At all events we have seen that there is a very serious objection on chronological grounds to the view that Hesiod's poems were composed in a form of 'impure Ionic' borrowed from the Asiatic coast. In this case it is surely far more probable that the Ionic element is due to the rhapsodists, whether in Chalcis or Athens. But is there any real reason for denying that the Homeric poems may have had a similar experience? This is a question which I do not feel qualified to answer. But it seems to me to deserve more attention from scholars than it has received as yet.
In this chapter we have seen that the Homeric poems contain elements of great antiquity. Although we have no means of fixing an exact date for these elements, we can hardly doubt that they originated at a time before iron had come into general use for weapons. According to the prevailing opinion of archaeologists this innovation cannot have taken place after the tenth century. We need not suppose that any considerable portions of the poems in their present form date from such an early period. But the 'type' must have been fixed by that time, and to a considerable extent also the subject-matter.
Still more clearly we have seen that there is no ground for supposing that the earlier and later elements are separated from one another by a wide interval. For the idea that the earlier elements reflect the conditions of the last age of Mycenean splendour—probably about the thirteenth century—while the later elements betray acquaintance with conditions of the seventh century, we have not been able to find any justification. The period intervening between the Mycenean age and the beginning of the classical age is certainly one which has as yet yielded comparatively little to archaeological research. But our discussion has led us to infer that the conditions of life reflected in the poems throughout belong to some part of this period, rather than that they are due to a combination taken from the preceding and following ages[353] with a more or less blank interval of some five or six centuries.
I have spoken advisedly of earlier and later 'elements' rather than of earlier and later 'portions' in the poems. Elaborate analyses, such as that proposed for the Odyssey by Prof. von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, are admittedly hopeless unless we assent to the hypothesis that the person responsible for the final form of the poem possessed a written text; and we have seen that this hypothesis is open to grave objections. The existence of different strata in the work must doubtless be conceded. We may even allow that it is built up out of shorter epics. But I cannot admit that such a poem as the Odyssey can be successfully constructed out of shorter ones by stringing the latter together, even if we do grant that the additions made by the editor amount to a sixth part of the whole[354]. It is questionable therefore whether we are justified in regarding the last stratum as the work of an 'editor'—whether we ought not rather to regard this person as the 'author' of our poem. He must have used earlier pieces, and he may have incorporated them in large mass in his work. But we have no guarantee that he did not greatly expand his materials as well as provide connecting links between them.
In the Iliad we are confronted to a certain extent with the same problems. But the process of unification does not appear to have been carried out so thoroughly and the proportion of early matter incorporated is probably much greater. The point however which I would especially emphasise in both cases alike is that the unification process cannot be used as an argument for lateness of date. If we bear in mind the undoubtedly archaic character of both poems, the paucity of inconsistencies points to an entirely opposite conclusion. The greater the amount of matter which we attribute to the last strata, the shorter must be the period during which the poems grew until they reached their final form.
Lastly we have seen that though the linguistic evidence agrees very well with the tradition that 'Homer' belonged to Smyrna (or Chios), there are very serious objections to the view that the poems were originally composed in the Ionic dialect[355]. They may have been subsequently Ionicised in their original home, but even that is scarcely certain. The form in which they have come down to us belongs properly to the western Ionic of the islands, which in early times was used as a literary language in Athens.
FOOTNOTES:
[292] Plutarch, Solon, cap. 10; Diogenes Laertius, Solon, cap. 48, etc. In some form or other the story was known to Aristotle (Rhet. I 15).