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The Gortyn inscription implies the power of writing out a long code of laws, and it implies that persons about to go to law could read the public inscription, as we can read a proclamation posted up on a wall, or could have it read to them. {Footnote: Roberts, vol. i. pp. 52-55.}
The alphabets inscribed on vases of the seventh century (Abecedaria), with "the archaic Greek forms of every one of the twenty-two Phoenician letters arranged precisely in the received Semitic order," were, one supposes, gifts for boys and girls who were learning to read, just like our English alphabets on gingerbread. {Footnote: For Abecedaria, cf. Roberts, vol. i. pp. 16-21.}
Among inscriptions on tombstones of the end of the seventh century, there is the epitaph of a daughter of a potter. {Footnote: Roberts, vol. i. p. 76.} These writings testify to the general knowledge of reading, just as much as our epitaphs testify to the same state of education. The Athenian potter's daughter of the seventh century B.C. had her epitaph, but the grave-stones of highlanders, chiefs or commoners, were usually uninscribed till about the end of the eighteenth century, in deference to custom, itself arising from the illiteracy of the highlanders in times past. {Footnote: Ramsay, Scotland and Scotsmen, ii. p. 426. 1888.} I find no difficulty, therefore, in supposing that there were some Greek readers and writers in the eighth century, and that primary education was common in the seventh. In these circumstances my sense of the probable is not revolted by the idea of a written epic, in {blank space} characters, even in the eighth century, but the notion that there was no such thing till the middle of the sixth century seems highly improbable. All the conditions were present which make for the composition and preservation of literary works in written texts. That there were many early written copies of Homer in the eighth century I am not inclined to believe. The Greeks were early a people who could read, but were not a reading people. Setting newspapers aside, there is no such thing as a reading people.
The Greeks preferred to listen to recitations, but my hypothesis is that the rhapsodists who recited had texts, like the jongleurs' books of their epics in France, and that they occasionally, for definite purposes, interpolated matter into their texts. There were also texts, known in later times as "city texts" ({Greek: ai kata poleis}), which Aristarchus knew, but he did not adopt the various readings. {Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. p, 435.}
Athens had a text in Solon's time, if he entered the decree that the whole Epic should be recited in due order, every five years, at the Panathenaic festival. {Footnote: Ibid., vol. ii. p. 395.} "This implies the possession of a complete text." {Footnote: Ibid., vol. ii. p. 403.}
Cauer remarks that the possibility of "interpolation" "began only after the fixing of the text by Pisistratus." {Footnote: Grundfragen, p. 205.} But surely if every poet and reciter could thrust any new lines which he chose to make into any old lays which he happened to know, that was interpolation, whether he had a book of the words or had none. Such interpolations would fill the orally recited lays which the supposed Pisistratean editor must have written down from recitation before he began his colossal task of making the Iliadout of them. If, on the other hand, reciters had books of the words, they could interpolate at pleasure into them, and such books may have been among the materials used in the construction of a text for the Athenian book market. But if our theory be right, there must always have been a few copies of better texts than those of the late reciters' books, and the effort of the editors for the book market would be to keep the parts in which most manuscripts were agreed.
But how did Athens, or any other city, come to possess a text? One can only conjecture; but my conjecture is that there had always been texts—copied out in successive generations—in the hands of the curious; for example, in the hands of the Cyclic poets, who knew our Iliadas the late French Cyclic poets knew the earlier Chansons de Geste. They certainly knew it, for they avoided interference with it; they worked at epics which led up to it, as in the Cypria;they borrowed motifsfrom hints and references in the Iliad, {Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 350, 351.} and they carried on the story from the death of Hector, in the AEthiopisof Arctinus of Miletus. This epic ended with the death of Achilles, when The Little Iliadproduced the tale to the bringing in of the wooden horse. Arctinus goes on with his Sackof Ilios, others wrote of The Returnof the Heroes,and the Telegoniais a sequel to the Odyssey. The authors of these poems knew the Iliad, then, as a whole, and how could they have known it thus if it only existed in the casual repertoireof strolling reciters? The Cyclic poets more probably had texts of Homer, and themselves wrote their own poems—how it paid, whether they recited them and collected rewards or not, is, of course, unknown.
The Cyclic poems, to quote Sir Richard Jebb, "help to fix the lowest limit for the age of the Homeric poems. {Footnote: Homer, pp. 151, 154.} The earliest Cyclic poems, dating from about 776 B.C., presuppose the Iliad, being pla
Sir Richard then takes the point on which we have already insisted, namely, that the Cyclic poets of the eighth century B.C. live in an age of ideas, religions, ritual, and so forth which are absent from the Iliad{Footnote: Homer, pp. 154, 155.}
Thus the Iliadexisted with its characteristics that are prior to 800 B.C., and in its present compass, and was renowned before 800 B.C. As it could not possibly have thus existed in the repertoireof irresponsible strolling minstrels and reciters, and as there is no evidence for a college, school, or guild which preserved the Epic by a system of mnemonic teaching, while no one can deny at least the possibility of written texts, we are driven to the hypothesis that written texts there were, whence descended, for example, the text of Athens.
We can scarcely suppose, however, that such texts were perfect in all respects, for we know how, several centuries later, in a reading age, papyrus fragments of the Iliaddisplay unwarrantable interpolation. {Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 422-426.} But Plato's frequent quotations, of course made at an earlier date, show that "whatever interpolated texts of Homer were then current, the copy from which Plato quoted was not one of them." {Footnote: Ibid., p. 429} Plato had something much better.
When a reading public for Homer arose—and, from the evidences of the widespread early knowledge of reading, such a small public may have come into existence sooner than is commonly supposed—Athens was the centre of the book trade. To Athens must be due the prae-Alexandrian Vulgate, or prevalent text, practically the same as our own. Some person or persons must have made that text—not by taking down from recitation all the lays which they could collect, as Herd, Scott, Mrs. Brown, and others collected much of the Border Minstrelsy, and not by then tacking the lays into a newly-composed whole. They must have done their best with such texts as were accessible to them, and among these were probably the copies used by reciters and rhapsodists, answering to the MS. books of the mediaeval jongleurs.