plato, chap. vi.
l8 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
Let us try to see further into it. When was it instituted ?
Was there really a law at all, or only a gradual process
which the tradition, as its habit is, has made into one
definite act ?
As for the date, the establishment of the custom is sure
not to be earlier than the last person to whom it is as-
cribed ; that is, it took place not before, but probably after,
the reign of Hipparchus. Now, to make the works of the
great Ionian poet an integral part of the most solemn reli-
gious celebration of Athens, is a thing which can only have
taken place in a period of active fraternising with Ionia.
That movement begins for Athens with the Ionian revolt ;
before 500 B.C. she had been ashamed of her supposed
kinsmen ; even Cleisthenes had abolished the Ionian tribe
names. The year 499 opens the great Pan-Ionic period
of Athenian policy, in which Athens accepts the position
of metropolis and protectress of Ionia, absorbs Ionian
culture, and rises to the intellectual hegemony of Greece.
Learning and letters must have fled from Miletus at the
turn of the sixth century B.C., as they fled from Con-
stantinople in the fifteenth A.D., and Athens was their
natural refuge. We shall see later the various great men