PROBLEM OF THE HOMERIC POEMS.*

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NY attempt to differentiate separate parts of the Homeric poems, to the effect of assigning a separate authorship to the parts, labours under peculiar difficulties, for the following reasons:

1. It is of the nature of all popular minstrel poetry to bear the stamp, less of the individual man, and more of the spirit of the people, than is the case with poctical works of a later and literary period. As a consequence of this, the materials which the minstrel receives from local ballads, and which he works up into a great popular Epos, are less apt to be changed by the action of the poet's mind; and consequently remaining in their primitive form, are evidence, not so much of the peculiar genius of the minstrel, as of the special character of the materials which he used.

2. Partly on account of this ready reception of partially unassimilated materials into the composition of the popular Epos, and partly because

* Our readers will remember that the CONTEMPORARY REVIEW for February, 1879, contained a paper by Mr. Freeman, on the subject of this article, to the effect that the theory of the learned Professor of Greek in Aberdeen should not be set aside hastily, as a mere ingenious whim or hobbyhorsical craze, but was deserving of the serious attention of scholars. That this view of the case is correct will suggest itself to any reflective person who considers what important results to theology have followed from the separation of two distinct documents-the 'Iab and the Elohim document-in the first book of Moses. A similar proceeding with regard to Homer is of course perfectly legitimate; and if the result, after repeated trials, should finally prove not so fruitful, the labour will not have been altogether lost, and the cause of the different result will naturally be traced, not to the absence of separate documents in the materials of the composite book, but to the complete fusion which belongs to a book of poetic genius, as contrasted with the loose compagination of the fragments of an archaic history.

The reader who is not curiously familiar with the sequence of the books of the Iliad, will readily understand the starting-point of Professor Geddes' theory by recalling to mind the most striking feature in the general structure of the Iliad. The first book announces the subject, and gives a fervid dramatic start to the action in the quarrel between the king of Mycenae and the great Thessalian chieftain, his most effective ally at the siege of Troy. The result of this quarrel is that the offended thane retires from the scene; and the action goes on through a considerable series of books without his appearance. An embassy is then sent to supplicate his return, which he indignantly dismisses. The

this form of poetry, when completed, was rarely, if ever, sung publicly as an aesthetical whole, but had a floating currency, like small bank notes, all through the world where the language was spoken, slight shades of difference, contrarieties, and even contradictions, might readily assert a permanent place in the organic aggregate, with which the genius and the character of the minstrel had nothing to do, but which are altogether to be traced to the different local sources from which the materials were drawn. They may thus afford, at most, legitimate proof of the incongruity of the materials, but not of diversity of authorship, in the handling of those materials.

3. In a poem of such immense scope and breadth as the Iliad, nothing is more natural than to suppose-and, indeed, the genesis and growth of all early minstrel poetry forces us to suppose-that the materials were taken from widely different sources; and if it be plain enough on the face of the poem that Achilles, a great Thessalian chief, is the prominent character in one section into which it naturally divides, while Agamemnon, Diomedes, Ajax, Ulysses are the prominent characters in the other, any difference of treatment that may seem to exist in the parts of the poem belonging to the two sections, is primarily to be looked on as the natural and necessary consequence of their place of origin. and of growth.

1. If any other cause is to be assigned for such apparent difference of treatment, recourse to such other cause can be justified only by the occurrence of such remarkable discrepancies, either in style or manner, as can be naturally accounted for only on the supposition of a different hand or a later age.

5. It is a fact that the scheme of the Iliad, as announced in the opening words" The Wrath of Achilles," is completely satisfied so far as a coherent story, a development, and a plot is concerned, by the selection of a certain number of books in which the person of Achilles is prominent, and the exsection of others in which that hero lies in the background:

struggle then goes on as before in his absence, and with perilous results; till, roused from his prolonged fit of sulky inaction by the death of his friend Patroclus, he rushes to the rescue, tuus the flight of the Greeks into a pursuit, and thoroughly humbles the Trojans, by the death of their great champion Hector. This catastrophe takes place in the twentysecond book. Two concluding books follow: one containing the funereal games in honour of Patroclus, and the other the midnight visit of the old Trojan king to the camp of the Greeks, to redeem from the fierce victor the body of his son. Now the process of exsection, originally hinted at by Wolf (Prodoje nosa, xxvii.', and popularized in England by Mr. Grote, was to drop out of the Iliad altogether the greater part of those books where Achilles does not appear -viz, i, în, iv., V., vi.. vii., x., and for a special reason also ix. as also the two last, which do not seem necessary for the complete satisfaction of the indignant hero's revenge; and to call the remaining bocks the Achilleid, a great original poem, which was afterwards enlarged by the addition of those non-Achillean books which give it the breadth and the range of an Iliad. This idea Professor Geddes takes up as the basis of a minute comparative examination of these exsected books; and he arrives at the doable conclusion (1) with Mr. Grote that they were not composed by the author of the Achilleii: (that they were composed by the author of the Odyssey, the real Homer, and the undoubted author of an epic poet, which for compactness of Structure, and for high esthetical and moral devement, must be locked upon as in every way superior to the more fervil and bellicose production on which the world of critics has so long lavished its undiscerning

laudations.

and this fact raises a presumption, or, at least, excites a suspicion, that these two parts proceeded from different sources, and that the books which may be omitted, without harm to the plot, may have been an enlargement of the original scheme.

6. But the presumption thus raised, taken at its highest value, does not in the slightest degree militate against the idea that the enlargement might have proceeded from the same hand. That the author, whoever he was call him Homer-started with an Achilleid, and that it grew into an Iliad under his hand, is the most natural thing in the world. The natural action of the poetical mind, both generally in itself and specially in the circumstances under which the minstrel sang his Trojan ballads, would lead to this result.

7. The presumption that the enlargement of the original Achilleid into an Iliad was made by the original minstrel, is raised into a probability by the fact that the books proposed to be differentiated as the product of a different author, though not logically necessary to a satisfactory conduct and catastrophe of the story, are, æsthetically, an immense improvement on the original plan; and if they retard the progress of the action in one place, or add, so to speak, a postscript in another place, do so under the presiding influence of a great artistic genius.

8. Any attempt to assign the two sections of the Iliad to a separate authorship is rendered doubly difficult by the character of the treatment which the poems received after they were completed. Though preserved as wholes, either in the schools of the bards by well-exercised memory, or in written records, they were used as parts, and circulated through the country as a sort of common property which the local minstrels, or the same wandering minstrel at different places, might deal with as he pleased. They were therefore liable, in their passage from Homer to Pisistratus, under whom they for the first time. assumed a universally acknowledged literary shape, to all sorts of variations and interpolations, impossible at this time of day to be eliminated with any certainty, and absolutely precluding the possibility of drawing, from the curious comparison of individual phrases and allusions, any legitimate conclusion as to the authorship of the parts of the poem in which these phrases and allusions occur.

9. The homogeneousness of a certain traditional style which the schools of minstrelsy used in early times, renders it hopeless to look for proofs of a different authorship in the region of purely philological expression. So far as language and style are concerned, the style of the Odyssey and of the Iliad are the same; much more the same in every respect, certainly, than any two plays of Shakespeare selected from different ages of his dramatic career; and even, if such a difference of style could be pointed out in the two sections of the Iliad, or in the Odyssey as distinguished from the Iliad, the just conclusion to be drawn from it might be that the style of the same minstrel had suffered a

slight modification, either from the character of the materials which he used, or from the influence of mature years and enlarged experience on a mind of great sensibility and many-sided appreciation.

10. The above considerations must cause us very seriously to pause before entering upon the very adventurous attempt made by the distinguished professor of Greek in Aberdeen to eliminate out of a large section of the Iliad called by Mr. Grote the Achilleid, any large section, and assign its authorship to the Homer of the Odyssey. Against the acceptance of this theory, besides the presumptions arising from the general character and conditions of early minstrel poetry above stated, there will rise up quickly in the minds of many the feeling that though the Odyssey is undoubtedly the more closely compacted structure, the Iliad flashes out in most places with more electric power of genius, and that to admit this genius, and then systematically exsect some of the finest fields where it displays itself, is a very scurvy way of treating the author of the Achilleid, and a very unfair accession of honour laid gratuitously at the door of the Homer of the Odyssey.

11. Taking Professor Geddes' extremely ingenious analysis in detail, it seems impossible for an unprejudiced mind not to feel that he has attached too much significance to slight accidental differences, and that, even allowing these differences to he greater than they are, they by no means, logically or æsthetically, warrant his conclusions.

12. In the first place, his criterion of geographical knowledge proves only that the strictly Achillean books of the Iliad moved in a narrower field of geographical association than that which belonged to other heroes of the war. Though an Odyssey had never been written, this is precisely what must have occurred, as the poem grew to larger dimensions under the busy hand of the wandering minstrel. The fact on which Professor Geddes dwells with special emphasis under this head, viz., that "EXλas, and "EXλnves, acquire a gcographical extension in the Odyssey, and what he calls the Ulysses books of the Iliad, which does not occur in any of the books of the Achilleid, may be explained partly by the loose use of local names in those early times of continual drift among the peoples, and partly may be attributed to the influence of later rhapsodists using the geographical phraseology of their own time.

13. The criterion of humour and pathos is utterly worthless. That the author of the Iliad has a fair perception of the humorous is evident from the description of Vulcan performing waiter's service to the gods in the Olympian Banquet of Book I.; and, if there be more of this playful cheerfulness in the Odyssey, it is simply because the intense warlike fury of the Iliad, and the general dignity of its theme, will not allow large scope for the exhibition of it. As to pathos, to vindicate to a separate author all the passages in the Iliad where tenderness and delicacy of sentiment are prominent, is simply to make the author of the Achilleid what no great poet is, though a stoic may be, a man

without a tear. Pathetic pieces are introduced in the Iliad simply because the author of the poem was a great poet, and because he was only too thankful, when his subject allowed him, to be deaf for a season to the rattling of war chariots, and to allow the gentle sounds of pastoral peace and domestic tenderness to wander innocently through his ear.

14. Similar remarks apply to the criterion of conjugal honour and affection. The author of the Iliad could not always expatiate on the methods of cutting throats epically; so he might be allowed a little connubial scene between Hector and Andromache, without being supposed to have any mystical connexion with Ulysses and Penelope.

15. The criterion of honour to Ulysses amounts simply to this. Ulysses as a type of the diplomatic man stands in exactly the same relation to Achilles that Cavour did to Garibaldi in the great Italian war. The author of the Iliad did him special honour in the part of the Iliad where he brings him on the stage; and that is all. In the so-called Achillean books, if he appears less prominent and less noble, perhaps it is simply because Homer was a good artist, and knew when to employ, and how to treat, his principal figures.

16. In the chapter of latent sympathies and antipathies I can find nothing that supports the thesis of the learned Professor. If Hector, in what he calls the Ulyssean books, is the beau ideal of a courtier, brave and tender, as the case may require, and appears somewhat of a boaster and a bully and a coward, in the concluding portion of the Achilleid, this contradiction on the part of the poet, or blunder if you choose, is the natural product of the over-action of the sympathetic and the patriotic element combined in the minstrel's mind. Before Achilles neither gods nor men can stand; so even the brave Hector must seem a coward, precisely as Pallas Athene, the most perfect character in the Greek Olympus, becomes an instigator of perjury, simply because the patriotic pulses in the poet's heart make him forget his morality. Similar remarks apply to the fair Helen; if she is heaped up with epithets of praise in the supposed Ulyssean books, it is simply because Achilles is out of the way for the nonce, and there is room to tell about other people; and it may be also, as Professor Geddes says, that she was naturally better known and more talked of in the ballads of Southern Greece, than in those of Northern Thessaly, but this proves nothing at all as to the special authorship of the poet, whoever he was, who put these materials into their present shape.

17. In his 12th chapter Professor Geddes lays down as the result of his minute observations on theological matters in Homer, that there is the same relation between the theology of the Achilleid and that of the Odyssey as geologists recognize between palæozoic and neozoic epochs in the strata of the earth's crust; in other words, that in the course of the development of religious ideas, the theology of the Odyssey and the Odyssean books of the Iliad stands as high above the theology