Those who maintain the Homeric poems to have been written from the

beginning, rest their case, not upon positive proofs, nor yet upon the

existing habits of society with regard to poetry--for they admit generally

that the Iliad and Odyssey were not read, but recited and heard,--but upon

the supposed necessity that there must have been manuscripts to ensure the

preservation of the poems--the unassisted memory of reciters being neither

sufficient nor trustworthy. But here we only escape a smaller difficulty

by running into a greater; for the existence of trained bards, gifted with

extraordinary memory, (25) is far less astonishing than that of long

manuscripts, in an age essentially non-reading and non-writing, and when

even suitable instruments and materials for the process are not obvious.

Moreover, there is a strong positive reason for believing that the bard

was under no necessity of refreshing his memory by consulting a

manuscript; for if such had been the fact, blindness would have been a

disqualification for the profession, which we know that it was not, as

well from the example of Demodokus, in the Odyssey, as from that of the

blind bard of Chios, in the Hymn to the Delian Apollo, whom Thucydides, as

well as the general tenor of Grecian legend, identifies with Homer

himself. The author of that hymn, be he who he may, could never have

described a blind man as attaining the utmost perfection in his art, if he

had been conscious that the memory of the bard was only maintained by

constant reference to the manuscript in his chest."

The loss of the digamma, that crux of critics, that quicksand upon which

even the acumen of Bentley was shipwrecked, seems to prove beyond a doubt,

The Iliad of Homer