WAS THERE A HOMER?

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 16 August 1924, Page 13

WAS THERE A HOMER?

“STRATA?’ OF THE ILIAD. It is not to be wondered at, says the Cadoux > D. 0., in the Nineteenth Centry, that modern scholars, with tlieir more trustful position towards legends and traditions generally should tend to revert to the old belief xn the existence of a. real poet named Homer. A moderate and probable view 7 is that there was a poet so named born at Smyrna, and flourishing there and at Khios about 800-750 8.C.; 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 being wholly responsible for the Iliad and the Odyssey dn their present form, lie was, besides being a greafc individual poet, the founder of a. school of “Homeric” writing—the pioneer of a great, and long-lived tradition, the beginner and to a large extent the awakener and inspirer of a long series of epic poets. Clear evidence is found that for a number of centuries the text of the Iliad, and to a less extent that of the old Ddyssey, was altered, interpolated, modified, expurgated, and in general very freely handled. The usual printed editions of Homer give the. “Vulgate” text, which can be traced back fairly satisfactorily to the time of the great Alexandrian scholars of the second century B.C. Before that time the evidence, both of quotations and of papyri, shows that the text was in 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 more difficult than the last generation of 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 Homeric 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, enlarged, and pruned through a long succession of centuries —somewhat spoils for the modern mind its simplicity as a work of art, and goes far to: neutralise that gain in human reality which the reinstatement 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 rarity of anachronisms, show that fluidity of detail and multiplicity of authorship were not incompatible with the dominance of a single master-mind.