The Pisistratean hypothesis "was not so long ago unfashionable, but in the last few years a clear reaction has set in," says Mr. Leaf. {Footnote: Iliad, i. p. XIX.}
The reaction has not affected that celebrated scholar, Dr. Blass, who, with Teutonic frankness, calls the Pisistratean edition "an absurd legend." {Footnote: Blass, Die Interpolationen in der Odyssee, pp. I, 2. Halle, 1904.} Meyer says that the Alexandrians rejected the Pisistratean story "as a worthless fable," differing here from Mr. Leaf and Wilamowitz; and he spurns the legend, saying that it is incredible that the whole Greek world would allow the tyrants of Athens to palm off a Homer on them. {Footnote: Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii. 390, 391. 1893.}
Mr. T. W. Allen, an eminent textual scholar, treats the Pisistratean editor with no higher respect. In an Egyptian papyrus containing a fragment of Julius Africanus, a Christian chronologer, Mr. Allen finds him talking confidently of the Pisistratidae. They "stitched together the rest of the epic," but excised some magical formulae which Julius Africanus preserves. Mr. Allen remarks: "The statements about Pisistratus belong to a well-established category, that of Homeric mythology.... The anecdotes about Pisistratus and the poet himself are on a par with Dares, who 'wrote the Iliad before Homer.'" {Footnote: Classical Review xviii. 148.}
The editor of Pisistratus is hardly in fashion, though that is of no importance. Of importance is the want of evidence for the editor, and, as we have shown, the impossible character of the task allotted to him by the theory.
As I suppose Mr. Leaf to insinuate, "fashion" has really nothing to do with the question. People who disbelieve in written texts must, and do, oscillate between the theory of an Homeric "school" and the Wolfian theory that Pisistratus, or Solon, or somebody procured the making of the first written text at Athens in the sixth century—a theory which fails to account for the harmony of the picture of life in the poems, and, as Mr. Monro, Grote, Nutzhorn, and many others argue, lacks evidence.
As Mr. Monro reasons, and as Blass states the case bluntly, "Solon, or Pisistratus, or whoever it was, put a stop, at least as far as Athens was concerned, to the mangling of Homer" by the rhapsodists or reciters, each anxious to choose a pet passage, and not going through the whole Iliad in due sequence. "But the unity existed before the mangling. That this has been so long and so stubbornly misunderstood is no credit to German scholarship: blind uncritical credulity on one side, limitless and arbitrary theorising on the other!" We are not solitary sceptics when we decline to accept the theory of Mr. Leaf. It is neither bottomed on evidence nor does it account for the facts in the case. That is to say, the evidence appeals to Mr. Leaf as valid, but is thought worse than inadequate by other great scholars, such as Monro and Blass; while the fact of the harmony of the picture of life, preserved through four or five centuries, appears to be left without explanation.
Mr. Leaf holds that, in order to organise recitations in due sequence, the making of a text, presenting, for the first time, a due sequence, was necessary. His opponents hold that the sequence already existed, but was endangered by the desultory habits of the rhapsodists. We must here judge each for himself; there is no court of final appeal.
I confess to feeling some uncertainty about the correctness of my statement of Mr. Leaf's opinions. He and I both think an early Attic "recension" probable, or almost certain. But (see' "Conclusion") I regard such recension as distinct from the traditional "edition" of Pisistratus. Mr. Leaf, I learn, does not regard the "edition" as having "made" the Iliad; yet his descriptions of the processes and methods of his Pisistratean editor correspond to my idea of the "making" of our Iliad as it stands. See, for example, Mr. Leaf's Introduction to Iliad, Book II. He will not even insist on the early Attic as the first written text; if it was not, its general acceptance seems to remain a puzzle. He discards the idea of one Homeric "school" of paramount authority, but presumes that, as recitation was a profession, there must have been schools. We do not hear of them or know the nature of their teaching. The Beauvais "school" of jongleurs in Lent (fourteenth century A.D.) seems to have been a holiday conference of strollers.