A person, putting these questions to Greeks of different towns and ages, would have obtained answers widely discrepant and contradictory. Since the invaluable labors of Aristarchus and the other Alexandrine critics on the text of the Iliad and Odyssey, it has, indeed, been customary to regard those two (putting aside the Hymns, and a few other minor poems) as being the only genuine Homeric compositions: and the literary men called Chorizontes, or the Separators, at the head of whom were Xenôn and Hellanikus, endeavored still farther to reduce the number by disconnecting the Iliad and Odyssey, and pointing out that both could not be the work of the same author. Throughout the whole course of Grecian antiquity, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the Hymns, have been received as Homeric: but if we go back to the time of Herodotus, or still earlier, we find that several other epics also were ascribed to Homer,—and there were not wanting[230] critics, earlier than the Alexandrine age, who regarded the whole Epic Cycle, together with the satirical poem called Margitês, the Batrachomyomachia, and other smaller pieces, as Homeric works. The cyclic Thebaïs and the Epigoni (whether they be two separate poems, or the latter a second part of the former) were in early days currently ascribed to Homer: the same was the case with the Cyprian Verses: some even attributed to him several other poems,[231] the Capture of Œchalia, the Lesser Iliad, the Phokaïs, and the Amazonia. The title of the poem called Thebaïs to be styled Homeric, depends upon evidence more ancient than any which can be produced to authenticate the Iliad and Odyssey: for Kallinus, the ancient elegiac poet (B. C. 640), mentioned Homer as the author of it,—and his opinion was shared by many other competent judges.[232] From the remarkable description given by Herodotus, of the expulsion of the rhapsodes from Sikyôn, by the despot Kleisthenês, in the time of Solôn (about B. C. 580), we may form a probable judgment that the Thebaïs and the Epigoni were then rhapsodized at Sikyôn as Homeric productions.[233] And it is clear from the language of Herodotus, that in his time the general opinion ascribed to Homer both the Cyprian Verses and the Epigoni, though he himself dissents.[234] In spite of such dissent, however, that historian must have conceived the names of Homer and Hesiod to be nearly coextensive with the whole of the ancient epic; otherwise, he would hardly have delivered his memorable judgment, that they two were the framers of Grecian theogony.
The many different cities which laid claim to the birth of Homer (seven is rather below the truth, and Smyrna and Chios are the most prominent among them,) is well known, and most of them had legends to tell respecting his romantic parentage, his alleged blindness, and his life of an itinerant bard, acquainted with poverty and sorrow.[235] The discrepancies of statement respecting the date of his reputed existence are no less worthy of remark; for out of the eight different epochs assigned to him, the oldest differs from the most recent by a period of four hundred and sixty years.
Thus conflicting would have been the answers returned in different portions of the Grecian world to any questions respecting the person of Homer. But there were a poetical gens (fraternity or guild) in the Ionic island of Chios, who, if the question had been put to them, would have answered in another manner. To them, Homer was not a mere antecedent man, of kindred nature with themselves, but a divine or semi-divine eponymus and progenitor, whom they worshipped in their gentile sacrifices, and in whose ascendent name and glory the individuality of every member of the gens was merged. The compositions of each separate Homêrid, or the combined efforts of many of them in conjunction, were the works of Homer: the name of the individual bard perishes and his authorship is forgotten, but the common gentile father lives and grows in renown, from generation to generation, by the genius of his self-renewing sons.
Such was the conception entertained of Homer by the poetical gens called Homêridæ, or Homêrids; and in the general obscurity of the whole case, I lean towards it as the most plausible conception. Homer is not only the reputed author of the various compositions emanating from the gentile members, but also the recipient of the many different legends and of the divine genealogy, which it pleases their imagination to confer upon him. Such manufacture of fictitious personality, and such perfect incorporation of the entities of religion and fancy with the real world, is a process familiar, and even habitual, in the retrospective vision of the Greeks.[236]
It is to be remarked, that the poetical gens here brought to view, the Homêrids, are of indisputable authenticity. Their existence and their considerations were maintained down to the historical times in the island of Chios.[237] If the Homêrids were still conspicuous, even in the days of Akusilaus, Pindar, Hellanikus, and Plato, when their productive invention had ceased, and when they had become only guardians and distributors, in common with others, of the treasures bequeathed by their predecessors,—far more exalted must their position have been three centuries before, while they were still the inspired creators of epic novelty, and when the absence of writing assured to them the undisputed monopoly of their own compositions.[238]
Homer, then, is no individual man, but the divine or heroic father (the ideas of worship and ancestry coalescing, as they constantly did in the Grecian mind) of the gentile Homêrids, and he is the author of the Thebaïs, the Epigoni, the Cyprian Verses, the Proœms, or Hymns, and other poems, in the same sense in which he is the author of the Iliad and Odyssey,—assuming that these various compositions emanate, as perhaps they may, from different individuals numbered among the Homêrids. But this disallowance of the historical personality of Homer is quite distinct from the question, with which it has been often confounded, whether the Iliad and Odyssey are originally entire poems, and whether by one author or otherwise. To us, the name of Homer means these two poems, and little else: we desire to know as much as can be learned respecting their date, their original composition, their preservation, and their mode of communication to the public. All these questions are more or less complicated one with the other.
Concerning the date of the poems, we have no other information except the various affirmations respecting the age of Homer, which differ among themselves (as I have before observed) by an interval of four hundred and sixty years, and which for the most part determine the date of Homer by reference to some other event, itself fabulous and unauthenticated,—such as the Trojan war, the Return of the Hêrakleids, or the Ionic migration. Kratês placed Homer earlier than the Return of the Hêrakleids, and less than eighty years after the Trojan war: Eratosthenês put him one hundred years after the Trojan war: Aristotle, Aristarchus, and Castor made his birth contemporary with the Ionic migration, while Apollodôrus brings him down to one hundred years after that event, or two hundred and forty years after the taking of Troy. Thucydidês assigns to him a date much subsequent to the Trojan war.[239] On the other hand, Theopompus and Euphoriôn refer his age to the far more recent period of the Lydian king, Gyges, (Ol. 18-23, B. C. 708-688,) and put him five hundred years after the Trojan epoch.[240] What were the grounds of these various conjectures, we do not know; though in the statements of Kratês and Eratosthenês, we may pretty well divine. But the oldest dictum preserved to us respecting the date of Homer,—meaning thereby the date of the Iliad and Odyssey,—appears to me at the same time the most credible, and the most consistent with the general history of the ancient epic. Herodotus places Homer four hundred years before himself; taking his departure, not from any fabulous event, but from a point of real and authentic time.[241] Four centuries anterior to Herodotus would be a period commencing with 880 B. C. so that the composition of the Homeric poems would thus fall in a space between 850 and 800 B. C. We may gather from the language of Herodotus that this was his own judgment, opposed to a current opinion, which assigned the poet to an earlier epoch.
To place the Iliad and Odyssey at some periods between 850 B. C. and 776 B. C., appears to me more probable than any other date, anterior or posterior,—more probable than the latter, because we are justified in believing these two poems to be older than Arktinus, who comes shortly after the first Olympiad;—more probable than the former, because, the farther we push the poems back, the more do we enhance the wonder of their preservation, already sufficiently great, down from such an age and society to the historical times.
The mode in which these poems, and indeed all poems, epic as well as lyric, down to the age (probably) of Peisistratus, were circulated and brought to bear upon the public, deserves particular attention. They were not read by individuals alone and apart, but sung or recited at festivals or to assembled companies. This seems to be one of the few undisputed facts with regard to the great poet: for even those who maintain that the Iliad and Odyssey were preserved by means of writing, seldom contend that they were read.
In appreciating the effect of the poems, we must always take account of this great difference between early Greece and our own times,—between the congregation mustered at a solemn festival, stimulated by community of sympathy, listening to a measured and musical recital from the lips of trained bards or rhapsodes, whose matter was supposed to have been inspired by the Muse,—and the solitary reader, with a manuscript before him; such manuscript being, down to a very late period in Greek literature, indifferently written, without division into parts, and without marks of punctuation. As in the case of dramatic performances, in all ages, so in that of the early Grecian epic,—a very large proportion of its impressive effect was derived from the talent of the reciter and the force of the general accompaniments, and would have disappeared altogether in solitary reading. Originally, the bard sung his own epical narrative, commencing with a proœmium or hymn to one of the gods:[242] his profession was separate and special, like that of the carpenter, the leech, or the prophet: his manner and enunciation must have required particular training no less than his imaginative faculty. His character presents itself in the Odyssey as one highly esteemed; and in the Iliad, even Achilles does not disdain to touch the lyre with his own hands, and to sing heroic deeds.[243] Not only did the Iliad and Odyssey, and the poems embodied in the Epic Cycle, produce all their impression and gain all their renown by this process of oral delivery, but even the lyric and choric poets who succeeded them were known and felt in the same way by the general public, even after the full establishment of habits of reading among lettered men. While in the case of the epic, the recitation or singing had been extremely simple, and the measure comparatively little diversified, with no other accompaniment than that of the four-stringed harp,—all the variations superinduced upon the original hexameter, beginning with the pentameter and iambus, and proceeding step by step to the complicated strophês of Pindar and the tragic writers, still left the general effect of the poetry greatly dependent upon voice and accompaniments, and pointedly distinguished from mere solitary reading of the words. And in the dramatic poetry, the last in order of time, the declamation and gesture of the speaking actor alternated with the song and dance of the chorus, and with the instruments of musicians, the whole being set off by imposing visible decorations. Now both dramatic effect and song are familiar in modern times, so that every man knows the difference between reading the words and hearing them under the appropriate circumstances: but poetry, as such, is, and has now long been, so exclusively enjoyed by reading, that it requires an especial memento to bring us back to the time when the Iliad and Odyssey were addressed only to the ear and feelings of a promiscuous and sympathizing multitude. Readers there were none, at least until the century preceding Solôn and Peisistratus: from that time forward, they gradually increased both in number and influence; though doubtless small, even in the most literary period of Greece, as compared with modern European society. So far as the production of beautiful epic poetry was concerned, however, the select body of instructed readers, furnished a less potent stimulus than the unlettered and listening crowd of the earlier periods. The poems of Chœrilus and Antimachus, towards the close of the Peloponnesian war, though admired by erudite men, never acquired popularity; and the emperor Hadrian failed in his attempt to bring the latter poet into fashion at the expense of Homer.[244]