that, after the publication of his essay, the ancient creed remained unassailable; and Nitzsch, so far from convincing others, could not carry persuasion to his own mind by believing in the conclusiveness of his own arguments, for, some time after the appearance of his dissertation, he returned into the ranks of the upholders of the common authorship. Müller, who considers it difficult and hazardous to raise any definite con'clusion as to the person and age' of Homer, grants in his "History of the Literature of Ancient Greece,' that in the Iliad and the Odyssey many differences are apparent in the 'character and manners both of men and gods, as well as in the management of the language.' Welcker admits the differences of age and of authorship between the two poems. Thiersch makes partly the same admission. Ihne can see no reason why the Odyssey should not be dissociated from the Iliad, except the desire of scholars to maintain an interest in the later poem by ascribing it to Homer.

But the separation of the Odyssey from the Iliad is too simple a theory to be a favourite with German professors. The Teutonic mind, filled with suppositions and conjectures, revels in the creation of paradoxes, most captivating it when most presumptuous, but radically defective in principle and incapable of proof one way or the other, as that the Iliad was the work of many poets, whose scattered fragments were collected into a compact form in a subsequent age by a poet of more than ordinary ability. This, which is Wolf's system, it may be broadly stated, is universally rejected by the scholars of England, Holland, France, and Italy, though some learned doctor in Germany every now and then springs up with an enormity of erudition, absolutely terrifying, to maintain the Wolfian doctrine, or advance a pet extravagance of his own, as Schubart, that Homer was a Trojan; attractive certainly from the novelty of the notion and the ingenuity exhibited, but repulsive, to any but a native of Fatherland, from the mistiness of the style and argument. Schubart, however, notwithstanding that he claims Homer as a gentle, cultivated Trojan,' and not 'a ferocious, barbarous Greek,' is no separatist, acknowledging himself a believer in the Father of Poetry having written the thoroughly Greek Odyssey, as well as the semi-Greek, semiTrojan Iliad.

Scepticism finds its congenial home in Germany; but the art of examining a question which is believed to hang in uncertainty was best known and cultivated in Greece. From that land Scepticism received its name, of which it is unworthy unless attended by a careful looking about' and 'guarding against '

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error. When we observe in the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus, where the soul of Pyrrho still breathes, that Greek scepticism can traverse the sciences, contravene even mathematics, we should be cautious before we reject its opposition when it deals with poetry. There it stands upon the firmest principles. Greek scepticism, besides, never indulged in fantastical ideas; to study it is, therefore, no waste of time, and it brings no fatigue to the mind because it never wanders in a wrong direction nor deviates into an unnecessary variety of topics. Modern sceptics may promulgate unheeded their whimsical fancies respecting Homer; one ingenious hypothesis alone should engage our attention-that of the ancient Chorizontes. True, the belief in the common authorship of the two poems has been uniform for ages; it was so in ancient times among the Greeks; it is so, for the most part, with us. But how many a brilliant genius in Greece may have passed into the silence of the grave suspecting the general belief regarding the poems ascribed to Homer, when Pausanias left on record how exceedingly timid he was on the subject-how, after carefully examining the age of Homer, he feared too much the calumnies of his contemporaries to declare what conclusion he had arrived at. We require no more to be convinced that Pausanias, after his laborious scrutiny, was inclined to a new tenet contrary to the received opinion, but preferred silence and supposed adherence to old notions than ridicule for what might be considered paradoxical eccentricity. If so with him, why not with others? And how many Pausaniases may there not be among the bright lights still shining in the galaxy preserved to us of Greek genius?

For awhile, then, we will take up the Chorizontic principle; and, in surveying again the ancient theory, attempt to throw some new light on the famous scepticism, the conducting and details of which, except the few unimportant particulars given, are unfortunately lost. It may be that the time will never come now when Homer's admirers, classical and poetical, will exclaim, with regard to this principle, in hoc acquiescimus omnes; yet, notwithstanding the credence that may be withheld from the theory of the Chorizontes, the fundamental pillar of their system can never be shaken, because the text of the poems, so far from being annihilative, is greatly in support of their hypothesis.

As no mention is made of the 'poetry of Homer' before the date of Lycurgus, so it is not until nearly three hundred years had elapsed after the date assigned to Lycurgus that we again hear anything more of 'Homer.' Then something is told

us of Homer' being rescued from the injuries of time and restored to himself. This was in Athens in the days of Solon. We then hear for the first time of Homer's' works being divided into two poems. From this we conjecture that in the days of Lycurgus there was in existence in Lacedæmon a poem of Homer's' which was no other than the Iliad, and that in the days of Solon there were in existence in Athens two poems, which were the Odyssey and the Iliad. If it be granted that this conjecture is plausible, we will go a step. further in forming another opinion without proof, and say that the Odyssey was not in existence until a very considerable time after the Iliad, from no authentic mention being made of it until nearly three hundred years after authentic mention was made of the Iliad. If this concession be granted, it is in consonance with what we shall now endeavour to prove, and what the internal evidence of the two poems themselves demonstrates, that something like a hundred and fifty, two hundred or more, years elapsed between their composition.

Having thus, in the absence of perfect knowledge, arrived at a specious conjecture that generations, perhaps centuries, had elapsed between the writing of the Iliad and the Odyssey, we prepare ourselves, in the first place, for a change of language, because in a progressive country such as Greece, it is impossible that there should not have been some change in the language after so long a period, when language will sometimes undergo a great change even in the life of an individual, as in that of Queen Elizabeth. If such a change could take place in three quarters of a century, in, admittedly, an exceptional period, and in a country, it is true, particularly progressive, a similar change must have taken place in two hundred years or so, in any country marked by progress whatever.

Now, as to language, we find words in the Odyssey that we do not find in the Iliad; words, too, as acknowledged by the latest editor of the former poem, not casually used, nor out-of-the-way words, but evidently familiar in everyday style, implying distinctness of vernacular and of vulgar matter. Independently of such words, there are others pointing to a more advanced civilisation than obtained at the time of the siege of Troy, such as περιμηχανόεσθαι, σto lay stratagem on ' all sides,'-an evident allusion to the entire investment of a place, and aλerpís, a grinder of corn in a mill,' applied to a woman, when it is certain that in the Iliad the only domestic duties of the women were spinning with the spindle, sewing clothes, and fetching water from the spring, and not grinding corn as we see female servants doing in the Odyssey, in the

palace of Alcinous and in the house of Ulysses. A further improvement in language is evident from the author of the Odyssey using the abbreviation ἑξῆς, where Homer uses ἑξείης. Payne Knight in his Prolegomena gives several instances of words of four syllables in the Iliad contracted into trisyllables in the Odyssey, trisyllables into dissyllables, and dissyllables into monosyllables. It is a common argument, however, against the unity that contractions are more frequent in the Odyssey; and it is altogether unnecessary to call the classical reader's attention to the fact that this by itself is all but conclusive of the Odyssey not having been written until long after the Iliad. It exhibits an improvement in the language which could not have been in force until the lapse of generations after Homer's existence, it being only gradually as ages progressed that the Greek language, imbibing, as it were, a new tincture, acquired greater and greater delicacy from contraction, till it subsequently attained perfection in the Attic dialect, which, in its fondness for abbreviation, contracted nouns, circumflexed verbs, united syllables in the same word, and joined different words by synæresis, crasis, and elision.

Occasionally a word is found in the Odyssey which has not the archaic signification it had at the time when the older poem was written. This is also very remarkable. Homer uses certain words in a sense which the author of the Odyssey will not follow. The latter poet employs the words in their established acceptation, as the Greek language was written in its purity; we thereby arrive at the natural conclusion that Homer occasionally used words which did not express the precise meaning which by the time of the author of the Odyssey had come to be affixed to them by good usage. Certain verbs, nouns, and adjectives might be mentioned which with Homer have two meanings, while the author of the Odyssey understands them only in one, and that their common acceptation.

The two poets differing in these particulars, differ again as to the use of the digamma. In the Iliad there are certain words, exactly thirty-five in number, in which the application of the digamma is fluctuating and arbitrary. Still there are some words which are always digammated in the Iliad, with which the author of the Odyssey is at variance; and neos, which never has the digamma in the Iliad, has it in the Odyssey (xiv. 411).

There is a slight difference in syntactical construction. This may be instanced in the case of the preposition slow, which is always constructed in the Iliad with the accusative, or the genitive by the ellipse of the accusative. The author of the

Odyssey, in common with the more modern epic poets, Apollonius Rhodius, Oppian, Nonnus, and Quintus Smyrnæus, joins this preposition without any ellipse with the genitive (viii. 290), and there are instances in his poem where slow occurs absolutely, which never happens in the Iliad. Again, the author of the Odyssey has a peculiarity of sometimes placing WOTE at the commencement of a sentence unconnectedly, when it becomes the equivalent of the interjection by way of surprise, How!' or What!' This he does at least four times (i. 227, iv. 45, vi. 122, vii. 84), and, had the Alexandrian grammarian, Nicanor, who is supposed to have pointed the Homeric poems, given us the proper punctuation, a fifth time (iii. 247). In such a position, and with such a meaning, that adverb is nowhere to be found in the Iliad. So, on the other hand, Homer uses in the sense of on account of' (Il. ix. 562) and 'on' (xix. 375), neither of which is the language of the author of the Odyssey, though Herodotus (ii. 129) follows Homer in the former signification of the preposition, and Thucydides (vi. 32) in the latter.

When we thus find that there are differences in language, in a more modern application of words, the use of the digamma and syntactical construction, we await still graver distinctions.

As in England, in the days of Elizabeth, there was not only a change in the language, but in the style of houses when the mansion began to take the place of the castle, and in the decorations of the mansion when tapestry was superseded by exquisite oak and chestnut carvings, so we look for the alterations that had taken place in the structure of houses and in their furniture in the long interval that elapsed between the writing of the Iliad and the Odyssey; and we find, as we expect, that there were many and marked changes.

From sundry passages in the Iliad we are enabled to form, if not an exact, a tolerable idea of the structure and accommodation of houses in Homer's time. A Sóuos, king's whole residence-what we now-a-days call palace'-seems to have consisted of a set of dwellings simply built and made of masonry. The whole was surrounded by a wall, epkos, which must have been circular in form, from the poet applying the word to the wall of a garden or vineyard, ἕρκος ἀλοίων ; and to the teeth in a man's head, aρkos odóvтwv. In this outer or circular wall was a gate with folding doors large enough to admit the passage of a chariot and horses. Inside the wall was an enclosure, avλý, open and exposed to the air, from the poet giving that name to a sheep-pen;' and, as the ancients offered sacrifices in the open air, from his making it the place of a sacrifice-avλîs

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VOL. CXXXIII. NO. CCLXXII.

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