collected together, in the form of an epic poem, till about Peisistratus'

time, about five hundred years after."(23)

Two French writers--Hedelin and Perrault--avowed a similar scepticism on the

subject; but it is in the "Scienza Nuova" of Battista Vico, that we first

meet with the germ of the theory, subsequently defended by Wolf with so

much learning and acuteness. Indeed, it is with the Wolfian theory that we

have chiefly to deal, and with the following bold hypothesis, which we

will detail in the words of Grote(24)--

Half a century ago, the acute and valuable Prolegomena of F. A. Wolf,

turning to account the Venetian Scholia, which had then been recently

published, first opened philosophical discussion as to the history of the

Homeric text. A considerable part of that dissertation (though by no means

the whole) is employed in vindicating the position, previously announced

by Bentley, amongst others, that the separate constituent portions of the

Iliad and Odyssey had not been cemented together into any compact body and

unchangeable order, until the days of Peisistratus, in the sixth century

before Christ. As a step towards that conclusion, Wolf maintained that no

written copies of either poem could be shown to have existed during the

earlier times, to which their composition is referred; and that without

writing, neither the perfect symmetry of so complicated a work could have

been originally conceived by any poet, nor, if realized by him,

transmitted with assurance to posterity. The absence of easy and

convenient writing, such as must be indispensably supposed for long

manuscripts, among the early Greeks, was thus one of the points in Wolf's

The Iliad of Homer