graphy' asserts of the fact, he The colours, he

that there is not the least shadow of doubt' having seen, handled, and produced them.' says, are not brilliant, but they are decided enough to be recognisable by any person not colour blind.' The recipes for producing these heliocromes are given in the journal. If these confessedly imperfect colours can be rendered brighter by further study and more appropriate chemical agents, photography will indeed be a splendid art, not only for the service it renders to mankind in the different manners we have shown, but in itself, as rendering absolute transcripts of Nature in her own magnificent dress.

ART. III. Quæstio de diversâ Iliadis et Odysseæ Ætate. A BERNARDO THIERSCH. [Appendix to his Essay on the Age and Country of Homer.] Halberstadt: 1832.*

PROCLUS, in his Life of Homer,' as edited from the

manuscript in the Escurial, says, speaking of the subject of his biography: He wrote two poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey; Xeno and Hellanicus deprive him of them; the ancients, on the contrary, impute to him as much as the Cycle; that is, all the poetry treating of the whole round of subjects and incidents, real and fabulous, in Grecian history from the origin of the world to the sack of Troy. The statement is hyperbolical in both cases. The ancients-Proclus meaning Homer's oldest critics, Theagenes of Rhegium, Stesimbrotus of Thasos, Metrodorus of Lampsacus, and others mentioned by Aristotle, Plato, Xenophon, and Diogenes Laertius-did not attribute to Homer all the poetry of the Epic Cycle, and the Chorizontes would not have taken from him the authorship of the Iliad. When Homer became apotheosized, the Greeks, in their unbounded admiration, ascribed to their god of poetry every good poem the authorship of which was unknown or doubtful, as the Phoenicians credited Sanchoniatho with every history of which they knew not the writer. Homer

* We have prefixed the title of this Essay to the following article because it conveys a description of the subject we are about to treat, and it is cited by Mr. Grote as the best discussion of it. But it will be seen that we hold it to be far from complete, and that we altogether differ from the conclusion of Professor Thiersch, which is that the Iliad and Odyssey are works of the same age but not of the same author. The word Chorizontes merely means Separatists, from xwpilw to separate, to divide, because they separated the authorship of the two poems.

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with his countrymen had then strength enough and shoulders broad enough to bear any burden; he was the Hercules and Atlas of poetry. Still it is going beyond conceivable exaggeration to accumulate on his back the heap of epics that made up the Mythic and Trojan Cycles. The list is formidable enough with some of his Gnomæ, the Epithalamia, several Epigrams, still in our hands; thirty-three Hymns, yet extant, and the Batrachomyomachia; three similar mock heroic pieces, Arachnomachia, Geranomachia, and Psaromachia; the Margites, a humorous poem; another entitled At ‘Ettάtektos, and the Cercopes, founded on the transformation of a set of jugglers into monkeys; the Iliad and the Odyssey, destined to be imperishable; and eleven other epics, whose adamant was not proof against the ceaselessly wearing flow of the stream of time: the Amazonia, Cyclus, Cypria, Epigoni, Eiresione, Phocæis, Nostoi, Epiciclides, Thebais, the Little Iliad, and the Capture of Echalia. How the vast bulk of these multifarious poems gradually fell away from Homer's ownership it would be curious, though now impossible, to know. The history of the dropping away of one or two may be glanced at.

In the time of Herodotus Homer still passed as the author of the Cypria and Epigoni. The Father of History, applying a test of criticism to the Cypria, made a passing allusion to the account of the voyage of Paris to Troy from Sparta after the rape of Helen, differing in that poem from the account in the Iliad and the Odyssey; in the Iliad, Paris, taking a wide circuit, touches at Sidon, whence he carries off many of the King of Phoenicia's treasures, and makes a long voyage; in the Cypria, he sailed home direct and reached Troy in three days. From that passage alone Herodotus concluded the poem was not Homer's, and with the very greatest probability, as it was afterwards assigned to a Cyprian, Stasinus. The authorship of the Epigoni Herodotus questioned by a doubt intensely expressed If Homer, forsooth, by any possibility, composed that poem.' By the time of Zeno the Philosopher, who wrote a remarkable book about Homer (according to Dio Chrysostom), the works of the great poet were then shorn of those two poems, but included the Margites, which, on the principle of every feather to the right bird, was ultimately given to, no doubt its proper author, Pigres of Halicarnassus, howbeit that Aristotle, Plato, and Aristophanes lived and died under the impression that it was a genuine production of Homer's. When the Alexandrian grammarians commenced their labours, the only two epics for which Homer stood accountable were the Iliad and the Odyssey; these, as Mr. Grote rightly observes in his comprehensive

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and reconditeHistory of Greece,' 'throughout the whole course of Grecian antiquity were believed to have been the production of one poet,-that poet being, of course, Homer. The critics termed Chorizontes, who flourished in the middle of the second century before the Christian era, were the first to point out that they could not be the work of the same author. Whether these Chorizontes were few or many is not recorded, but from the passage in Proclus it would really seem that Xeno and Hellanicus, hitherto believed to be merely their Coryphæi, were the only two.

Of Xeno nothing is known, except that he chose Alexandria as the place of his residence, and filled a brilliant position in its celebrated school of critics. More is known of his collaborator. Hellanicus was the teacher of an Homeric commentator, famous in his day, Ptolemæus Epithetes, himself having been a pupil of Agathocles, and Agathocles of Xenodotus. He was thus, perhaps, a contemporary of that grammarian of unprecedented reputation, whose name in Horace's Art of 'Poetry' is the antonomasia of a critic,-Aristarchus. Hellanicus flourished in or about the hundred and fifty-sixth Olympiad. His characteristic distinction was superfluous acuteness, as one or two of his corrections to Homer sufficiently show (Il. v. 269; xv. 651; xix. 90). Xeno's superflux of subtlety was almost on a par with the exuberant sharpness of his brother Chorizon.

These two shrewd men were the chief, if not the only Alexandrian grammarians who, by illustrations and otherwise, argued that the Iliad and the Odyssey belonged to different ages and were the works of different authors. The inconsistencies they pointed out appear, from the specimens preserved, to have been principally in composition, language, domestic economy, food, history, and mythology. They called attention to epanalepsis being rather frequent in the Iliad, but so rare in the Odyssey that it occurs but once; thus showing that the author of the latter poem evidently considered the use of the rhetorical figure, Repetition, a blemish, which Homer thought a beauty. Such variety of taste will always mark two writers. Then of itself this goes a great way in proving the different sources of the two poems. IIрomáрole in the Odyssey, the Chorizontes said, is used as a designation of time, and in the Iliad of place, The unity-believing Greek scholiasts, to prove the contrary, quoted verses from the Iliad which do not indisputably bear out their point. Nor did it escape the Chorizontes that only in the Odyssey evtéλn λeğidia are used, by which Heyne understands mean words;' though, from the

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remarks of the Greek scholiasts, it would seem that the phrase means articles used in the management of a family.' Be that as it may, the Chorizontes, in their examples of what they call εὐτέλη λεξιδία, hit upon a class of articles in domestic economy mentioned only in the Odyssey-xoîvış, a measure for corn, and Auxvós, an oil-lamp, while those who would have refuted them instanced the use in the Iliad of oλuos, thus referring to a corresponding article of domestic economy, if the word meant, as they deemed, a mortar' or 'cylinder,' though it does not, for neither the mortar nor the cylinder seems to have been known in Homer's time, uos being simply a 'round stone,' which, in the absence of the invention of the proper instruments, was used for pounding groats, beans, corn, or other substances.

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Erroneous as the Greek critics of the Christian era, the German critic, Grauert, imagined he had successfully refuted another statement of the Chorizontes, that only the heroes in the Odyssey eat fish, by triumphantly referring to the passage where Homer speaks of men glutting themselves on oysters.' Had such an attempt at refutation proceeded from a member of the middle class in Bonn, we should not have been at all surprised, because in Bonn as in London the middle class speak of shellfish' shops where lobsters, crabs, and oysters' are disposed of at a reasonable percentage for ready cash; but we are really astonished when it comes from a learned doctor, who ought to have known that molluscs are not fish, any more than are whales, dolphins, or seals, and who ought to have given credit to the Chorizontes for having mastered the contents of the fourth book of Aristotle's History of Animals, and, above all, for having fully remembered the passage in the Iliad, when they themselves explained that the oysters' of which Patroclus there speaks were a species of testaceous animals in the sea with continuous shells, as snails and tortoises among testacea on land. The Chorizontes, on the subject of food, might have stated that in the Odyssey people eat not only fish, but game or poultry (xii. 330), and sausages (xviii. 117), which is not the case in the Iliad.

A different statement with regard to an historical matter did not evade the quicksightedness of the Chorizontes,-Neleus in the Odyssey having three sons and in the Iliad twelve. Here again, in reference to the family of Neleus, they might have added that Nestor in the Odyssey has six sons (counting Antilochus as one) and several daughters, and in the Iliad only two sons and no daughter. From Homer's expression, to avenge the 'violence offered to Helen and her sighs,' they concluded that the

poet regarded Helen as carried away by force with a sorrowing soul to Troy, whereas the author of the Odyssey, following the tradition, which had sprung up after Homer's time, insinuating that Helen was carried off with her inclination, looks on the frail Spartan lady quitting husband, home, and child of her own free will, to elope, with a heart as bounding as the Ægean, across that sea to the shores of Asia, with the handsome young profligate son of King Priam. The author of the Odyssey, the Chorizontes further said, confers the epithet 'City-sacking' only on Ulysses; and that is, certainly, contrary to the usage of Homer, who applies it with equal indifference to Achilles and Ulysses, to the god and goddess of war, Mars and Bellona, and to the two heroes Otrynteus and Oileus. What the Chorizontes said of Venus having one husband in one poem and another in the other, the number of towns in Crete, and the different messengers of the gods in the two poems, will be dwelt on hereafter.

These very few specimens of the, no doubt, numerous objections which the ancient Chorizontes raised in attempting to prove their point, have been preserved in the Scholia given to the world in 1788 by Villoison, when he published the valuable codex on which he lighted in St. Mark's Library, Venice, with (not to be disrespectful to the memory of so distinguished and learned a man), the feeling, if not the exclamation, of Dominie Sampson, Prodigious! so great was his admitted wonder in discovering the manuscript, on account of its antiquity, which dates back to the tenth century, and especially the rarity and copiousness of its notes, which were unknown even to Eustathius. The inconsistencies in the Iliad and the Odyssey, herein pointed out by the Chorizontes, are evidently only those which the Greek scholiasts thought they could answer, and which they did answer with satisfaction to themselves, as may be seen by referring to their notes. Modern upholders of the common authorship have sneered at the inconsistencies as slight. Well, they are not very important; still they are so unnatural, they could not have been committed by a sane man.

Independently of these points of difference enumerated by the ancient Chorizontes, modern writers have added others. Payne Knight, reviving the doctrine in his Prolegomena, dwelt on discrepancies between events in the two poems which he deemed incapable of explanation; and Nitzsch defended the theory on the ground that the theology is holier and purer in the Odyssey than in the Iliad. Payne Knight, in his eagerness to carry his point, was led into so many errors from enthusiasm