time as an instrument for teaching both the language in which it is written, and the subject of which it treats. What is given honestly to the one purpose, will ordinarily be so much taken or withheld from the other. For the one object, the mind must be directed upon the thought of the author; for the other, upon the material organ through which it is conveyed; or, in other words, for the former of these two aims his language must be regarded on its material, for the latter, on its intellectual, side. The difficulty of combining these views, taken of necessity from opposite quarters, increases in proportion as the student is young, the language subtle, copious and elaborate, the subject diversified and extended. In some cases it may be slight, or, at least, easily surmountable; but it is raised nearly to its maximum in the instance of Homer."

I

It will appear from a perusal of the "Introduction," which, on such a subject, will not be accused of unreasonable length,— that I have taken Wolf's view of the composition of the Iliad. I think that it is a skilful adaptation of the primitive Ionic, and perhaps other national heroic ballads, an epitome or compilation made for a definite purpose and on a definite principle, and not the complete and genuine work of one poet. In other words, it is a connected story made up of more or less disconnected materials, a story which has a harmony and a unity which are not the less admirable because not contemplated by the original authors. am aware that this is not the popular view in this country. But it is right to say, that I have not only read and duly considered Wolf's long and learned Prolegomena, but I have also read with equal attention the arguments "pro and contra" adduced by Thirlwall, Grote, Mure, Gladstone, and K. O. Müller. What appears on reasonable grounds to be a true view, should certainly be preferred to that which, on comparatively slight grounds, is adopted as the popular view. To my mind, it is simply impossible that poems so long as the Iliad and the Odyssey should have been traditionally preserved for many centuries intact, without being written, which I feel certain they were not, and could not have been. At the

same time, even to revive a doubt whether the Homeric poems were composed by Homer will by many be condemned as rash and speculative. "To theorize rashly (with or without consciousness), and then rudely to excise from the Homeric text whatever clashes with our crude conceptions, is, after all, an essentially superficial and vulgar method of proceeding: and if it was excusable before the evidence touching the Poet and the text had been so greatly confirmed, as it has been, by closer scrutiny, it can hardly be forgiven now."

The student is requested to use the Index of Words at the end as a directory, in case of no special reference being made in the notes to other places where any given word is commented on. Much pains have been taken in comparing and weighing the opinions, not unfrequently differing, of the learned authors of the Lexilogus and the New Cratylus. In matters where we can hardly go beyond conjecture, some licence may be allowed in speculating on the origins, meanings', and connexions of words. Such theories, even if unsound in themselves, may sometimes prove suggestive to others; they are in no case put forward with any desire to dogmatize.

Gladstone, "Studies," vol. i. p. 44.

9 Mr. Gladstone, for instance, thinks кîλov, 'an arrow,' is connected with telum, and pes (Il. i. 268) with ěpa, terra (“Studies," i. pp. 510. 575). I think that knλov, with кâλov, 'wood,' and some other kindred words, is from the digammated root of kaiw, and ĥpes from an ancient word Fap or Fnp, the Latin Vir, the English War; and we are both entitled to hold our own opinions.

CAMBRIDGE, 1865.

INTRODUCTION.

THE literary history of " Homer's Iliad" would in all probability appear to us a highly curious one, if we could but penetrate the thick mist of antiquity by which it is concealed. Originating, without doubt, in a very remote, not to say, pre-historic age, this great poem, perhaps the most widely celebrated that the world has ever known, has passed, almost without challenge, for considerably more than two thousand years, as the complete and authentic composition of the author whose name it bears. The hyperbolical attributes of "divine" and "immortal" which the Greeks themselves' bestowed upon Homer, have hardly become obsolete even in the present age'. And yet, who Homer really was, the ancients themselves, even as far back as history extends, knew no more than we do. The place of his birth and the time at which he lived were matters of speculation more than four centuries before the Christian era. The natural consequence of this uncertainty was, that all anonymous ancient epic poetry, not didactic nor religious, but essentially chivalrous, and a good deal besides that partook of a religious character, i. e. Hymns, was at an early period assigned without suspicion to Homer'. The epic

1 Ar. Ran. 1034. Plat. Symp. p. 209 D, &c.

3

2 Wolf calls the Homeric poems "aeternae et unicae Graeci ingenii reliquiae," Proleg. § 3. "The immortal poems of Homer," Gladstone.

3 Herod. ii. 53.

Pindar refers the events connected with the Trojan war, without discrimination, to Homer and the Homeridae; and Thucydides (iii. 104) appears to have no doubts whatever that the existing "Hymn to Apollo" was really the work of Homer.

6

poems of the Cypria, which treated of the subjects introductory to the Iliad, and also the Thebaic Epigoni,-now by common consent considered as parts of the long-lost epic Cyclus,-were generally accepted in the time of Herodotus as the genuine works of Homer. The name Homer, in fact, was a convenient resource, an almost mythical device to account for the existence of a body of very ancient epic poetry, treating principally, but by no means exclusively, of a great pre-historic event that had occurred, or was believed to have occurred long before his time in the northwest parts of Asia Minor, and was known by the general title of τà Tρwixà, "The incidents of the Trojan war." Of the poet himself no one ever (if we except the spurious "Lives of Homer," attributed to Herodotus and Plutarch, but on which no reliance whatever can be placed) pretended to know a single fact', except indeed that he was said to have been blind, and to have lived either at Chios or Smyrna. It must therefore be distinctly stated, that neither we, by the aids of research or philology, nor the ancients themselves by any certain traditions, have been able to explain the true origin of the Homeric poems. They may possibly, under some simpler forms, have existed in ages even much more remote than we commonly suspect, and have passed through many successive though unrecorded modifications, the last of which, by Aristarchus, the great Alexandrine critic of the second century B.C., resulted in the Iliad and the Odyssey nearly or quite in the form in which we now have them'. A theory has lately been propounded (or rather revived,

5 Herod. i. 117; iv. 32.

* Thucyd. i. 3, "Ομηρος πολλῷ ὕστερον ἔτι καὶ τῶν Τρωικῶν γενόμενος. 7 See Plat. Resp. lib. x. p. 599, seqq.

8 This opinion was probably derived from the so-called Homeric Hymn to the Delian Apollo, 172, τυφλὸς ἀνὴρ, οἰκεῖ δὲ Χίῳ ἔνι παιπαλοέσσῃ. The legendary reason for this is given in Plat. Phaedr. p. 243 A.

9 of the several places which claimed the honour of the poet's birth, these two are the most probable. K. O. Müller (Hist. Gr. Lit. chap. v. § 2) decides in favour of Smyrna.

1 We do not believe that our Iliad differs materially from the recension by Aristarchus; though Wolf is of opinion (Proleg. § xlvii.) that his reading of the poet did not become rapádoσis, i. e. the vulgate or established text,' till long afterwards; and that the text was finally settled precisely as we have it, in the

for it is clear that a school of interpreters of this kind existed in the time of Plato) that the Iliad had its origin-necessarily a very remote one-in elemental worship. "The whole Achilleis is a magnificent Solar Epic, telling us of a sun rising in radiant majesty, soon hidden by the clouds, yet abiding his time of vengeance, when from the dark veil he breaks forth at last in more than his early strength, scattering the mists and kindling the ragged clouds which form his funeral pyre, nor caring whether his brief splendour shall be succeeded by a darker battle, as the vapours close again over his dying glory." It is not easy for us to realize the creation and perpetuation of long metrical compositions, in a language possessing the most complex and elaborate inflexions, long before writing itself was in use, if not before it was even invented; it is not easy to conceive how poems with so long and elaborate and sustained a plot should have been the production of a very primitive, not to say, a rude age; still more difficult is it to conceive the length of time, or the stages and processes which the Greek Epic must have passed through before it had attained, at the early period at which Homer is believed to have lived, the high perfection of the Homeric verse. All this however must be left to imagination; and we must be content, if the difficulties of the case appear to us,

third or fourth century of our era. Still he entertains no doubt (Proleg. § xlix.) that "si de universa facie et habitu carminum quaerimus, vulgata nostra recensio est ipsa Aristarchea." That great Scholar (Proleg. § vii.) assigns six periods or ages of the Homeric text, in all of which he supposes some changes to have been introduced. These are, 1. From B.C. 950 to Pisistratus. 2. From Pisistratus to Zenodotus of Ephesus (circ. B.C. 210). 3. From Zenodotus to the grammarian Apion (circ. A.D. 30). 4. From Apion to Longinus (A.D. 250). 5. From Longinus to the editor of the Editio princeps (1488). 6. From 1488 to the three following centuries. He does not here take into account the recension of Aristotle. We are disposed to think the Iliad underwent some considerable modernizing processes between that event and the age of Pisistratus. Wolf admits (§ xxxvi. init.) that of the second period we know very little more than of the first.

2 See Theaetet. p. 153 C.

This part of the theory is rendered the more probable by the conclusions of modern scholars (see Thirlwall, i. p. 152) that Helen was a mythological person, and, in fact, a goddess. And thus only can we explain the story told in Plato, Phaedr. p. 243, that both Homer and Stesichorus were struck with blindness dià Thy Ἑλένης κακηγορίαν.

Tales of Thebes and Argos, by G. W. Cox (Introduction, p. 67). Professor Max Müller, if we mistake not, is an advocate of this theory, which seems to the present editor in the highest degree improbable.