Clearing the question of these incumbrances, I wish to submit to the suffrages of those, who may be more competent than myself to estimate both the proposition and the proof, the following thesis: that, in regard to the religion, history, ethnology, polity, and life at large of the Greeks of the heroic times, the authority of the Homeric poems, standing far above that of the whole mass of the later literary traditions in any of their forms, ought never to be treated as homogeneous with them, but should usually, in the first instance, be handled by itself, and the testimony of later writers should, in general, be handled in subordination to it, and should be tried by it, as by a touchstone, on all the subjects which it embraces.
It is generally admitted that Homer is older by some generations than Hesiod, by many than the authors of the Cyclical Poems; and older by many centuries than the general mass of our authorities on Greek antiquity, beginning with Æschylus and Herodotus, and coming down to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Ælian, Pausanias, Diogenes Laertius. Nor is it by time alone, that his superior proximity and weight are to be measured. Of all the ages that have passed since Homer, it may be truly said that not one has produced a more acute, accurate, and comprehensive observer. But, above all, writing of the heroic time, he, and he alone, writes like one who, as from internal evidence we may confidently assert, stood within its precinct, and was imbued from head to foot with its spirit and its associations.
It is, of course, quite possible, that in one particular or another, Homer may be in error, and the later tradition, it is also just possible, may be correct. But so, also, the evidence of an eye-witness in a court of justice may be erroneous, while by chance the merest hearsay may be true. This does not divert men from a careful classification of evidence according to its presumptive value, where they have purposes of utility, according to the common and limited sense of the term, in their view. In regard to the early Greek history, the practice has often been otherwise; partly in the works of scholars, and yet more, as we might expect, in the more popular forms of tuition. It has been to lump together the heterogeneous mass of traditions embodied in the literature of a thousand years. All that the sport of fancy and imagination had conceived—all that national, or local, or personal vanity had suggested—all that motives of policy had forged in history or religion—or so much of this aggregate as time has spared to us, has been treated without any systematic recognition of the different value of different orders of tradition. I admit that it is towards the close of the Greek literature that we find the principal professed inquirers into antiquity; and their aim and method may have redressed, in great part, any inequality between themselves and writers of the time of Thucydides or Plato. But nothing can cancel, nothing, it might almost be said, can narrow, the enormous interval, in point of authority, between Homer, who sang in the heroic age, and those who not only collected their materials, but formed their thoughts, after it was closed, and after its floating reminiscences had become subject to the incessant action of falsifying processes.
For a length of time the temper of our ancient histories was one of unquestioning reception. But where much was self-contradictory, all could not be believed. Under these circumstances, it was not unnatural that those writers who were full and systematic, should be preferred, rather than that the labour should be undergone of gathering gold in grains from the pages of Homer, of carefully collecting facts and presumptions singly from the text, and then again estimating the amount and effect of their bearings upon one another. Hence the Catalogues of Apollodorus, or the downright assertions of Scholiasts, have been allowed to give form to our early histories of Greece; and the authentic, but usually slighter notices of Homer, have received little attention, except where, in some detail or other, they might suit the argument which each particular writer happened to have in hand. Again, because Herodotus was by profession an historian and nothing else (at least, I can discern no better reason), more importance seems to be attached to his notices of prior ages than to the less formally presented notices of Homer, who, according to the statement of Herodotus himself, preceded him by four hundred years. I do not mean by this remark to imply that Herodotus and Homer are particularly at variance with one another, but only to illustrate what seems to me a prevailing source of error.
In general, where the traditions reported by the later writers are preferred to those of Homer, it is perhaps because, although they may conflict with probability as well as with one another in an infinity of points, yet they are in themselves more systematic and complete. They represent to us for the most part pasticcios arbitrarily made up of materials of unequal value, but yet made up into wholes; whereas, the evidence which he supplies is original though it is fragmentary. Had he been followed by a continuous succession of authors, we should, no doubt, do wisely in consenting to view the subjects of fact, with which he dealt, mainly as they were viewed by those who trod in his steps. But, on the contrary, they were separated from him by a gulf both wide and deep; over which his compositions floated, in despite of difficulties so great that many have deemed them positively insurmountable, only by their extraordinary buoyancy.
It is in the Cyclic poems that we should naturally seek for materials to enlarge, expound, or correct Homer. But there is not a line or a notice remaining of any one of them, which would justify our assigning to them any historical authority sufficient to qualify them for such a purpose. Their reputed authors, from Arctinus downwards, all belong to periods within the dates of the Olympiads[93]. They all bear marks of having been written to fill the gaps which Homer had left unoccupied, and so to enter into a partnership, if not with his fame, yet with his popularity; with the popularity, of which his works, as we can well judge from more recent experience, would be sure to shed some portion upon all compositions ostensibly allied with them, and which then, as now, presented the most cogent inducements to imitators who had their livelihood to seek by means of their Muse.
Homer, without doubt, gave an immense addition of celebrity and vogue to the subject of the Trojan war, much as Boiardo and Ariosto did to the whole circle of the romances of which Orlando is the centre. One of these poems, the Ἰλίου Πέρσις, is a simple expansion, as Mure has observed[94], of the third lay of Demodocus in the Eighth Odyssey[95]. They seem to bear the mark of being, not composed first-hand from actions of men, but from a stock of compositions in which heroic actions had already been enshrined; so little do they appear to have been stamped with the individuality which denotes original design. And accordingly the usual manner of quoting them is not as the certain works of a given person, but the form of citation is (ὁ γράψας τὴν μικρὰν Ἰλιάδα, ὁ ποιήσας τὰ Κύπρια ἔπη), the writer of the little Iliad, the composer of the Cyprian Songs, and the like. Heyne[96] holds even the commencement of the Cyclic poems to have been at least a century after the date of the Iliad and Odyssey.
Mr. Fynes Clinton, whose name can never be mentioned without a grateful recognition of his merits and services, supplies, in the early part of his Fasti Hellenici, many valuable suggestions for the sifting of early Greek history. But he nowhere acknowledges, or approaches (I believe) to the acknowledgment of the rule, that for the heroic age the authority of Homer stands alone in kind. In the Fasti Hellenici many statements, dating long after Homer, are delivered as if of equal authority with his in regard to the history of that age; and Mr. Clinton seems to have been led into a snare, to which his duty as a chronologer probably exposed him, in assuming that history and chronology may be expected to begin together; an assumption, I apprehend, not supported by probability. Mr. Mitford has admirably pointed out the importance of veracity to Homer’s function, and to his fame as a poet, at a time when a poet could be the only historian[97], the probability and singular consistency of his scattered anecdotes, and the remarkable contrast between the clearness of his history, and the darkness and uncertainty which follow after him, and continue until the historic age begins; nor does he scruple to declare that ‘for these early ages Homer is our best guide[98].’ But even this is still short of my desire, which is not merely to recognise him as primus inter pares, but to treat his testimony as paramount, and as constituting a class by itself, with which no other literary testimony can compete. And so once more Bishop Marsh, in his able work on the Pelasgi, assigns no special office, I might perhaps say no peculiar weight, to the Homeric testimony.
But I am glad to shelter myself under the authority afforded me by the practice of Buttmann, who, in the Preface to his admirable Lexilogus, declares his rule of philological investigation in Homer to be this: to take, first, the evidence of the text itself in its several parts; secondly, that of the succeeding epic poetry, and along with this the testimony of the prime after-ages of Greek literature; thirdly, grammatical tradition.
And yet the extensive contrariety between the old and the new is admitted. ‘The Iliad and the Odyssey,’ says Mr. Grote[99], ‘and the remaining Hesiodic fragments, exhibit but too frequently a hopeless diversity, when confronted with the narratives of the logographers.’ And the author of the Minos[100] cleared away the fabulous and defaming accounts of that sovereign, to return to the representations of Homer and of Hesiod; καίτοι γε πιθανώτεροί εἰσιν ἢ σύμπαντες οἱ τραῳδοποιοὶ, ὧν συ ἀκούων ταῦτα λέγεις. The great ancient writers, indeed, seem never to have questioned the authority of Homer as a witness; nor could any one wish to see him enthroned at a greater elevation than that assigned to him as late as in the pages of Strabo. Virgil systematically made light of him, but he was in a manner compelled by his subject to make light of historical veracity altogether.