On the one hand, then, it may be readily admitted that the Homeric poems were exposed, before they were reduced to writing, to the powerful and various action of disintegrating causes. Among these we may name neglect, inability to cope with the real difficulties of their transmission, the personal vanity of the rhapsodists, and the local vanity of communities. But I think we have also disclosed to us, both by the fragmentary notices of the history of the poems if taken in their collective effect, and by the state of things in and upon which the Alexandrian critics laboured, the operation of an immense amount of restorative counter-agency. All chance of our arriving at a sober judgment must depend upon our duly weighing these two sets of forces in their relation to one another. There were indeed tendencies, which may well be called irresistible, to aberrations from the traditional standard; but there were barriers also insurmountable, which seem to have confined those aberrations within certain limits. They could not proceed beyond a given point without awakening the consciousness, that Homer, the priceless treasure of Greece, and perhaps the first source of its keener consciousness of nationality, was in danger of being disfigured, and deformed, and so lost; and that sense, when once awakened, without doubt generated such reactions as we find exemplified in the proceedings of Pisistratus.
We may indeed derive directly, from the force of the destroying element, when viewed in detail, the strongest proof that there must have been an original standard, by recurrence to which its ravages could from time to time be repaired. For if that element had worked without such means of correction, I do not see how we could now have been in possession of an Iliad and an Odyssey. As with regard to religions after they are parted from their source, the tendency would have been to continually-increasing divergence. The dissimilarities arising from omission, alteration, and interpolation, would have grown, so as to embrace larger and larger portions of the poems, and at this day, instead of merely questioning this or that line in a few places, and comparing this with that reading, we should have been deliberating among a dozen Iliads and a dozen Odysseys, to discover which were the true.
If, then, it be said that the proceedings of Pisistratus or of Solon, bear testimony not to the soundness but to the incessant corruption of the text, my answer is, they bear witness to its corruption, just as the records of the repairs of Westminster Abbey might be said, and truly said, to bear testimony to its disrepair. That partial and local faults, and dislocations, would creep in, is as certain as that wind and weather act upon the stoutest fabric: but when we read of the repairs of a building, we infer that pains were taken to make it habitable; and when we read of the restorations of Homer, we perceive that it was an object of public solicitude to keep the poems in a state of soundness. As, indeed, the building most used will cæteris paribus require the most frequent repairs, so the elementary causes of corruption, by carelessness, might operate most powerfully in a case where the poet might be recited by every strolling minstrel at a local festivity: but it is also clear that in these very cases there would be the greatest anxiety to detect and to eliminate the destructive elements, when once they were seen to be making head. But, in truth, the analogy of a building does not represent the case. Edifices are sometimes disfigured by the parsimony of after-times: but there was no time, so far as we know, when Greece did not rate the value of Homer more highly than the cost of taking care of him. Again, the architects of degenerate ages think, as Bernini did of Michael Angelo, that they can improve upon their designs: but the name of no Greek has been recorded who thought he could improve upon Homer, and the vanity of the nameless was likely to be checked by their companions and competitors.
We have principally had in view the question, whether Homer was, in a peculiar degree, guarded against any profound and radical corruption which might grow out of unchecked carelessness; but the result will be not more unfavourable, if we ask how did he stand in regard to the other great fountain-head of evil, namely, falsification with a purpose? Now, the fact, that in any given case provision is made for jealous custody against any attack from without, affords no proof, or even presumption, against the subsistence of destroying causes within. But the Greeks, as a nation, had no motive to corrupt, and had every motive to preserve the text of Homer. His national office and position have been admirably expressed by Statius, in verses on the Trojan expedition:—
Tum primùm Græcia vires
Contemplata suas: tum sparsa ac dissona moles,
In corpus vultumque coït[92].
His works were the very cradle of the nation; there it first visibly lived and breathed. They were the most perfect expression of every Greek feeling and desire: in the rivalry between the Hellenic race and the (afterwards so called) βάρβαροι of Asia, they gave, in forms the most effective and the most artful, everything worth having to the former, and left the later Greek nothing to add. What void to be filled could even vanity discover, when so many Greek chieftains, inferior, in a degree never measured, to Achilles, were, nevertheless, each of them, too strong for the prince of Trojan warriors?
But it may perhaps be replied that, even supposing that collective Greece could gain nothing by corrupting Homer, yet the relative distribution of honour among the principal States might be affected to the profit of one and the prejudice of another. Now it is plain that, in this delicate and vital point, the sectional jealousies of the Greeks would afford the best possible security to the general contents of the text: something of the same security that the hatred of the Jews and the Samaritans supplied, when they became rival guardians of the books of the Old Testament. Argos, deeply interested for Diomed, and Lacedæmon for Menelaus, and both for Agamemnon, were watchmen alike powerful and keen against Athens, if she had attempted to obtain for herself in the Iliad a place at all proportioned to her after-fame. There were numerous parts of Homer’s Greece, both great and small, that fell into subsequent insignificance, such as Pylos, Ithaca, Salamis, Locris: the relative positions of Thessaly and Southern Greece were fundamentally changed in the historic times. But all, whether they exulted in the longlived honours of their States, or whether they fondly brooded on the recollections of former fame, were alike interested in resisting interlopers who might seek to trespass for their own advantage, as well as in the general object of preserving the priceless national monument from decay. Nor is there any room to suppose, that these questions of primeval honour were indifferent to the later Greeks. The citation from the Catalogue by the Athenian envoys before Gelon in Herodotus (to take a single instance), affords conclusive proof to the contrary: and, even so late as in the day of Pausanias, he tells us that Argolis and Arcadia were the States, which even then were still keenly disputing with Athens the palm of autochthonism.
It, therefore, appears to me that the presumptions of the case are on the whole favourable, and not adverse, to the general soundness of the Homeric text.
I confess myself to be very greatly confirmed in this view of the presumptions, by the scarcely measurable amount of internal evidence which the text supplies to substantiate its own integrity. Almost the whole of the copious materials which recent writers have accumulated to prove the unity and personality of the author, is available to show the soundness of the text. The appeal need not be only to the undisturbed state of the main strata of the poems, the consistent structure and relations of the facts; the general corpus of the poems might have been sound, and yet a bad text would, when subjected to a very searching ordeal on the minutest points, have revealed a multitude of solecisms and errors: but, instead of this, the rigid application of the microscope has only shown more clearly a great perfection in the workmanship. The innumerable forms of refined and delicate coincidence in names and facts, in the use of epithets, the notes of character, the turn of speeches and phrases, and the like, are so many rills of evidence, which combine into a stream of resistless force, in favour of that text which has been found so admirably, as a mirror, to reflect the image and the mind of Homer, and which, like a mirror, could not have reflected it truly unless it had itself been true.
Indeed, I must proceed a step further; and admit that the arguments ab extra, which I have here put forward respecting the historic aims of the poet, his proximity in time to his subject, and the probable soundness of the text, are rather answers to objections, than the adequate materials of affirmative conviction.