To villain-bonds and despot sway.
—Byron; The Giaour.
CONCLUDING SUMMARY
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE HELLENIC SPIRIT
Written Specially for the Present Work
By DR. ULRICH von WILAMOWITZ-MÖLLENDORFF
Professor of Classical Philology in the University of Berlin, etc.
Homer stands at the beginning of Greek history; nothing before him, nothing beside him, a great gulf fixed between him and everything after; yet there is nothing Greek on which his light or shadow does not fall. Homer is a world in himself, and what a world he is! In the eyes of many, even to this day, he stands for the sum total of the Greek spirit; in the eyes of some, for the whole body of poetry. What the two epics set before us is so complete, so individual, that in spite of all concessions in detail, the oneness of the poem and of the author is constantly obtruding itself upon our notice anew. Homer is so little antiquated that he seems to be of no age; we place him in a sunnier morning-time of mankind, that is all; but to range him in the sequence of history, to conceive of him as under conditions of time and place seems like profanation; this, like so much else, he has in common with the Old Testament. And yet to classify him thus is the first necessity of real comprehension. The Greeks themselves have not done much to help us. About the time of Socrates a school of æsthetic criticism restricted the sacred name of the poet Homer, certainly not without some show of reason, to the Iliad and the Odyssey; and thus these poems have come down to us, but the price we pay is the loss of all others of equally Homeric origin; and hence Homer stands more than ever alone. The last word of the philology of antiquity was that Homer ought to be explained only by himself. Modern philology seemed on the way to the same conclusion.