Oldest Civilisation of Greece (1901), supposes the culture described in the Homeric poems to be contemporary in Asia with that of this Dipylon period in Greece. {Footnote: Op. cit., pp. 49, 222.} He says, "The Homeric culture is evidently the culture of the poet's own days; there is no attempt to archaise here. … " They do not archaise as to the details of life, but "the Homeric poets consciously and consistently archaised, in regard to the political conditions of continental Greece," in the Achaean times. They give "in all probability a pretty accurate description" of the loose feudalism of Mycenaean Greece. {Footnote: Op. cit., pp. 223, 225.}
We shall later show that this Homeric picture of a past political and social condition of Greece is of vivid and delicate accuracy, that it is drawn from the life, not constructed out of historical materials. Mr. Hall explains the fact by "the conscious and consistent" archaeological precision of the Asiatic poets of the ninth century. Now to any one who knows early national poetry, early uncritical art of any kind, this theory seems not easily tenable. The difficulty of the theory is increased, if we suppose that the Achaeans were the recent conquerors of the Mycenaeans. Whether we regard the Achaeans as "Celts," with Mr. Ridgeway, victors over an Aryan people, the Pelasgic Mycenaeans; or whether, with Mr. Hall, we think that the Achaeans were the Aryan conquerors of a non-Aryan people, the makers of the Mycenaean civilisation; in the stress of a conquest, followed at no long interval by an expulsion at the hands of Dorian invaders, there would be little thought of archaising among Achaean poets. {Footnote: Mr. Hall informs me that he no longer holds the opinion that the poets archaised.}
A distinction has been made, it is true, between the poet and other artists in this respect. Monsieur Perrot says, "The vase-painter reproduces what he sees; while the epic poets endeavoured to represent a distant past. If Homer gives swords of bronze to his heroes of times gone by, it is because he knows that such were the weapons of these heroes of long ago. In arming them with bronze he makes use, in his way, of what we call 'local colour. … ' Thus the Homeric poet is a more conscientious historian than Virgil!" {Footnote: La Grète de l'Epopée, Perrot et Chipiez, p. 230.}
Now we contend that old uncritical poets no more sought for antique "local colour" than any other artists did. M. Perrot himself says with truth, "the CHANSON DE ROLAND, and all the Gestes of the same cycle explain for us the Iliad and the Odyssey." {Footnote: op. cit., p. 5.} But the poet of the CHANSON DE ROLAND accoutres his heroes of old time in the costume and armour of his own age, and the later poets of the same cycle introduce the innovations of their time; they do not hunt for "local colour" in the CHANSON DE ROLAND. The very words "local colour" are a modern phrase for an idea that never occurred to the artists of ancient uncritical ages. The Homeric poets, like the painters of the Dipylon period, describe the details of life as they see them with their own eyes. Such poets and artists never have the fear of "anachronisms" before them. This, indeed, is plain to the critics themselves, for they, detect anachronisms as to land tenure, burial, the construction of houses, marriage customs, weapons, and armour in the Iliad and Odyssey. These supposed anachronisms we examine later: if they really exist they show that the poets were indifferent to local colour and archaeological precision, or were incapable of attaining to archaeological accuracy. In fact, such artistic revival of the past in its habit as it lived is a purely modern ideal.
We are to show, then, that the Epics, being, as wholes, free from such inevitable modifications in the picture of changing details of life as uncritical authors always introduce, are the work of the one age which they represent. This is the reverse of what has long been, and still is, the current theory of Homeric criticism, according to which the Homeric poems are, and bear manifest marks of being, a mosaic of the poetry of several ages of change.
Till Wolf published his Prolegomena to {blank space} (1795) there was little opposition to the old belief that the ILIAD and Odyssey were, allowing for interpolations, the work of one, or at most of two, poets. After the appearance of Wolfs celebrated book, Homeric critics have maintained, generally speaking, that the ILIAD is either a collection of short lays disposed in sequence in a late age, or that it contains an ancient original "kernel" round which "expansions," made throughout some centuries of changeful life, have accrued, and have been at last arranged by a literary redactor or editor.
The latter theory is now dominant. It is maintained that the Iliad is a work of at least four centuries. Some of the objections to this theory were obvious to Wolf himself—more obvious to him than to his followers. He was aware, and some of them are not, of the distinction between reading the ILIAD as all poetic literature is naturally read, and by all authors is meant to be read, for human pleasure, and studying it in the spirit of "the analytical reader." As often as he read for pleasure, he says, disregarding the purely fanciful "historical conditions" which he invented for Homer; as often as he yielded himself to that running stream of action and narration; as often as he considered the harmony of colour and of characters in the Epic, no man could be more angry with his own destructive criticism than himself. Wolf ceased to be a Wolfian whenever he placed himself at the point of view of the reader or the listener, to whom alone every poet makes his appeal.
But he deemed it his duty to place himself at another point of view, that of the scientific literary historian, the historian of a period concerning whose history he could know nothing. "How could the thing be possible?" he asked himself. "How could a long poem like the Iliad come into existence in the historical circumstances?" {Footnote, exact place in paragraph unknown: Preface to Homer, p, xxii., 1794.}. Wolf was unaware that he did not know what the historical circumstances were. We know how little we know, but we do know more than Wolf. He invented the historical circumstances of the supposed poet. They were, he said, like those of a man who should build a large ship in an inland place, with no sea to launch it upon. The Iliad was the large ship; the sea was the public. Homer could have no readers, Wolf said, in an age that, like the old hermit of Prague, "never saw pen and ink," had no knowledge of letters; or, if letters were dimly known, had never applied them to literature. In such circumstances no man could have a motive for composing a long poem. {Footnote: Prolegomena to the Iliad, p. xxvi.}
Yet if the original poet, "Homer," could make "the greater part of the songs," as Wolf admitted, what physical impossibility stood in the way of his making the whole? Meanwhile, the historical circumstances, as conceived of by Wolf, were imaginary. He did not take the circumstances of the poet as described in the Odyssey. Here a king or prince has a minstrel, honoured as were the minstrels described in the ancient Irish books of law. His duty is to entertain the prince and his family and guests by singing epic chants after supper, and there is no reason why his poetic narratives should be brief, but rather he has an opportunity that never occurred again till the literary age of Greece for producing a long poem, continued from night to night. In the later age, in the Asiatic colonies and in Greece, the rhapsodists, competing for prizes at feasts, or reciting to a civic crowd, were limited in time and gave but snatches of poetry. It is in this later civic age that a poet without readers would have little motive for building Wolfs great ship of song, and scant chance of launching it to any profitable purpose. To this point we return; but when once critics, following Wolf, had convinced themselves that a long early poem was impossible, they soon found abundant evidence that it had never existed.
They have discovered discrepancies of which, they say, no one sane poet could have been guilty. They have also discovered that the poems had not, as Wolf declared, "one 'harmony of colour" (unus color). Each age, they say, during which the poems were continued, lent its own colour. The poets, by their theory, now preserved the genuine tradition of things old; cremation, cairn and urn burial; the use of the chariot in war; the use of bronze for weapons; a peculiar stage of customary law; a peculiar form of semi-feudal society; a peculiar kind of house. But again, by a change in the theory, the poets introduced later novelties; later forms of defensive armour; later modes of burial; later religious and speculative beliefs; a later style of house; an advanced stage of law; modernisms in grammar and language.
The usual position of critics in this matter is stated by Helbig; and we are to contend that the theory is contradicted by
