case against the primitive integrity of the Iliad and Odyssey. By Nitzsch,

and other leading opponents of Wolf, the connection of the one with the

other seems to have been accepted as he originally put it; and it has been

considered incumbent on those who defended the ancient aggregate character

of the Iliad and Odyssey, to maintain that they were written poems from

the beginning.

"To me it appears, that the architectonic functions ascribed by Wolf to

Peisistratus and his associates, in reference to the Homeric poems, are

nowise admissible. But much would undoubtedly be gained towards that view

of the question, if it could be shown, that, in order to controvert it, we

were driven to the necessity of admitting long written poems, in the ninth

century before the Christian aera. Few things, in my opinion, can be more

improbable; and Mr. Payne Knight, opposed as he is to the Wolfian

hypothesis, admits this no less than Wolf himself. The traces of writing

in Greece, even in the seventh century before the Christian aera, are

exceedingly trifling. We have no remaining inscription earlier than the

fortieth Olympiad, and the early inscriptions are rude and unskilfully

executed; nor can we even assure ourselves whether Archilochus, Simonides

of Amorgus, Kallinus, Tyrtaeus, Xanthus, and the other early elegiac and

lyric poets, committed their compositions to writing, or at what time the

practice of doing so became familiar. The first positive ground which

authorizes us to presume the existence of a manuscript of Homer, is in the

famous ordinance of Solon, with regard to the rhapsodies at the

Panathenaea: but for what length of time previously manuscripts had

existed, we are unable to say.

The Iliad of Homer