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The lines disputed by the Megarians occur in the Catalogue, and, as to the date and original purpose of the Catalogue, the most various opinions prevail. In Mr. Leaf's earlier edition of the Iliad(vol. i. p. 37), he says that "nothing convincing has been urged to show" that the Catalogueis "of late origin." We know, from the story of Solon and the Megarians, that the Catalogue"was considered a classical work—the Domesday Book of Greece, at a very early date"—say 600-580 B.C. "It agrees with the poems in being pre-Dorian" (except in lines 653-670).
"There seems therefore to be no valid reason for doubting that it, like the bulk of the Iliadand Odyssey, was composed in Achaean times, and carried with the emigrants to the coast of Asia Minor...."
In his new edition (vol. ii. p. 86), Mr. Leaf concludes that the Catalogue"originally formed an introduction to the whole Cycle," the compiling of "the whole Cycle" being of uncertain date, but very late indeed, on any theory. The author "studiously preserves an ante-Dorian standpoint. It is admitted that there can be little doubt that some of the material, at least, is old."
These opinions are very different from those expressed by Mr. Leaf in 1886. He ca
I am unable to imagine how this mutilated passage of Diogenes, even if rightly restored, proves that Dieuchidas, a writer of the fourth century B.C., alleged that Pisistratus made a collection of scattered Homeric poems—in fact, made "a standard text."
The Pisistratean hypothesis "was not so long ago unfashionable, but in the last few years a clear reaction has set in," says Mr. Leaf. {Footnote: Iliad, i. p. XIX.}
The reaction has not affected that celebrated scholar, Dr. Blass, who, with Teutonic frankness, calls the Pisistratean edition "an absurd legend." {Footnote: Blass, Die Interpolationenin der Odyssee, pp. I, 2. Halle, 1904.} Meyer says that the Alexandrians rejected the Pisistratean story "as a worthless fable," differing here from Mr. Leaf and Wilamowitz; and he spurns the legend, saying that it is incredible that the whole Greek world would allow the tyrants of Athens to palm off a Homer on them. {Footnote: Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii. 390, 391. 1893.}
Mr. T. W. Allen, an eminent textual scholar, treats the Pisistratean editor with no higher respect. In an Egyptian papyrus containing a fragment of Julius Africanus, a Christian chronologer, Mr. Allen finds him talking confidently of the Pisistratidae. They "stitched together the rest of the epic," but excised some magical formulae which Julius Africanus preserves. Mr. Allen remarks: "The statements about Pisistratus belong to a well-established category, that of Homeric mythology.... The anecdotes about Pisistratus and the poet himself are on a par with Dares, who 'wrote the Iliadbefore Homer.'" {Footnote: Classical Reviewxviii. 148.}
The editor of Pisistratus is hardly in fashion, though that is of no importance. Of importance is the want of evidence for the editor, and, as we have shown, the impossible character of the task allotted to him by the theory.
As I suppose Mr. Leaf to insinuate, "fashion" has really nothing to do with the question. People who disbelieve in written texts must, and do, oscillate between the theory of an Homeric "school" and the Wolfian theory that Pisistratus, or Solon, or somebody procured the making of the first written text at Athens in the sixth century—a theory which fails to account for the harmony of the picture of life in the poems, and, as Mr. Monro, Grote, Nutzhorn, and many others argue, lacks evidence.
As Mr. Monro reasons, and as Blass states the case bluntly, "Solon, or Pisistratus, or whoever it was, put a stop, at least as far as Athens was concerned, to the mangling of Homer" by the rhapsodists or reciters, each anxious to choose a pet passage, and not going through the whole Iliadin due sequence. "But the unity existed before the mangling. That this has been so long and so stubbornly misunderstood is no credit to German scholarship: blind uncritical credulity on one side, limitless and arbitrary theorising on the other!" We are not solitary sceptics when we decline to accept the theory of Mr. Leaf. It is neither bottomed on evidence nor does it account for the facts in the case. That is to say, the evidence appeals to Mr. Leaf as valid, but is thought worse than inadequate by other great scholars, such as Monro and Blass; while the fact of the harmony of the picture of life, preserved through four or five centuries, appears to be left without explanation.
Mr. Leaf holds that, in order to organise recitations in due sequence, the making of a text, presenting, for the first time, a due sequence, was necessary. His opponents hold that the sequence already existed, but was endangered by the desultory habits of the rhapsodists. We must here judge each for himself; there is no court of final appeal.
I confess to feeling some uncertainty about the correctness of my statement of Mr. Leaf's opinions. He and I both think an early Attic "recension" probable, or almost certain. But (see' "Conclusion") I regard such recension as distinct from the traditional "edition" of Pisistratus. Mr. Leaf, I learn, does not regard the "edition" as having "made" the Iliad; yet his descriptions of the processes and methods of his Pisistratean editor correspond to my idea of the "making" of our Iliadas it stands. See, for example, Mr. Leaf's Introduction to Iliad, Book II. He will not even insist on the early Attic as the first writtentext; if it was not, its general acceptance seems to remain a puzzle. He discards the idea of one Homeric "school" of paramount authority, but presumes that, as recitation was a profession, there must have been schools. We do not hear of them or know the nature of their teaching. The Beauvais "school" of jongleursin Lent (fourteenth century A.D.) seems to have been a holiday conference of strollers.
CHAPTER IV
LOOSE FEUDALISM: THE OVER-LORD IN "ILIAD," BOOKS I. AND II.
We now try to show that the Epics present an historical unity, a complete and harmonious picture of an age, in its political, social, legal, and religious aspects; in its customs, and in its military equipment. A long epic can only present an unity of historical ideas if it be the work of one age. Wandering minstrels, living through a succession of incompatible ages, civic, commercial, democratic, could not preserve, without flaw or failure, the attitude, in the first place, of the poet of feudal princes towards an Over-Lord who rules them by undisputed right divine, but rules weakly, violently, unjustly, being subject to gusts of arrogance, and avarice, and repentance. Late poets not living in feudal society, and unfamiliar alike with its customary law, its jealousy of the Over-Lord, its conservative respect for his consecrated function, would inevitably miss the proper tone, and fail in some of the many {blank space} of the feudal situation. This is all the more certain, if we accept Mr. Leaf's theory that each poet-rhapsodist's rйpertoirevaried from the rйpertoiresof the rest. There could be no unity of treatment in their handling of the character and position of the Over-Lord and of the customary law that regulates his relations with his peers. Again, no editor of 540 B.C. could construct an harmonious picture of the Over-Lord in relation to the princes out of the fragmentary rйpertoiresof strolling rhapsodists, which now lay before him in written versions. If the editor could do this, he was a man of Shakespearian genius, and had minute knowledge of a dead society. This becomes evident when, in place of examining the Iliadthrough microscopes, looking out for discrepancies, we study it in its large lines as a literary whole. The question being, Is the Iliada literary whole or a mere literary mosaic? we must ask "What, taking it provisionally as a literary whole, are the qualities of the poet as a painter of what we may call feudal society?"