[17] Quarterly Review, p. 58.
[18] Ibid. p. 58.
[19] Quarterly Review, p. 60.
[APPENDIX D]
THE LOST EPICS AND THE HOMERIC EPICS (WIEDERHOLUNGEN)
In Chapter XVIII., on Homer and the "Cyclic" Poems, I fear that I have not succeeded in understanding Mr. Murray's view of the subject. The fault of misapprehension is not perhaps entirely without excuse. Generally speaking, I give the erroneous impression that Mr. Murray thinks the Iliad later than what are usually called the "Cyclic" poems on the themes connected with Troy. He certainly says that passages in the Iliad "seem to be derived from the Cypria, the Little Iliad, and the Sack of Ilion, the so-called Aethiopis...."[1]
He also says: "In its actual working up, however, our Iliad has reached a further stage of development than the ordinary run of poetic chronicles, if I may use the term." Moreover, "we happen to know that there was an old chronicle poem which both contained a catalogue of the ships[2] and also narrated at length the assembling of the fleet at Aulis—the so-called Cypria or Cyprian verses. Our Catalogue has in all probability been taken from there."[3] Here we are told that our Iliad derives some passages and the Catalogue from an old chronicle poem, the Cypria, and from several other named epics, "the Little Iliad, and the Sack of Ilion, the so-called Aethiopis," while, "in actual working up, our Iliad has reached a further stage of development than the ordinary run of poetic chronicles...." It was natural that, on hearing how the Iliad borrowed from an old chronicle poem, the Cypria, I should think that the Cypria was regarded as an old chronicle poem complete in itself before it was borrowed from by the Iliad. The chronicle poem of events so mythical and remote could not resemble a monastic chronicle in receiving additions from contemporary history. This remark also applies to the other poems with names, Sack of Ilion, and so on, and with contents which must be definitely known, if it be known that the Iliad borrowed from them, or seems to have borrowed from them. One could not but be convinced, then, that these old books which lent, were supposed to be earlier finished than the book, the Iliad, which borrowed from them. But Mr. Murray also said, and here the prospect wavers: "The truth is that these various books or masses of tradition were growing up side by side for centuries. All the great books were growing up together, and passages could be repeated from any one to any other."[4]
Now a book is one thing—a book with a name, such as Cypria, is not equivalent to "a mass of tradition," which is another thing. To take an example, we have The Wallace of Blind Harry (circ. 1460), a book about as long as the Odyssey. Harry's materials were "a mass of tradition," including, it is believed, popular ballads, concerning events then remote by a century and a half. We cannot call the mass of tradition "a book which was growing up"; nor can we call the mass of tradition about the Graeco-Trojan affairs before the tenth year of the siege, a book. There is no book till the Cypria is made, and the Cypria cannot be borrowed from before it is made. A poet who relies on the mass of tradition is not borrowing from a book, any more than Harry was borrowing from a book (his use of an alleged book by Wallace's chaplain, John Blair, is another question). Manifestly incidents from a mass of tradition about Thebes, about the Greek and Trojan affairs before the war, and so on, may be introduced into an epic about the actual siege of Troy. That is all very natural and probable. But if a poem, with a definite name and a definite scope, the Iliad, borrow passages from another poem with a definite scope and name, the Cypria or others, then the poem that lends is the earlier, and the poem that borrows is the later. It was the use by Mr. Murray of these definite names of poems, Cypria, Little Iliad, Aethiopis, and so on, with his assertion that another book, the Iliad, borrows passages from them, which led me to suppose that the lending poems were, in his opinion, complete (in one form or another) when the Iliad borrowed from them. Here I misinterpreted him.