CHAPTER XVII
CONCLUSION
The conclusion at which we arrive is that the Iliad, as a whole, is the work of one age. That it has reached us without interpolations and lacunae and remaniements perhaps no person of ordinary sense will allege. But that the mass of the Epic is of one age appears to be a natural inference from the breakdown of the hypotheses which attempt to explain it as a late mosaic. We have also endeavoured to prove, quite apart from the failure of theories of expansion and compilation, that the Iliad presents an historical unity, unity of character, unity of customary law, and unity in its archaeology. If we are right, we must have an opinion as to how the Epic was preserved.
If we had evidence for an Homeric school, we might imagine that the Epic was composed by dint of memory, and preserved, like the Sanskrit Hymns of the Rig Veda, and the Hymns of the Maoris, the Zuñis, and other peoples in the lower or middle stage of barbarism, by the exertions and teaching of schools. But religious hymns and mythical hymns—the care of a priesthood—are one thing; a great secular epic is another. Priests will not devote themselves from age to age to its conservation. It cannot be conserved, with its unity of tone and character, and, on the whole, even of language, by generations of paid strollers, who recite new lays of their own, as well as any old lays that they may remember, which they alter at pleasure.
We are thus driven back to the theory of early written texts, not intended to meet the wants of a reading public, but for the use of the poet himself and of those to whom he may bequeath his work. That this has been a method in which orally published epics were composed and preserved in a non-reading age we have proved in our chapter on the French Chansons de Geste. Unhappily, the argument that what was done in mediaeval France might be done in sub-Mycenaean Greece, is based on probabilities, and these are differently estimated by critics of different schools. All seems to depend on each individual's sense of what is "likely." In that case science has nothing to make in the matter. Nitzsche thought that writing might go back to the time of Homer. Mr. Monro thought it "probable enough that writing, even if known at the time of Homer, was not used for literary purposes." {Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. p. xxxv.} Sir Richard Jebb, as we saw, took a much more favourable view of the probability of early written texts. M. Salomon Reinach, arguing from the linear written clay tablets of Knossos and from a Knossian cup with writing on it in ink, thinks that there may have existed whole "Minoan" libraries—manuscripts executed on perishable materials, palm leaves, papyrus, or parchment. {Footnote: L'Anthropologie, vol. xv, pp. 292, 293.} Mr. Leaf, while admitting that "writing was known in some form through the whole period of epic development," holds that "it is in the highest degree unlikely that it was ever employed to form a standard text of the Epic or any portion of it.... At best there was a continuous tradition of those portions of the poems which were especially popular ..." {Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. pp. xvi., xvii.} Father Browne dates the employment of writing for the preservation of the Epic "from the sixth century onwards." {Footnote: Handbook of Homeric Study, p. 134.} He also says that "it is difficult to suppose that the Mycenaeans, who were certainly in contact with this form of writing" (the Cretan linear), "should not have used it much more freely than our direct evidence warrants us in asserting." He then mentions the Knossian cup "with writing inscribed on it apparently in pen and ink ... The conclusion is that ordinary writing was in use, but that the materials, probably palm leaves, have disappeared." {Footnote: Ibid., pp. 258, 259.}
Why it should be unlikely that a people confessedly familiar with writing used it for the preservation of literature, when we know that even the Red Indians preserve their songs by means of pictographs, while West African tribes use incised characters, is certainly not obvious. Many sorts of prae-Phoenician writing were current during the Mycenaean age in Asia, Egypt, Assyria, and in Cyprus. As these other peoples used writing of their own sort for literary purposes, it is not easy to see why the Cretans, for example, should not have done the same thing. Indeed, Father Browne supposes that the Mycenaeans used "ordinary writing," and used it freely. Nevertheless, the Epic was not written, he says, till the sixth century B.C. Cauer, indeed, remarks that "the Finnish epic" existed unwritten till Lbnnrot, its Pisistratus, first collected it from oral recitation. {Footnote: Grundfragen der Homerkritik, p. 94.} But there is not, and never was, any "Finnish epic." There were cosmogonic songs, as among the Maoris and Zuñis—songs of the beginnings of things; there were magical songs, songs of weddings, a song based on the same popular tale that underlies the legend of the Argonauts. There were songs of the Culture Hero, songs of burial and feast, and of labour. Lönnrot collected these, and tried by interpolations to make an epic out of them; but the point, as Comparetti has proved, is that he failed. There is no Finnish epic, only a mass of Volkslieder. Cauer's other argument, that the German popular tales, Grimm's tales, were unwritten till 1812, is as remote from the point at issue. Nothing can be less like an epic than a volume of Märchen.
As usual we are driven back upon a literary judgment. Is the Iliad a patchwork of metrical Märchen or is it an epic nobly constructed? If it is the former, writing was not needed; if it is the latter, in the absence of Homeric guilds or colleges, only writing can account for its preservation.
It is impossible to argue against a critic's subjective sense of what is likely. Possibly that sense is born of the feeling that the Cretan linear script, for example, or the Cyprian syllabary, looks very odd and outlandish. The critic's imagination boggles at the idea of an epic written in such scripts. In that case his is not the scientific imagination; he is checked merely by the unfamiliar. Or his sense of unlikelihood may be a subconscious survival of Wolf's opinion, formed by him at a time when the existence of the many scripts of the old world was unknown.
Our own sense of probability leads us to the conclusion that, in an age when people could write, people wrote down the Epic. If they applied their art to literature, then the preservation of the Epic is explained. Written first in a prae-Phoenician script, it continued to be written in the Greek adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet. There was not yet, probably, a reading public, but there were a few clerkly men.