WAS THERE A HOMER?

Ashburton Guardian, Volume XLV, Issue 10168, 25 July 1924, Page 5

WAS THERE A HOMER?

“STRATA” OF THE ILIAD. , ] It is not to be wondered at, says the j Rev. C. J. Cadoux, D. 0., in the “Nineteenth Century,” that modern scholars, • with their more trustful position to- ; wards legends and traditions genera lv i should tend to revert to the old belief , in the existence of a real poet named Homer. A moderate and probable view is that there was a poet so named born | at SauWna, and flourishing there and at Khios about 800-750 B.O.; that he took over from tradition the shorter epic about the wrath of Akhilleus (Achilles), and reproduced'it with enlargements so considerable as to> convert it from an Akhilleid into: an Iliad. Yet several reasons suggest that instead of hem* wholly responsible for tne Iliad ana Odyssey in their present form he was, besides being a great individual ;Poe , the founder of a school of Homeric writing—'the pioneer of a great and loim-lived tradition, the beginner and to *a large extent the awakener ancl inspirer of .8 long series of epic poets. Clear evidence is found that for a number of centuries the text of the Ilaid, and to a less extent that of the old Odyssey, was altered, interpolated, modified, expurgated, and in geneial very freely handled. The usual printed editions of Homer give the Vulgate text, which can be traced back teirly satisfactorily to the time of the gteat Alexandrian scholars of the second century B.C. Before that time the evidence/ both of quotations and of papyri, shows that the text was m a very fluid state. Referring to the linguistic variations, Professor Gilbert Murray has written: “The task of separating the strata is shown to be much moie difficult than the last generation oi scholars imagined. You cannot simply cut out ‘late parts’ and leave the rest uniform. The confusion of tongues is deep down in the heart of the Homenc dialect, and no surgery in the world can cut beneath it. « , ,■* No doubt that this discovery that the Iliad is a “traditional book”—one continually remoulded, enlaiged,. and pruned through a long succession of centuries —somewhat spoils for tli modern mind its simplicity as a work of art, and goes far to neutralise that gain in human reality which t.ie ieißstatement of the personal'Homer seemed to promise. Yet Dr. Cadoux considers that the large measure of consistency and uniformity actually reached in the poem, and the remarkable raritv of anachronisms, show that fluidity of detail and multiplicity of authorship | wore not incompatible with the domm** : ance of a single master-mind.