Homer and His Age - Andrew Lang

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{Footnote: Companion to the Iliad, p. 21.}

      On that head there can be no doubt; in the supposed circumstances no harmony, no unus color, could have survived in the poems till the days of the sixth century editor.

      Here, then, is another difficulty in the path of the theory that the Iliad is the work of four centuries. If it was, we are not enabled to understand how it came to be what it is. No editor could possibly tinker it into the whole which we possess; none could steer clear of many absurd anachronisms. These are found by critics, but it is our hope to prove that they do not exist.

      NOTE

       Table of Contents

      It has been shown in the text that in 1892 Mr. Leaf thought the story about the making of the Iliad under Pisistratus, a legend without authority, while he regarded the traditions concerning an Homeric school as sufficient basis for an hypothesis, "which we are bound to make in order to explain the possibility of any theory." In 1900 he entirely reversed his position, the school was abandoned, and the story of Pisistratus was accepted. One objection to accepting any of the various legends about the composing and writing out, for the first time, of the Iliad, in the sixth century, the age of Pisistratus, was the silence of Aristarchus on the subject. He discussed the authenticity of lines in the Iliad which, according to the legend, were interpolated for a political purpose by Solon or Pisistratus, but, as far as his comments have reached us in the scholia, he never said a word about the tradition of Athenian interpolation. Now Aristarchus must, at least, have known the tradition of the political use of a disputed line, for Aristotle writes (Rhetoric, i. 15) that the Athenians, early in the sixth century, quoted Iliad, II. 558, to prove their right to Salamis. Aristarchus also discussed Iliad, II. 553, 555, to which the Spartans appealed on the question of supreme command against Persia (Herodotus, vii. 159). Again Aristarchus said nothing, or nothing that has reached us, about Athenian interpolation. Once more, Odyssey, II. 631, was said by Hereas, a Megarian writer, to have been interpolated by Pisistratus (Plutarch.) But "the scholia that represent the teaching of Aristarchus" never make any reference to the alleged dealings of Pisistratus with the Iliad. The silence of Aristarchus, however, affords no safe ground of argument to believers or disbelievers in the original edition written out by order of Pisistratus.

      It can never be proved that the scholiasts did not omit what Aristarchus said, though we do not know why they should have done so; and it can never be proved that Aristarchus was ignorant of the traditions about Pisistratus, or that he thought them unworthy of notice. All is matter of conjecture on these points. Mr. Leaf's conversion to belief in the story that our Iliad was practically edited and first committed to writing under Pisistratus appears to be due to the probability that Aristarchus must have known the tradition. But if he did, there is no proof that he accepted it as historically authentic. There is not, in fact, any proof even that Aristarchus must have known the tradition. He had probably read Dieuchidas of Megara, for "Wilamowitz has shown that Dieuchidas wrote in the fourth century." {Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. p. xix.} But, unluckily, we do not know that Dieuchidas stated that the Iliad was made and first committed to writing in the sixth century B.C. No mortal knows what Dieuchidas said: and, again, what Dieuchidas said is not evidence. He wrote as a partisan in a historical dispute.

      The story about Pisistratus and his editor, the practical maker of the Iliad, is interwoven with a legend about an early appeal, in the beginning of the sixth century B.C., to Homer as an historical authority. The Athenians and Megarians, contending for the possession of the island of Salamis, the home of the hero Aias, are said to have laid their differences before the Spartans (cir. 600–580 B.C.). Each party quoted Homer as evidence. Aristotle, who, as we saw, mentions the tale (Rhetoric, i. 15), merely says that the Athenians cited Iliad, II. 558: "Aias led and stationed his men where the phalanxes of the Athenians were posted." Aristarchus condemned this line, not (as far as evidence goes) because there was a tradition that the Athenians had interpolated it to prove their point, but because he thought it inconsistent with Iliad, III. 230; IV. 251, which, if I may differ from so great a critic, it is not; these two passages deal, not with the position of the camps, but of the men in the field on a certain occasion. But if Aristarchus had thought the tradition of Athenian interpolation of II. 558 worthy of notice, he might have mentioned it in support of his opinion. Perhaps he did. No reference to his notice has reached us. However this may be, Mr. Leaf mainly bases his faith in the Pisistratean editor (apparently, we shall see, an Asiatic Greek, residing in Athens), on a fragmentary passage of Diogenes Laertius (third century A.D.), concerned with the tale of Homer's being cited about 600–580 B.C. as an authority for the early ownership of Salamis. In this text Diogenes quotes Dieuchidas as saying something about Pisistratus in relation to the Homeric poems, but what Dieuchidas really said is unknown, for a part has dropped out of the text.

      The text of Diogenes Laertius runs thus (Solon, i. 57): "He (Solon) decreed that the Homeric poems should be recited by rhapsodists {Greek text: ex hypobolaes}" (words of disputed sense), so that where the first reciter left off thence should begin his successor. It was rather Solon, then, than Pisistratus who brought Homer to light ({Greek text: ephotisen}), as Diogenes says in the Fifth Book of his Megarica. And the lines were especially these: "They who held Athens," &c. (Iliad, II. 546–558), the passage on which the Athenians rested in their dispute with the Megarians.

      And what "lines were especially these"? Mr. Leaf fills up the gap in the sense, after "Pisistratus" thus, "for it was he" (Solon) "who interpolated lines in the Catalogue, and not Pisistratus." He says: "The natural sense of the passage as it stands" (in Diogenes Laertius) "is this: It was not Peisistratos, as is generally supposed, but Solon who collected the scattered Homer of his day, for he it was who interpolated the lines in the Catalogue of the Ships". … But Diogenes neither says for himself nor quotes from Dieuchidas anything about "collecting the scattered Homer of his day." That Pisistratus did so is Mr. Leafs theory, but there is not a hint about anybody collecting anything in the Greek. Ritschl, indeed, conjecturally supplying the gap in the text of Diogenes, invented the words, "Who collected the Homeric poems, and inserted some things to please the Athenians." But Mr. Leaf rejects that conjecture as "clearly wrong." Then why does he adopt, as "the natural sense of the passage," "it was not Peisistratos but Solon who collected the scattered Homer of his day?" {Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. p. xviii.} The testimony of Dieuchidas, as far as we can see in the state of the text, "refers," as Mr. Monro says, "to the interpolation that has just been mentioned, and need not extend further back." "Interpolation is a process that postulates a text in which the additional verses can be inserted," whereas, if I understand Mr. Leaf, the very first text, in his opinion, was that compiled by the editor for Pisistratus. {Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 400 410, especially pp. 408–409.} Mr. Leaf himself dismisses the story of the Athenian appeal to Homer for proof of their claim as "a fiction." If, so, it does not appear that ancient commentaries on a fiction are of any value as proof that Pisistratus produced the earliest edition of the Iliad. {Footnote: Mr. Leaf adds that, except in one disputed line (Iliad, II. 558) Aias "is not, in the Iliad, encamped next the Athenians." His proofs of this odd oversight of the fraudulent interpolator, who should have altered the line, are Iliad, IV. 327 ff, and XII. 681 ff. In the former passage we find Odysseus stationed next to the Athenians. But Odysseus would have neighbours on either hand. In the second passage we find the Athenians stationed next to the Boeotians and Ionians, but the Athenians, too, had neighbours on either side. The arrangement was, on the Achaean extreme left, Protesilaus's command (he was dead), and that of Aias; then the Boeotians and Ionians, with "the picked men of the Athenians"; and then Odysseus, on the Boeotolono-Athenian right; or so the Athenians would read the passage. The texts must have seemed favourable to the fraudulent Athenian interpolator denounced by the Megarians, or he would have altered them. Mr. Leaf, however, argues that line 558 of Book II. "cannot be original, as is patent from the fact that Aias in the rest of the Iliad is not encamped next the Athenians" (see IV. 327; XIII. 681). The Megarians do not seem to have seen

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