It seems by a passage of Plato (Phædrus, p. 252), that the Homêridæ professed to possess unpublished verses of their ancestral poet—ἔπη ἀποθέτα. Compare Plato, Republic, p. 599, and Isocrat. Helen, p. 218.
[238] Nitzsch (De Historiâ Homeri, Fascic. 1, p. 128, Fascic. 2, p. 71), and Ulrici (Geschichte der Episch. Poesie, vol. i. pp. 240-381) question the antiquity of the Homêrid gens, and limit their functions to simple reciters, denying that they ever composed songs or poems of their own. Yet these gentes, such as the Euneidæ, the Lykomidæ, the Butadæ, the Talthybiadæ, the descendants of Cheirôn at Peliôn, etc., the Hesychidæ (Schol. Sophocl. Œdip. Col. 489), (the acknowledged parallels of the Homêridæ), may be surely all considered as belonging to the earliest known elements of Grecian history: rarely, at least, if ever, can such gens, with its tripartite character of civil, religious, and professional, be shown to have commenced at any recent period. And in the early times, composer and singer were one person: often at least, though probably not always, the bard combined both functions. The Homeric ἀοιδὸς sings his own compositions; and it is reasonable to imagine that many of the early Homêrids did the same.
See Niebuhr, Römisch. Gesch. vol. i. p. 324; and the treatise, Ueber die Sikeler in der Odyssee,—in the Rheinisches Museum, 1828, p. 257; and Boeckh, in the Index of Contents to his Lectures of 1834.
“The sage Vyasa (observes Professor Wilson, System of Hindu Mythology, Int. p. lxii.) is represented, not as the author, but as the arranger and compiler of the Vedas and the Puránás. His name denotes his character, meaning the arranger or distributor (Welcker gives the same meaning to the name Homer); and the recurrence of many Vyasas,—many individuals who new-modelled the Hindu scriptures,—has nothing in it that is improbable, except the fabulous intervals by which their labors are separated.” Individual authorship and the thirst of personal distinction, are in this case also buried under one great and common name, as in the case of Homer.
[239] Thucyd. i. 3.
[240] See the statements and citations respecting the age of Homer, collected in Mr. Clinton’s Chronology, vol. i. p. 146. He prefers the view of Aristotle, and places the Iliad and Odyssey a century earlier than I am inclined to do,—940-927 B. C.
Kratês, probably placed the poet anterior to the Return of the Hêrakleids, because the Iliad makes no mention of Dorians in Peloponnêsus: Eratosthenês may be supposed to have grounded his date on the passage of the Iliad, which mentions the three generations descended from Æneas. We should have been glad to know the grounds of the very low date assigned by Theopompus and Euphoriôn.
The pseudo-Herodotus, in his life of Homer, puts the birth of the poet one hundred and sixty-eight years after the Trojan war.
[241] Herodot. ii. 53. Hêrakleides Ponticus affirmed that Lykurgus had brought into Peloponnêsus the Homeric poems, which had before been unknown out of Ionia. The supposed epoch of Lykurgus has sometimes been employed to sustain the date here assigned to the Homeric poems; but everything respecting Lykurgus is too doubtful to serve as evidence in other inquiries.
[242] The Homeric hymns are proœms of this sort, some very short, consisting only of a few lines,—others of considerable length. The Hymn (or, rather, one of the two hymns) to Apollo is cited by Thucydidês as the Proœm of Apollo.