Examples from the Iliad,
not corroborated by recent discoveries.
We cannot verify what these poets describe by anything which we know in historical Greece, without making very large allowances. The games, for example, described in the twenty-third book of the Iliad, are totally distinct in character from the Olympic games,—the oldest historical contests of the same kind known to us. The monarchy of Agamemnon and of Menelaus is totally different
from that of Sparta, which survived into the light of history; and even the poets themselves constantly tell you that they speak of men not such as the men of their own day, but greater, stronger, and happier. On the other hand, when we seek for support from the very ancient remains found at Mycenæ, Tiryns, and Troy in recent years, we find no clear corroboration, and must admit that the arms, the dress, and probably the life of the great men whose splendour we have unearthed do not correspond to the descriptions of the same things in Homer. This has been the subject of a special book by W. Helbig[46:1], and the general result at which he arrives is merely negative. The civilization found by Dr. Schliemann is apparently not that of Homer. Is the latter then purely imaginary, neither prehistoric nor historic? Is the life described as artificial as the language?
Fick's account of the Homeric dialect.
§ 24. For now we are assured, by the researches of Fick, that the apparent jumble of dialects in the poems cannot possibly be any original language which embraced all the dialects, far less a judicious selection from each due to the genius of the poet, but rather the incongruous result of the adaptation of an older form (Æolic) to the wants of a newer and different (Ionic) public. This rehandling of great poems to make them intelligible is an almost universal phenomenon, and now affords us the first reasonable theory for the extraordinary facts presented by Homer's language. Of course there are
later poems, and possibly later passages in the old poems, where this artificial dialect was deliberately imitated by men who found it already achieved, and merely accepted it as the received epic language. But these passages are insignificant. The body of the poems seems to have been rehandled for the practical purpose of making them intelligible, just as Dryden rehandled Chaucer.
Difficulties in the theory.
In this theory of Fick, which he has defended with extraordinary acuteness and learning, we have the greatest advance made in our day as regards the language of Homer. Of course it has not yet been accepted by the world of scholars[47:1]. I myself think Fick's weak point is his close adherence to the dissection of the Iliad into three successive layers by A. Kirchhoff, and his attempt to show that the parts severed from the older as accretions by Kirchhoff are also exactly the parts which were composed in the later (Ionic) dialect, and which therefore do not show the traces of older forms elsewhere to be found. Fick may be right even here; but I am not persuaded by his arguments[47:2].
