As the general result of a century of Homeric controversy, instinctive appreciation may be said broadly to have got the better of verbal criticism. Not but that the latter has done valuable work; but it is now pretty plainly seen to have been, in some quarters, carried considerably too far. The triumphs enjoyed by German advocates of the ‘Kleinliedertheorie’—of the disjunction, that is to say, of the Epics into numerous separate lays—are generally recognised to have been merely temporary. A large body of opinion was, at the outset, captivated by their arguments; it has of late tended to swing back towards some approximation to the old orthodoxy. There is, indeed, much difficulty in conceiving the profound and essential unity apparent to unprejudiced readers of the Iliad and Odyssey to be illusory; nor should it be forgotten that the evoking of a cosmos from a chaos implies a single regulative intelligence. And a cosmos each poem might very well be called; while the ‘embryon atoms’ from which they sprang, of legends, stories, myths, and traditions, constituted scarcely less than an
Ocean without bound,
Without dimension; where length, breadth, and highth,
And time, and place, are lost.
The Odyssey and the Iliad, however, stand in this respect by no means on the same footing. In the former, fundamental unity is obvious; the development of the plot is logical and continuous; there are no considerable redundancies, no superfluous adventures, no oblivious interludes; the sense of progress towards a purposed end pervades the whole. Careful scrutiny, it is true, detects, in the details of the narrative, some few trifling discrepancies; but attempts to remove them by tampering with the general plan of its structure lead at once to intolerable anomalies. So much cannot be said for the Iliad. Here the component strata are manifestly dislocated, and some intruded masses can be clearly identified. Thus the Tenth Book at once detaches itself both in substance and style from the remaining cantos. It narrates an adventure wholly disconnected from the main action unfolded in them, and narrates it with a coolness and easy fluency very unlike the rush and glow of genuine Iliadic verse. Few, accordingly, are the critics who venture to claim the episode, brilliant and interesting though it be, as an integral part of the original poem. Yet even when it has been set aside, things do not go altogether straight. The basis of the story is furnished by the wrath of Achilles and its direful consequences; but while the hero sulks in his tent, a good deal of miscellaneous and largely irrespective fighting proceeds, during which he sinks out of sight, and is only transiently kept in mind. Zeus himself is allowed to forget his solemn promise to Thetis of avenging, through the defeat of the Greeks, the injury done to her son by Agamemnon; and the Olympian machinery generally works in an ill-regulated and haphazard fashion. Moreover, the embassy of conciliation in the Ninth Book is ignored later on; while the Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Books, devoted mainly to the obsequies of Patroclus and Hector, have by some critics been deemed superfluous, by others inconsistent with an exordium announcing—as Pope has it—
The wrath that hurled to Pluto’s gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain,
Whose limbs unburied by the naked shore,
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore.
Through the weight of these objections, Mr. Grote felt compelled to dissever the Iliad into a primitive part, which he called the Achilleid, and a mass of accessional poetry, most likely of diverse origin and date. And a similar view still prevails. Only that the Achilleid has been cut down, by further retrenchments, to the compass of a somewhat prolix Lay, treating, as its express subject, of the ‘Wrath’ of Achilles. Dr. Leaf indeed accentuates the separation by upholding the probable origin, on opposite sides of the Ægean, of the nuclear and adventitious portions of the Epic.