Listed 100 (total found 108) sub titles with search on: Biographies for wider area of: "KYKLADES Island complex GREECE" .
DELOS (Island) KYKLADES
Antiphanes, a Physician of Delos, who is quoted by Caelius Aurelianus (De Morb. Chron. iv. 8, p. 537), and Galen (De Compos. Medicam. sec. Locos, v. 5, vol. xii. p. 877), and must therefore have lived some time in or before the second century after Christ. He is mentioned by St. Clement of Alexandria (Paedag. ii. 1, p. 140) as having said, that the sole cause of diseases in man was the too great variety of his food.
Erasistratus, (Erasistratos), one of the most celebrated physicians and anatomists
of antiquity, is generally supposed to have been born at Iulis in the island of
Ceos (Suidas, s. v. Eradistr.; Strab. x. 5, ed. Tauchn.), though Stephanus Byzantinus
(s. v. Kos) calls him a native of Cos, Galen of Chios (Introd. c. 4, vol. xiv.),
and the emperor Julian of Samos. (Misopog.) Pliny says he was the grandson of
Aristotle by his daughter Pythias (H. N. xxix. 3), but this is not confirmed by
any other ancient writer; and according to Suidas, he was the son of Cretoxena,
the sister of the physician Medius, and Cleombrotus ; from which expression it
is not quite clear whether Cleombrotus was his father or his uncle. He was a pupil
of Chrysippus of Cnidos (Diog. Laert. vii. 7.10, Plin. H. N. xxix. 3 ; Galen,
de Ven. Sect. adv. Erasistr. c. 7, vol. xi.), Metrodorus (Sext. Empir. c. Mathem.
i. 12, ed. Fabric.) and apparently Theophrastus. (Galen, de Sang. in Arter. c.
7, vol. iv.) He lived for some time at the court of Seleucus Nicator, king of
Syria, where lie acquired great reputation by discovering the disease of Antiochus,
the king's eldest son, probably B. C. 294. Seleucus in his old age had lately
married Stratonice, the young and beautiful daughter of Demetrius Poliorcetes,
and she had already borne him one child. (Plut. Demtetr. c. 38; Appian, de Rebus
Syr. c. 59.) Antiochus fell violently in love with his mother-in-law, but did
not disclose his passion, and chose rather to pine away in silence. The physicians
were quite unable to discover the cause and nature of his disease, and Erasistratus
himself was at a loss at first, till, finding nothing amiss about his body, he
began to suspect that it must be his mind which was diseased, and that he might
perhaps be in love. This conjecture was confirmed when he observed his skin to
be hotter, his colour to be heightened, and his pulse quickened, whenever Stratonice
came near him, while none of these symptoms occurred on any other occasion; and
accordingly he told Seleucus that his son's disease was incurable, for that he
was in love, and that it was impossible that his passion could be gratified. The
king wondered what the difficulty could be, and asked who the lady was. "
My wife," replied Erasistratus; upon which Seleucus began to persuade him
to give her up to his son. The physician asked him if he would do so himself if
it were his wife that the prince was in love with. The king protested that lie
would most gladly; upon which Erasistratus told him that it was indeed his own
wife who had inspired his passion, and that he chose rather to die than to disclose
his secret. Seleucus was as good as his word, and not only gave up Stratonice,
but also resigned to his son several provinces of his empire. This celebrated
story is told with more or less variation by many ancient authors, (Appian, de
Rebus Syr. c. 59-61; Galen, de Praenot. ad Epig. c. 6. vol. xiv.; Julian, Misopog.,
ed. Spanheim; Lucian, de Syria Dea; Plin. H. N. xxix. 3; Plut. Demetr. c. 38;
Suidas, s. v. Erasistr.; Jo. Tzetz. Chil. vii. Hist. 118; Valer. Max. v. 7), and
a similar anecdote has been told of Hippocrates (Soranus, Vita Hippocr. in Hippocr.
Opera, vol. iii.), Galen (de Praenot. ad Epig. c. 6. vol. xiv.), Avicenna, and
(if the names be not fictitious) Panacius (Aristaen. Epist. i. 13) and Acestinus.
(Heliod. Aethiop. iv. 7.) If this is the anecdote referred to by Pliny (l. c.),
as is probably the case, Erasistratus is said to have received one hundred talents
for being the means of restoring the prince to health, which (supposing the Attic
standard to be meant, and to be equal to 243l. 15s.) would amount to 24,375l.--one
of the largest medical fees upon record.
Very little more is known of the personal history of Erasistratus
: he lived for some time at Alexandria, which was at that time beginning to be
a celebrated medical school, and gave up practice in his old age, that he might
pursue his anatomical studies without interruption. (Galen, de Hippocr. et Plat.
Deer. vii. 3, vol. v.) He prosecuted his experiments and researches in this branch
of medical science with great success, and with such ardour that he is said to
have dissected criminals alive. (Cels. de Medic. i. praef.) He appears to have
died in Asia Minor, as Suidas mentions that lie was buried by mount Mycale in
Ionia. The exact date of his death is not known, but he probably lived to a good
old age, as, according to Eusebius, he was alive B. C. 258, about forty years
after the marriage of Antiochus and Stratonice. He had numerous pupils and followers,
and a medical school bearing his name continued to exist at Smyrna in Ionia nearly
till the time of Strabo, about the beginning of the Christian era. (Strab. xii.
8, sub fin.) The following are the names of the most celebrated physicians belonging
to the sect founded by him : Apoemantes (Galen, de Venae Sect. adv. Erasistr.
c. 2, vol. xi.), Apollonius Memphites, Apollophanes (Cael. Aurel. de Morb. Acut.
ii. 33) Artemidorus, Charidemus, Chrysippus, Heraclides, Hermogenes, Hicesius,
Martialis, Menodorus, Ptolemaeus, Strato, Xenophon. He wrote several works on
anatomy, practical medicine, and pharmacy, of which only the titles remain, together
with a great number of short fragments preserved by Galen, Caelius Aurelianus,
and other ancient writers: these, however, are sufficient to enable us to form
a tolerably correct idea of his opinions both as a physician and an anatomist.
It is in the latter character that he is most celebrated, and perhaps there is
no one of the ancient physicians that did more to promote that branch of medical
science. He appears to have been very near the discovery of the circulation of
the blood, for in a passage preserved by Galen (de Usu Part. vi. 12, vol. iii.)
he expresses himself as follows :--" The vein (1) arises from the part where
the arteries, that are distributed to the whole body, have their origin, and penetrates
to the sanguineous [or right] ventricle; and the artery [or pulmonary vein] arises
from the part where the veins have their origin, and penetrates to the pneumatic
[or left] ventricle of the heart." The description is not very clear, but
seems to shew that he supposed the venous and arterial systems to be more intimately
connected than was generally believed; which is confirmed by another passage in
which he is said to have differed from the other ancient anatomists, who supposed
the veins to arise from the liver, and the arteries from the heart, and to have
contended that the heart was the origin both of the veins and the arteries. (Galen,
de Hippocr. et Plat. Decr. vi. 6, vol. v.) With these ideas, it can have been
only his belief that the arteries contained air, and not blood, that hindered
his anticipating Harvey's celebrated discovery. The tricuspid valves of the heart
are generally said to have derived their name from Erasistratus ; but this appears
to be an oversight, as Galen attributes it not to him, but to one of his followers.
(De Hippocr. et Plat. Deer. vi. 6, vol. v.) He appears to have paid particular
attention to the anatomy of the brain, and in a passage out of one of his works
preserved by Galen (ibid. vii. 3, vol.) speaks as if he had himself dissected
a human brain. Galen says (ibid.) that before Erasistratus had more closely examined
into the origin of the nerves, he imagined that they arose from the dura mater
and not from the substance of the brain; and that it was not till he was advanced
in life that he satisfied himself by actual inspection that such was not the case.
According to Rufus Ephesius, he divided the nerves into those of sensation and
those of motion, of which the former he considered to be hollow and to arise from
the membranes of the brain, the latter from the substance of the brain itself
and of the cerebellum. (De Appell. Part. &c.) It is a remarkable instance at once
of blindness and presumption, to find this acute physiologist venturing to assert,
that the spleen (Galen, de Atra Bile, c. 7. vol. v.), the bile (id. de Facult.
Natur. ii. 2, vol. ii.), and several other parts of the body (id. Comment. in
Hippocr. " CDe Alim." iii. 14. vol. xv.), were entirely useless to animals.
In the controversy that was carried on among the ancients as to whether fluids
when drunk passed through the trachea into the lungs, or through the oesophagus
into the stomach, Erasistratus maintained the latter opinion. (Plut. Sympos. vii.
1; Gell. xvii. 11, Macrob. Saturn. vii. 15.) He is also supposed to have been
the first person who added to the word arteria, which had hitherto designated
the canal leading from the mouth to the lungs, the epithet tracheia, to distinguish
it from the arteries, and hence to have been the originator of the modern name
trachea. He attributed the sensation of hunger to vacuity of the stomach, and
said that the Scythians were accustomed to tie a belt tightly round their middle,
to enable them to abstain from food for a longer time without suffering inconvenience.
(Gell. xvi. 3.) The pneuma, or spiritual substance, played a very important part
both in his system of physiology and pathology: he supposed it to enter the lungs
by the trachea, thence to pass by the pulmonary veins into the heart, and thence
to be diffused throughout the whole body by means of the arteries (Galen, de Differ.
Puls. iv. 2, vol. viii., et alibi); that the use of respiration was to fill the
arteries with air (id. de Usu Respir. c. l. vol. iv.); and that the pulsation
of the arteries was caused by the movements of the pneuma. He accounted for diseases
in the same way, and supposed that as long as the pneuma continued to fill the
arteries and the blood was confined to the veins, the individual was in good health;
but that when the blood from some cause or other got forced into the arteries,
inflammation and fever was the consequence. (Galen, de Venae Sect. adv. Erasistr.
c. 2. vol. xi., &c.; Plut. de Philosoph. Plac. v. 29.) Of his mode of cure the
most remarkable peculiarity was his aversion to bloodletting and purgative medicines
: he seems to have relied chiefly on diet and regimen, bathing, exercise, friction,
and the most simple articles of the vegetable kingdom. In surgery he was celebrated
for the invention of a catheter that bore his name, and was of the shape of a
Roman S. (Galen, Introd. c. 13. vol. xiv.)
(1) He is speaking of the pulmonary artery, which received the name phleps arteriodes
from Herophilus. See Ruf. Ephes. de Appell. Part. Corp. Hum.
This text is from: A dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology, 1873 (ed. William Smith). Cited Oct 2005 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
Erasistratus, (Erasistratos). A physician of Iulis, in the island of Ceos, and grandson of Aristotle by a daughter of this philosopher. After having frequented the schools of Chrysippus, Metrodorus, and Theophrastus, he passed some time at the court of Seleucus Nicator, where he gained great reputation by discovering the secret malady which preyed upon the young Antiochus, the son of the king, who was in love with his stepmother, Queen Stratonice . It was at Alexandria, however, that he principally practised. At last he refused altogether to visit the sick, and devoted himself entirely to the study of anatomy. The branches of this study which are indebted to him for new discoveries are, among others, the doctrine of the functions of the brain and that of the nervous system. He immortalized himself by the discovery of the viae lacteae; and he would seem to have come very near to that of the circulation of the blood. Comparative anatomy furnished him with the means of describing the brain much better than had ever been done before him. He also distinguished and gave names to the auricles of the heart. A singular doctrine of Erasistratus is that of the pneuma, or the spiritual substance which, according to him, fills the arteries, which we inhale in respiration, which from the lungs makes its way into the arteries, and then becomes the vital principle of the human system. As long as this spirit moves about in the arteries, and the blood in the veins, man enjoys health; but when, from some cause or other, the veins become contracted, the blood then spreads into the arteries and becomes the source of maladies; it produces fever when it enters into some noble part or into the great artery, and inflammations when it is found in the less noble parts or in the extremities of the arteries. Erasistratus rejected entirely blood-letting, as well as cathartics; he supplied their place with dieting, tepid bathing, vomiting, and exercise. In general, he was attached to simple remedies; he recognized what was subsequently termed idiosyncrasy, or the peculiar constitution of different individuals, which makes the same remedy act differently on different persons. A few fragments of the writings of Erasistratus have been preserved by Galen.
This text is from: Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. Cited Nov 2002 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
SYROS (Town) KYKLADES
1835 - 1908
Αξιώτη Μέλπω. Η σημαντική κομμουνίστρια πεζογράφος καταγόταν από τη Μυτιλήνη (Σημ.
gtp.gr: καταγόταν από Μύκονο). Μετά από έναν αποτυχημένο γάμο, εγκαταστάθηκε στην
Αθήνα το 1929. Εκεί, συνδέθηκε με κύκλους διανοουμένων και το 1936 έγινε μέλος
του ΚΚΕ.
Στην κατοχή, ανέπτυξε πλούσια πατριωτική δράση, μέσα από τις γραμμές
του ΕΑΜ, δουλεύοντας στον παράνομο τύπο. Το 1947, αναγκάστηκε να εγκαταλείψει
την Ελλάδα. Εγκαταστάθηκε στη Γαλλία, όπου συνέχισε την πολιτική και πνευματική
της δραστηριότητα, συνδεόμενη με πολλούς Γάλλους κομμουνιστές διανοούμενους (Λουί
Αραγκόν, Πολ Ελυάρ, Πάμπλο Πικάσο).
Μετά από διάβημα της ελληνικής κυβέρνησης προς τη γαλλική, η Μέλπω
Αξιώτη απελάθηκε από τη Γαλλία και εγκαταστάθηκε στην Πολωνία και στη συνέχειαστη
Λαϊκή Δημοκρατία της Γερμανίας. Εργάστηκε στη σύνταξη της ελληνικής εκπομπής του
Ραδιοφωνικού Σταθμού της Βαρσοβίας και δίδαξε Νέα Ελληνικά και Ιστορία της Νεοελληνικής
Λογοτεχνίας στη Φιλοσοφική Σχολή του Πανεπιστημίου Χούμπολτ της ΓΛΔ. Επαναπατρίστηκε
το 1965.
Αφησε ένα πλούσιο συγγραφικό έργο, στο οποίο συνδυάζεται η ηθογραφία
με σύγχρονες τεχνικές γραφής, όπως ο "εσωτερικός μονόλογος". Αναφέρουμε τα μυθιστορήματα
"Δύσκολες νύχτες", "Το σπίτι μου", "Θέλετε να χορέψομε, Μαρία;", "20ός αιώνας",
τη διήγηση "Κάδμω", τις ποιητικές συλλογές "Σύμπτωση", "Κοντραμπάντο", "Θαλασσινά",
τέσσερα Χρονικά με πληροφορίες και μαρτυρίες για την αντίσταση κ.ά.
Το
1836 - 1904
MILOS (Ancient city) GREECE
Dionysodorus, the mathematicians, bearing the same name as the Melian geometer
ANO SYROS (Small town) SYROS
1905 - 1972
KYTHNOS (Island) KYKLADES
Cydias (Kudias). A painter, born in the island of Cythnus, one of the Cyclades, and who flourished B.C. 360. Hortensius, the orator, purchased his painting of the Argonauts for 144,000 sesterces (nearly $5800). This same work was afterwards transferred by Agrippa to the portico of Neptune.
Arcesilaus of Paros, was, according to Pliny (xxxv. 39), one of the first encaustic painters, and a contemporary of Polygnotus (about 460 B. C.).
PYRGOS (Settlement) TINOS
1832 - 1904
Was born in Pirgos, of a family of sculptors. After studying in Athens and in Munich, he taught at the School of Fine Arts in Athens for almost 37 years. He studied a vast range of styles and created a monumental work that conveys the Greek spirit and temperament. He figures among the cornerstones of Greek fine arts, academics and teachers, and is considered the greatest Greek painter of 19th century.
SKLAVOCHORI (Settlement) TINOS
1842 - 1901
Was born in Sklavochori, where he spent his childhood. Since 1888, after studying in Athens and Munich, he became a permanent member and professor of the Academy of Fine Arts of Munich. His work represents naturalism, classicism and Greek style. Together with his friend Nikiforos Litras, he is considered the first representative of modern Greek art. He studied every style of painting and became known as one of the greatest artists of his period, even outside Greece.
IOULIS (Ancient city) KEA
A Greek Sophist of Ceos, contemporary with Socrates. He repeatedly visited Athens as an ambassador from his native country. The applause which his speeches gained there induced him to come forward as a rhetorician. In his lectures on literary style he laid chief stress on the right use of words and the accurate discrimination between synonyms, and thereby paved the way for the dialectic discussions of Socrates.. None of his lectures has come down to us in its original form. We have the substance only of his celebrated fable of the Choice of Heracles preserved by Xenophon
Prodicus, one of the sophists most often mentioned by Plato in his
dialogues, was born in the city of Iulis, in the island of Ceos,
an Athenian colony off the coast of Attica
east of Cape Sunium.
The exact date of his birth is not known, nor is that of his death,
but, based on various indications about his relative age compared to other sophists
and philosophers of the time, he must have been born around 460 and he most likely
died after Socrates, as the latter talks about him in the present tense in the
Apology.
Prodicus often came to Athens,
either for public missions or for private business. He made a lot of money there,
giving public readings of his works and expensive lessons to wealthy pupils. Some
of those who are variously mentioned as having attended his lessons include Isocrates,
Euripides and the historian Thucydides. He must have been very famous there during
his lifetime, as Aristophanes simply mentions him by name. He seems to have specialized
in the precise definition of words and subtle distinction between near synonyms.
Not much is left of his works except for two or three titles and a
few quotations or references here and there. Yet, based on what we know from these
sources, he must have been an all-around sophist and rhetorician, writing on many
subjects, including natural sciences. Prodicus is probably the sophist Plato feels
most sympathetic toward. Though he often rdicules him, he also presents him as
a teacher and friend of Socrates in a way that doesn't owe everything to irony.
Bernard Suzanne (page last updated 1998), ed.
This extract is cited July 2003 from the Plato and his dialogues URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks.
Ariston, a Peripatetic philosopher and a native of the island of Ceos, where his birthplace was the town of Julis, whence he is sometimes called Keios and sometimes Ioulietes. He was a pupil of Lycon (Diog. Laert. v. 70, 74), who was the successor of Straton as the head of the Peripatetic school, about B. C. 270. After the death of Lycon, about B. C. 230, Ariston succeeded him in the management of the school. Ariston, who was, according to Cicero (de Fin. v. 5), a man of taste and elegance, was yet deficient in gravity and energy, which prevented his writings acquiring that popularity which they otherwise deserved, and may have been one of the causes of their neglect and loss to us. In his philosophical views, it we may judge from the scanty fragments still extant, he seems to have followed his master pretty closely. Diogenes Laertius (vii. 163), after enumerating the works of Ariston of Chios, says, that Panaetius and Sosicrates attributed all those works, except the letters, to the Peripatetic Ariston (of Ceos). How far this opinion is correct, we cannot, of course, say; at any rate, however, one of those works, Erotikai diatribai, is repeatedly ascribed to the Cean by Athenaeus (x., xiii., xv.), who calls it Erotika homoia. One work of the Cean not mentioned by Diogenes, was entitled Lukon (Plut. de Aud. poet. 1), in gratitude to his master. There are also two epigrams in the Greek Anthology (vi. 303, and vii. 457), which are commonly attributed to Ariston of Ceos, though there is no evidence for it.
This text is from: A dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology, 1873 (ed. William Smith). Cited Oct 2005 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
Now I tell you that sophistry is an ancient art, and those men of ancient times who practised it, fearing the odium it involved, disguised it in a decent dress, sometimes of poetry, as in the case of Homer, Hesiod, and Simonides sometimes of mystic rites and soothsayings, as did Orpheus, Musaeus and their sects; and sometimes too, I have observed, of athletics, as with Iccus of Tarentum and another still living -as great a sophist as any- Herodicus of Selymbria, originally of Megara; and music was the disguise employed by your own Agathocles, a great sophist, Pythocleides of Ceos(Plato, Prot. 316d)
Aristotle says he had a thorough musical training at the hands of Pythocleides.(Plutarch, Per. 4.1)
Eumaridas, of Paros, a Pythagorean philosopher, who is mentioned by Iamblichus (Vit. Pyth. 36); but it is uncertain wether the reading is correct, and whether we ought not to read Thymaridas, who is known as a celebrated Pythagorean. (Iambl. l. c. 23)
Pherecydes, (Pherekudes). A Greek philosopher, of the isle of Syros, about B.C. 600-550; said to have been the first writer of prose. He wrote in the Ionic dialect of the origin of the world and the gods (Cosmogonia and Theogonia). The poetic element seems to have held a predominant place in his prose. He is also said to have been the first to maintain the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, which his pupil Pythagoras borrowed from him.
AMORGOS (Island) KYKLADES
Simonides of Amorgos, the second (after Simonides of Cos), both in time and in reputation, of the three principal iambic poets of the early period of Greek literature--namely, Archilochus, Simonides, and Hipponax. He was a native of Samos, whence he led a colony to the neighbouring island of Amorgos, where he founded three cities--Minoa, Aegialus, and Arcesine--in the first of which he fixed his own abode. He flourished about B.C. 664. Simonides was most celebrated for his iambic poems, which were of two species, gnomic and satirical. The most important of his extant fragments is a satire upon women, in which he derives the various, though generally bad, qualities of women from the variety of their origin: thus, the uncleanly woman is formed from the swine; the cunning woman, from the fox; the talkative woman, from the dog, and so on. The best editions of the fragments of Simonides of Amorgos are by Welcker (Bonn, 1835) and Bergk (1878).
This text is from: Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. Cited Mar 2003 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
Semonides, Types of Women (e-text)
DELOS (Island) KYKLADES
There were three authors of the name of Deinarchus, concerning whom we know little beyond what is stated by Demetrius of Magnesia (Dionys. Deinarch. 1), viz. that one was a poet of Delos, who lived previous to the time of the orator, and wrote poems on Bacchic subjects (comp. Euseb. Chron. DCCXX.; Cyrill. c. Julian. x.)
IOS (Island) KYKLADES
Homerus (Homeros). The ancient Greeks never doubted the historical
existence of Homer. He was to them "the poet" (ho poietes) in a special
sense, but they knew nothing of him as a person. Eight Greek biographies of
him are still extant-- one under the name of Plutarch, another falsely ascribed
to Herodotus--but none of them have any historic value; most of them belong
to the Christian era. The early Greeks had no more interest in literary biography
than the English contemporaries of Chaucer, and later generations supplied the
lack of knowledge from vague tradition and from uncertain indications in the
works attributed to the poet. They did not require scientific accuracy of statement,
and enjoyed a good story too well to question its truth. A large variety of
manifestly fictitious genealogical trees is presented for Homer, in many of
which he is brought into some connection with Hesiod. Some made him a descendant
of Orpheus. He was called by some Melesigenes, as the son of the river-god Meles,
near Smyrna. Others called him Maeonides, either as the son of Maeon or the
son of Maeonia (Lydia). A well-known epigram emphasizes the uncertainty with
regard to his birthplace. More than seven cities claimed him as their own. Some
thought he was born at Smyrna, and near that city a grotto was shown in which
they said he composed his poems. Simonides called him a Chian, doubtless partly
on the strength of the verse in the Hymn to Delian Apollo, 172, tuphlos aner,
oikei de Chioi eni paipaloessei, which is quoted by Thucydides --a verse which
at least supported the popular belief in the poet's blindness. The great critic
Aristarchus thought him an Athenian, basing his arguments upon characteristics
of the Homeric dialect. Aristodemus of Nyssa believed him to be a Roman, because
of the similarity of certain Roman customs with those described by the poet.
Others would make an Ithacan of him. Others thought him an Aegyptian. Lucian
called him a Babylonian, but doubtless in merry jest. It was reserved for an
English scholar, however, to suggest that if Homer's name were read backwards,
in Hebrew style, OMEROS would become SOREMO, which was only another form for
Solomon; thus the Homeric poems were ascribed to the Hebrew king. He was generally
assumed to have lived about a century or a century and a half after the Trojan
War (B.C. 1183). Others made him flourish about B.C. 976. He was set by Herodotus
not more than four hundred years before his time, or B.C. 850. The church fathers,
Clemens Alexandrinus and Tatian, inclined to set the date of his birth as late
as possible, in order to sustain their claim that the wisdom of the Greeks was
derived from the Hebrews.
Scholars no longer ask where Homer was born or when he lived,
but in what regions and tribes of Greece epic poetry was perfected, and in what
centuries the Iliad and Odyssey received their present form. Not that all would
deny that any poet Homer ever lived to whom we owe the Iliad or Odyssey, or
both, but all authentic information regarding him has perished beyond recovery.
Even in his poems his personality is kept entirely in the background.
The meaning of the name Homer is uncertain. Many stories
were invented to account for it as meaning "a hostage." Half a century
ago it was explained as "the uniter" (homou ararisko), and thus it
was made to sustain the view that the poems are only a conglomeration of distinct
and independent lays. Georg Curtius showed that, according to analogy, the name
should mean "the united," not "the uniter." The plural Homeroi
would then be used of the members of a guild of poet-singers. The next generation
would be Homeridai, and from this patronymic an assumption was made of an original
Homeros. This process has been playfully but fairly illustrated by the succession
in English: "fellows" (homeroi), "the fellows' guild" (homeridai),
"the Fellows guild" (Homeridai), which last assumes a Mr. Fellows
(Homeros) as its founder. But very possibly the name had nothing to do with
the profession of song.
Homer was to the early Greeks the personification of epic
poetry. All the old epic poems were attributed to him, as all great achievements
were assigned to Heracles--not only what are extant, but also what are known
as the cyclic poems: the Cypria (ta Kupria, in eleven books, of the judgment
of Paris, the rape of Helen, and other events which immediately preceded the
Trojan War--ascribed by others to Stasinus of Cyprus), the Aethiopis and Iliupersis
(Aithiopis, in five books, of the arrival of the Amazons and the Aethiopian
Memnon, the defence of Troy, and the death of Achilles; and Iliou Persis, in
two books, of the device of the wooden horse and the capture of the city --generally
ascribed to Arctinus of Miletus), the Little Iliad (Ilias Mikra, in four books,
in which Philoctetes and Achilles' son Neoptolemus were brought to the help
of the Greeks--by Lesches of Mitylene), the Nosti (Nostoi, in five books, of
the adventures of the Greeks on their return from Troy--by Agias of Troezen),
and the Telegonia (Telegonia, in two books, a sort of conclusion of the story
of the Odyssey--by Eugammon of Cyrene).
When Aeschylus said that his tragedies were but crumbs from
the rich feast of Homer (Athen. viii. 347 E, tas hautou tragoidias temache einai
elege ton Homerou megalon deipnon), he probably had in mind not only the Iliad
and Odyssey, but also the other poems of the Trojan cycle, from which he borrowed
suggestions, as is seen from the titles of his plays. Herodotus was the first,
so far as is known, to deny the Homeric authorship of the Cypria. This he did
on the ground of the inconsistency that the poet of the Cypria made Paris reach
Troy on the third day from Sparta, while the poet of the Iliad represented him
as driven on a devious course to Sidon; and the historian remarks that nowhere
else does Homer contradict himself (oudamei allei anepodise heouton). Thucydides
seems to have acknowledged or assumed the Homeric authorship of the so-called
Homeric Hymns. Plato and Xenophon mean our Iliad and Odyssey when they speak
of Homer; but Aristotle quotes from the Margites (hosper Homeros phesin en toi
Margitei). The earliest Alexandrian editor of Homer, Zenodotus, seems to have
assigned to him only the Iliad and Odyssey.
Among the minor poems of Homer are generally placed the Hymns,
Battle of the Frogs and Mice (Batrachomuomachia), Jests (paignia), and Margites.
The Hymns are not hymns in the modern sense of the term; they are rather epic
than lyric. They number thirty-four in all, but ten are brief, having only three
to six lines each. The first two, to Apollo, were counted as one until the critic
Rhunken in 1749 convinced scholars that the first was in praise of Delian (178
verses) and the second of Pythian Apollo (368 verses). The latest editor endeavours
again to show that the two are simply parts of one. The third Hymn (580 verses)
tells of the birth of Hermes and the exploits and tricks of the new-born babe:
how he found a tortoise and invented the seven-stringed lyre (phorminx), how
he stole the cattle of Apollo and then returned to his cradle, finally appeasing
Apollo's wrath by the gift of the lyre. This and the one immediately following
are distinctly secular, not religious, in their character. The fourth Hymn (293
verses) tells of Aphrodite and her love for Anchises. The fifth Hymn (495 verses),
to Demeter, has a more serious tone than the preceding. It seems to have been
intended to state the mythical foundation for the Eleusinian Mysteries. It tells
how Persephone, Demeter's daughter, was carried off by Hades as she was plucking
flowers ("herself a fairer flower"), and of the disconsolate wanderings
of the mother in search of her daughter until she found a temporary home at
Eleusis; on her departure thence a temple was built in her honour, and at last
the mother and daughter were united. No one of the other Hymns has more than
sixty verses. They are “introductions,” proems (prooimia), intended to be sung
before the rhapsodist's recital of some other lay (perhaps at some rhapsodic
contest), as a sort of "grace before meat"--in the same spirit which
made every Greek festivity sacred to some divinity. No external evidence exists
for the date of these Hymns. They contain many Homeric formulas and tags of
verses which give an antique flavour even to what is comparatively modern. Parts
of the poems may go back to a remote antiquity; the Hymn to Demeter may have
been composed about B.C. 650; more date from the fifth and sixth centuries.
After the fifth century, the interest in epic recitations was so slight that
these proems would not be composed.
The Batrachomyomachia is a comic epic poem of 303 verses,
giving a burlesque account of the battle between the frogs and mice, when Puff-cheek
(Phusignathos), king of the frogs, caused the death of Crumb-snatcher (Psicharpax),
a promising young mouse, inviting him and bearing him on his back to visit his
home, but deserting him in the midst of the waters on the approach of a water-snake.
The story is composed with humour and some ingenuity, but is a light production.
It was ascribed to Pigres, son of Lygdamis and nephew of the Artemisia who distinguished
herself in the battle of Salamis; but if it were composed by him, it was interpolated
and worked over later. Very possibly it was composed in the Alexandrian period,
in mockery of the revival of epic poetry after the ancient spirit was lost.
The epigrams and jests are entirely insignificant, both in quantity and quality.
The only one of any note is the answer of Arcadian fishers to the question as
to their luck: "All that they took, they left; what they did not take,
they brought with them"(hoss helomen, lipomesth <*> hosa d ouch helomen
pheromestha). The Margites was a comic poem of considerable fame in antiquity,
part in dactylic hexameter and part in iambic trimeter verse, with the story
of a stupid (margos), bashful fellow, who had all manner of ridiculous adventures
and attempted many things which were beyond his powers. As long as critics are
not agreed as to what works are rightly attributed to Chaucer, and even as to
the authorship of some of the plays which have been ascribed to Shakespeare,
no one can wonder that little is known of the history of the incunabula of Greek
poetry, composed in the imaginative age, long before the classical period.
The Iliad and the Odyssey contain the story of parts of the
Trojan cycle of myths.
The Iliad opens with a scene in the last of the ten years
of the Siege of Troy, and the action of the poem continues for only seven weeks.
With great ingenuity (as it would seem) just enough incidental indications are
given of the early history of the war to supply the needed basis for an intelligent
appreciation of the story. As Horace says, Homer semper ad eventum festinat
et in medias res, non secus ac notas auditorem rapit. The judgment of Paris
and the assignment of the prize of beauty to the Goddess of Love are referred
to in the Homeric poems but once, and that in a doubtful passage, xxiv. 29,
30. Paris (his Greek name Alexander is more frequent in the poems), the voluptuous
son of Priam, king of Ilios (the later Ilium), in the Trojan land, on the south
western shore of the Hellespont, had sailed to Lacedaemon and carried away Helen,
the beautiful wife of Menelaus, the king, and many of her possessions. In order
to avenge this insult and to recover the woman and her treasures, Menelaus and
his brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, gathered an army at Aulis, and with
1186 ships (and perhaps 100,000 men) set sail for the plain of Troy. For ten
years they besiege the city. They bring with them no supplies, and spend much
of their time in making forays on the neighbouring districts and more formal
expeditions against the adjoining towns. The captured men are slain or sold
to distant islands; the women are kept as slaves. The Trojans are not closely
barred within their walls, but they are unable to cultivate their fields and
are obliged to send their treasures to their neighbours, in order to buy provisions
and to hire mercenaries. The loss of men does not seem to have been very great
on either side in the early years of the war. At the opening of the Iliad, an
old priest of Apollo, Chryses, comes to the Greek camp to ransom his daughter,
who had been captured by the Greeks and given as a prize of honour to Agamemnon.
The king refuses the request, and Apollo avenges the slight to his priest by
sending a pestilence upon the Greek camp. After nine days an assembly of the
army is called, and the seer Calchas declares the cause of the god's anger.
The rude language used by Achilles, the mightiest of the Greek warriors, arouses
the wrath of Agamemnon, and a quarrel follows. Achilles "sulks in his tent,"
while his mother, the goddess Thetis, persuades Zeus to grant victory to the
Trojan arms. The action of the Iliad includes only four days of battle. In the
first, ii.-vii. 380, neither side gains any great advantage; in the second,
viii., the tide of battle often turns and the gods interfere again and again,
but at last the Trojans drive the foe to their camp, and bivouac on the plain,
near the Greek watchfires. In the third day of battle, xi.-xviii., the Trojans
break into the Greek camp and begin to set fire to the fleet; but as soon as
Achilles sees the flickering flame he sends his comrade Patroclus with his Myrmidons,
enjoining upon him to drive the Trojans from the camp, but not to attempt to
capture the city. Patroclus forgets the warning of his chief, and filled with
the spirit of the combat presses on too far; Apollo strikes him (the only instance
in the poems of such direct interference of a divinity), and Hector slays him.
Achilles now becomes more angry at Hector than he had been at Agamemnon, and
takes an active part in the fourth day of battle, xix.--xxii., in which he drives
the Trojans in confusion into their city, and slays Hector. The twenty-third
book is devoted to the funeral games in honour of Patroclus, in accordance with
the curious ancient custom of honouring the dead with horse-races and foot-races
and contests in wrestling, boxing, putting the shot, and shooting the bow. In
the twenty-fourth book old Priam comes to the Greek camp and ransoms the body
of Hector from Achilles, who here appears in a gentler mood. The poem closes
very simply: "Thus these were busy with the burial of Hector." After
the action of the Iliad, the Aethiopian Memnon comes with his men to the help
of Troy, while Philoctetes with the bow of Heracles and Neoptolemus, the son
of Achilles, after his father's death, come to aid the Greeks. The alliance
of the Amazons with the Trojans is not mentioned in the poems. Odysseus plans
the Wooden Horse, by which the city is captured. Athene's wrath is kindled against
the Greeks by their conduct after the capture of the city, and she sends upon
them a storm, which scatters their fleets. Menelaus is driven to Crete and Egypt,
and with Helen reaches his home in Sparta only in the eighth year of their wandering.
Odysseus is driven first to the land of the lotus-eaters, then to the island
of the Cyclopes, where Polyphemus slays and devours six of his comrades (and
is blinded by him), thence to the land of the Laestrygonians (where all but
one of his ships are destroyed), and to Circe's island, where he passes a year.
He then visits Hades, in order to consult the soul of the blind Theban seer,
Teiresias. In Hades he sees the shade of his mother and those of many of the
Greek heroes. On his return the dangers of Scylla and Charybdis are met. His
comrades slay one of the cattle of the Sun, and their boat is wrecked. Odysseus
himself is borne to the island of the sea-nymph Calypso, who cares for him tenderly,
and would make him immortal and her husband. The scene of the Odyssey opens
in the tenth year after the close of the Trojan War and the twentieth after
the departure of Odysseus from his home on Ithaca. He has been absent so long
that no expectation is entertained of his return. His home is filled by more
than a hundred young princes, each eager to win the hand of the faithful and
prudent wife, Penelope; and thus to become the king of the realm. The goddess
Athene pities Odysseus, who is weary of his sojourn in the grotto of Calypso
and longing for his home, and secures the decree of Zeus for his return. Meanwhile
she sends his son Telemachus to Nestor and Menelaus, asking for tidings of his
father. Odysseus sets out from Calypso's island, eighteen days' sail to the
west, but as he approaches Greece he is wrecked by the sea-god Poseidon, whose
son Polyphemus he had blinded, and is cast on the shore of the Phaeacians (identified
by the ancients with Corcyra, the modern Corfu), who convey him to his home.
Finding his palace in the possession of haughty suitors, he returns in the guise
of a beggar, but with the help of his son and two faithful servants (and Athene)
he slays the suitors and regains his kingdom and faithful wife.
The action of the Odyssey covers only six weeks --less even
than that of the Iliad--yet the events of the ten years of wandering are comprised
in the stories which are put into the mouth of Nestor, Menelaus, and Odysseus
himself. This device of introducing a full account of events which are not included
in the time of the proper action of the poem was followed by Vergil in his account
of the capture of Troy (as told by Aeneas), and by Milton in his account of
the war in heaven (told by Raphael). Many matters which are merely touched upon
in the poem were discussed more fully in the lesser epic poems, and the question
has been raised whether these brief mentions in the Iliad and Odyssey were allusions
to the fuller accounts, already familiar to the hearer, or rather were the fruitful
germs which were later developed into the Cypria, the Nosti, etc. In some cases
the latter alternative seems certain--e. g. on the death of Hector, his wife
Andromache despairs of safety for herself and her son Astyanax; "he will
either accompany her into slavery, or some Greek will seize him by the arm and
hurl him from the wall." This seems to have suggested to a later poet the
detailed description of such a death for the boy.
The influence of the Homeric poems upon the Greeks was very
great. Pindar says that Odysseus had more fame than he deserved because of the
sweet-voiced Homer (Nem. vii. 20, ego de pleon elpomai logon Odusseos e pathan
dia ton haduepe genesth Homeron). Herodotus even asserts that Homer and Hesiod
fixed the theogony of the Greeks, distributing to the gods their epithets, arts,
and honours. Appeal was made to the Homeric poems to settle questions of precedence
and of title to territory. These poems were in large measure the basis of the
Greek youth's education. A fragment of a play of Aristophanes shows us a father
examining his son, to prove his diligence in school, on the meaning of certain
obsolete Homeric words: ti kalousi korumba; ti kalous amenena karena; In the
Symposium of Xenophon, Niceratus says that his father, the noted Athenian general
Nicias, in his desire to make a good man of him, compelled him to learn all
the poems of Homer, and that he could repeat the entire Iliad and Odyssey from
memory. At the Panathenaic festival from the time of Solon early in the sixth
century, for at least two hundred years the recitation of portions of the Homeric
poems had a prominent place. The Platonic dialogue Ion reports a conversation
between Socrates and the Ephesian rhapsode Ion, who visits Athens after taking
the prize in the Homeric recitation at Epidaurus, and expects the same honour
from the Panathenaic festival. This Ion was a Homeric specialist; he claimed
no unusual familiarity with Hesiod and Archilochus, but asserted that no one
equalled him as an interpreter of Homer. Such men naturally magnified their
office and represented the poet as the teacher of much occult wisdom--finding
in his works the best maxims for war and for peace, for the statesman, the philosopher,
and the general. Even Aristophanes represents Aeschylus as saying, "From
what has divine Homer received his fame except from his most excellent instructions
with regard to tactics, brave deeds, and the arming of men?" (Frogs, 1034,
ho de theios Homeros | apo tou timen kai kleos eschen plen toud hoti chrest
edidaxen | taxeis aretas hopliseis andron). The words of Horace are familiar:
at Praeneste he read again Homer, who taught what was base and what was honourable
more fully and better than the Stoic Chrysippus or the Academic philosopher
Crantor (Epist. i. 2. 1, Troiani belli scriptorem . . . relegi; | qui quid sit
pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non, | plenius ac melius Chrysippo et
Crantore dicit). Plato refutes the view that Homer had special wisdom in regard
to "ars, generalships, administration of cities, and the education of men,"
thus showing the prevalence of that belief.
According to an uncertain story, Pythagoras was said to have
seen Homer in Hades, suffering torments in return for his statements about the
gods. But the first definite criticism of Homer, so far as is known, was that
of Xenophanes, at the close of the sixth century B.C., that Homer and Hesiod
attributed to the gods all actions which are regarded as shameful by men. Heraclitus,
Xenophanes' contemporary, would have Homer driven from the musical contests.
Plato, in his Republic, enters into a detailed examination of the moral effect
exerted by the Homeric poems, and declares that the youths who are in process
of training to be the guardians of his ideal State must not be rendered impious
by hearing what would degrade the gods in their eyes; lest they should fear
death more than defeat and flight, they must not hear Zeus lamenting the death
of Sarpedon, and Achilles declaring that he would rather serve a poor man on
earth than rule over all the dead in the home of Hades; they must not be taught
insubordination and insolence to commanding officers by hearing Achilles call
Agamemnon a coward; and they must not learn to give free rein to their passions
from the wantonness of Zeus and from Odysseus' enjoyment of food and drink.
Thus, although with much regret because of his old regard and affection for
the poet, the works of Homer are not allowed in Plato's ideal State. The reader
is at a loss to know how seriously he is to understand these words of the philosopher,
who is fond of clinching an argument or giving a higher literary flavour to
a sentence by a quotation from the "inspired poet." Allegory was already
employed in the interpretation of the most offensive passages, but Plato says
that the young person cannot distinguish between what is allegorical and what
is not. In the Phaedrus he playfully suggests that the poet may have lost his
sight because of his false statements with regard to the gods. Plutarch, in
his treatise on "How a young man should study poetry," makes a formal
reply to Plato without naming him, urging that the young should be taught to
discriminate between what is admirable in itself and what is an admirable imitation
of the offensive or even base. The rhetorician Zoilus received the nickname
of Homer's Scourge (Homeromastix) because of his severe criticisms on the poet;
but these were meant very likely merely as a paradox, just as other rhetoricians
showed their ingenuity in maintaining the guilt of Socrates, the innocence of
Busiris, and the advantages of fever and vermin.
The old Greek commentaries (scholia, scholia) on Homer mention
editions by Antimachus of Colophon (himself an epic poet, a contemporary of
Plato), and by Aristotle, who was said to have prepared an edition expressly
for the use of his distinguished pupil, Alexander the Great. Athenian school-masters
prepared also lists of obsolete Homeric words. The critical study of Homer,
however, began at Alexandria, in connection with the great library and "Museum”
which were established by the Ptolemies. These kings of Egypt had abundant means
with which to encourage the arts and sciences, and desired by the help of Greek
civilization to break down the barriers which existed between the different
races of their subjects and to exalt their kingdom. They gathered men of literary
talent from all lands and set apart a portion of the palace for a great library.
Strenuous efforts were made to secure copies of all works of Greek literature,
and, in fact, of all literature, including, according to the story, the Greek
translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. In the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus (who
reigned B.C. 285-247), the library was said to contain 400,000 volumes (rolls)--perhaps
equal to about 40,000 modern octavo volumes--such a collection as had never
existed before. It possessed copies of Homer from Marseilles, Chios (the seat
of the Homeridae), Sinope on the Black Sea, Argos, Cyprus, Crete. The Homeric
poems formed the centre of the literary studies of the Alexandrian scholars.
The first careful editor and reviser of the Homeric text was Zenodotus, the
earliest of the librarians. He had before him copies of the poems with variations
which extended over whole verses and clauses, as well as to words and forms.
A critical procedure was necessary. Even the same manuscript must have shown
marked inconsistencies of grammatical forms. The first critical edition, in
the nature of the case, must have been an experiment. The editor can have had
no fixed principles with regard to the formation of words and the characteristics
of the Homeric dialect. Zenodotus is thought to have been the first to divide
the Iliad and the Odyssey each into twenty-four books. In earlier times this
division was unknown. So, for example, Herodotus speaks of Iliad vi. 289-292
as en Diomedeos aristeiei. Aelian writes in detail of this ancient custom of
reference by the subject of each particular portion of the poems. The ancient
titles are preserved, though with some possible inaccuracies and no definite
authority, as the headings of the books in ordinary editions of the poems. The
division into books became necessary at this particular time, because then parchment
was replaced by papyrus as the ordinary writing material. The comparatively
frail papyrus was not suited for long rolls. Hence the works of Plato, Xenophon,
Thucydides, and Herodotus were divided, also. Zenodotus seems to have composed
no commentary to accompany his edition of the poems, but tradition preserved
his views of certain passages. He was not led to reject or change for grammatical
reasons, but seems to have been guided in many changes rather by a sense of
propriety. Thus he rejected Il. iii. 424, where Aphrodite took a chair and set
it for Helen, for the goddess to do menial service was aprepes in his eyes;
verses Il. i. 28-30 were unworthy of a king; in Il. i. 260, where Nestor says,
"I have been associated with better men than you" (areiosin ee per
humin), Zenodotus read "than we" (hemin), in order to make the expression
more courteous. But the work of this critic is coming to honour, and it is at
present fashionable in some quarters to praise him at the expense of Aristarchus.
The edition of Zenodotus formed the basis of that of his
successor, Aristophanes of Byzantium, a little after B.C. 200, who is noteworthy
as the first to introduce to general use the marks of accentuation and the signs
of quantity, which are still in use. His chief work was in lexicography.
Unquestionably the greatest of the literary critics of Alexandria
was Aristarchus, who was born in the island of Samothrace, but came to Alexandria
and studied under Aristophanes, whom he succeeded in the care of the library.
He prepared two revised editions of the Homeric text, with critical marks in
the margin, and wrote eight hundred tracts on many subjects, largely connected
with our poet. He founded a school of critics which continued active until the
time of the early Roman emperors. Many of his notes have been preserved to us
in the Greek scholia, and prove his learning and his caution. The watchword
and battle-cry of his school was analogy, opposed to the rival school of the
Stoic Crates at Pergamum, who was more free in the admission of anomalies in
the construction of sentences and in the formation and meaning of words. Crates
indulged in allegorical interpretation, paying little attention to grammatical
studies, and making Homer a philosopher and an orator, while Aristarchus was
more conservative and sober in his views.
The basis of our scholia to the Iliad is an epitome made
about A.D. 200, of four works. Of these the most important was a work by Didymus
(called Chalkenteros and Bibliolathas from his unwearied industry and literary
productivity), of the time of Augustus, in which Didymus aimed at giving a full
report of the readings of the editions of Aristarchus, in so far as they varied
from others. Next in importance was a work by an earlier contemporary, Aristonicus,
who endeavoured to explain the use of the critical signs of Aristarchus, and
the reasons for their employment in each case. Less full and important were
the extracts from a treatise by Herodian on Accentuation (he Iliake Prosoidia)
and one by Nicanor on Punctuation (Peri Stigmes). The epitome of these four
works has suffered serious losses in its transmission to the present time, and
considerable additional matter of little value and authority has been added.
The component parts of these scholia have been carefully analyzed and separated,
and scholars no longer speak of the statement of the scholiast, but of that
of Didymus, of Nicanor, etc. The extant scholia to the Odyssey are far less
extensive and important than those to the Iliad.
The Homeric text of the MSS. does not seem to be so distinctly
under the control of the text of Aristarchus as was to be expected. In many
particulars it differs from his editions--so widely that it seems that the vulgate
text was only indirectly and slightly influenced by his work. Many scholars
now regard the restoration of the Aristarchean text as the ultimate, or at least
the immediate, aim of Homeric text-criticism. But Bekker's edition of 1858 attempted
to present the text as it was sung--not as it stood in the old MSS.--inserting
the lost vau where the editor believed it had once been pronounced. Bekker had
been preceded by a wholly unscientific attempt of the same kind in 1820, by
R. Payne Knight, who inserted vaus with more zeal than discretion, printing
as the title of the Iliad WIDWIAS, and Tydeus as TUWDEWS, but who with many
absurdities had many ideas which have been confirmed by modern investigations.
Bekker has been followed by others, notably Nauck, who has made a scientific
edition of Homer such as he believes the poems to have been before the forms
were subjected to later Attic influence.
That the Homeric text of Plato and Aristotle was not exactly
like that of the present day is extremely probable, but these seem to have quoted
so freely that exact inferences are difficult. The view that they quoted from
memory is strengthened by the fact that each of the two makes a careless reference
to the Homeric story: Plato speaks of Eurypylus where he means Machaon, confusing
two similar incidents in the same book of the Iliad; and Aristotle puts into
the mouth of Calypso a command of Odysseus which was given in accordance with
advice of Circe. In the summer of 1891 the British Museum published a collation
of several very ancient papyrus texts of the Iliad, containing fragments of
several hundred lines. With the exception of two or three details, the most
important teaching of these MSS., one of which is from the very beginning of
our era, is that the ordinary texts of to-day are rather more accurate and intelligible
than those of two thousand years ago, but certain verses may not have been recognized
as Homeric then which are in modern texts.
For the last century the vexed and ever-burning Homeric Question
has been with regard to the composition and original form of the Homeric poems--whether
they were the creations of one poetic genius or the remnants of the songs of
many bards; whether their composition was organic or atomic; whether they can
be compared with Vergil's Aeneid and Milton's Paradise Lost, or whether they
were at first only short, scattered songs, grouped around central personages
and events, and gradually developed into longer poems with unity. The heat and
length of the discussion have made clear the fact that the question is difficult,
and no hypothesis has been presented free from grave objections. Scholars are
more nearly agreed than half a century ago, however. Probably no one who has
a right to an opinion on the subject now holds to the strict unity of the poems
in the old sense--that all of the Iliad and Odyssey was composed by one man--yet
comparatively few would deny a certain unity in the poems, however it was secured.
The ancient Alexandrians had their Separatists (chorizontes), Xeno and Hellanicus,
who denied that the Odyssey was composed by the author of the Iliad, and Perizonius
in 1684 called attention to the late use of writing for literary purposes. The
great Bentley in 1713 said that "Homer wrote a sequel of songs and rhapsodies
to be sung by himself for small earnings and good cheer, at festivals and other
days of merriment; the Iliad he made for the men, and the Odysseis for the other
sex. These loose songs were not collected together in the form of an epic poem
till about five hundred years after." Vico of Naples in 1725 expressed
his view that Homer never existed--that he was the personification of the early
songs of the Greeks. Robert Wood, in An Essay on the Original Genius of Homer
(1769), declared his belief that the art of writing was not known to Homer.
But the modern discussion of the Homeric Question dates from the Prolegomena
ad Homerum of Friedrich August Wolf, published in 1795. The Prolegomena excited
much attention, and probably has had greater influence than any other work on
the methods of historical and philological study, although its ideas were not
wholly novel. The poet Herder and the philologist Heyne each claimed that his
thunder had been stolen. The book owed its great success largely to its clear
and attractive presentation of the subject, and it is more valuable now for
its method than for its particular arguments. Wolf planned to give a critical
history of the Homeric poems through six periods, the first of which extended
from the composition of the poems (about B.C. 950, according to him) to the
age of Pisistratus, tyrant of Athens in the sixth century B.C., who, according
to an uncertain tradition, first collected and arranged them in their present
form; the second period extended from Pisistratus to Zenodotus, the earliest
of the Alexandrian critics. Wolf never completed his work beyond these first
two periods. He attempted to show (a) that the Homeric poems were not committed
to writing by the poet, but were intrusted to the memory of the rhapsodes, who
were gathered in schools, like the Hebrew prophets; thus before the poems were
written they were exposed to many and unintentional changes--from lapse of memory,
and from a singer's desire to improve a passage or suit it more perfectly to
a special occasion. Writing was unknown in Greece in Homer's time, and no class
of readers existed for whom a poem should be written. (b) After the poems had
been committed to writing, many more additional changes were made in them, in
order to remove inconsistencies and to give them the polish of an age advanced
in culture and poetic art. (c) The Iliad and Odyssey in their present form are
due not to the poetic genius of Homer, but to the intelligence of a later age--to
the united efforts of Pisistratus and the poets of his court. (d) The songs
themselves, of which the Iliad and Odyssey are composed, are not by the same
poet. These last two theses were never publicly discussed by Wolf in detail.
He only urged that if the poems were not to be committed to writing at the time
when they were composed, the sougs were not originally parts of one long work;
no one would have thought of making a poem which could not be read and which
was too long to be sung or recited at a single sitting. A bond of union would
be valueless between lays which were to be sung in no regular order on different
occasions. The Homeric poems unquestionably possess a certain unity beyond what
is found in Hesiod or in the late poet Quintus Smyrnaeus, but this unity must
be due to the editors of the Pisistratean age. Discrepancies are found which
could not occur in a single poem, but might very well be overlooked in the combination
of independent lays. Entire rhapsodies (e. g. Iliad x.) seem to be due to some
other than the poet of the greater part of the Iliad.
The views of Wolf were received with intense interest, but
with varied approval. The poet Schiller said that the man was a barbarian who
would tear asunder the Homeric poems and believe that they were put together
long after their composition. Goethe, while at first an enthusiastic admirer
of the Prolegomena, soon declared that he believed in the unity of the Iliad
more heartily than ever. On the whole, however, the work of Wolf was convincing,
at least in large part, to most scholars of Germany. Theologians received it
with special interest, on account of the applications of Wolf's principles to
the study of the Old Testament. But a reaction took place. Opponents urged that
the use of writing in Greece was much earlier than Wolf claimed; but they made
the fatal concession that such long poems would be impossible without the aid
of writing. Both sides claimed too much. Writing was certainly known in Greece
earlier than Wolf allowed, but was not used for extensive literary purposes
until long after the time alleged by his opponents. The power of the human memory
to retain accurately long poems had been underrated. The external arguments
against the original unity of the Homeric poems have yielded rather than advanced
since Wolf's time. The evidence in support of the story of the work of Pisistratus
in collecting and arranging the scattered Homeric poems is considered weak,
as well as that for the existence of schools of rhapsodists corresponding to
the schools of the prophets.
Only a beginning had been made of the attempt to disprove
the unity of the Homeric poems from internal evidence when Lachmann, of Berlin,
in 1837, applied to the Iliad the analysis which had been applied not much earlier
to the Nibelungenlied. He set to work to discover contradictions and inconsistencies
which would indicate the different authorship of different parts. The discussion
of the unity of the poems was conducted mainly on his principles for half a
century, and no one now lays stress on the external evidence, one way or the
other. In the first book of the Iliad he determined an original lay, complete
in itself, and two independent and inconsistent continuations. The beginning
of the second book (he says) cannot have been part of the same lay as the close
of the first book; at the close of book i., Zeus sleeps, with Hera by his side,
while at the beginning of book ii., Zeus cannot sleep and has an interview with
the Dream God, in which he tells much that he would not have Hera know. In the
third day of battle, which begins book xi. 1 and continues through book xviii.
240, the sun comes twice to the zenith. The twenty-third book of the Iliad cannot
have been intended to follow immediately upon the twenty-second--the one ending,
"Thus she spake weeping, and the women groaned in response," while
the next begins, "Thus these were groaning throughout the city." Following
such indications, Lachmann marked out the boundaries of eighteen distinct lays
in the Iliad. Kochly, following in Lachmann's footsteps, published in 1851 an
edition of the Iliad, in sixteen lays --not agreeing with Lachmann in the divisions
so well as in the number of the songs. The advocates of the theory that the
Homeric poems are but a conglomeration of independent lays have not succeeded
in coming to essential agreement with regard to the original songs. Their lines
of cleavage do not agree. Contradictions certainly exist: Odysseus' hair is
blonde, but black. Diomed and Odysseus are seriously wounded and retire from
the conflict, but two days later take part in the games in honour of Patroclus--Odysseus
wrestling with Telamonian Ajax, and winning the prize in the foot-race. Most
noted of all is the case of Pylaemenes; he is slain at Il. v. 576, but follows
the corpse of his son from the battle. Some inconsistencies may be considered
as trifles about which the poet did not concern himself; he was composing for
hearers rather than for critical readers who can turn backward and forward,
and compare statements. Other inconsistencies may have been caused by interpolations;
the incident of Pylaemenes in Il. xiii. 658 may have been added by a later poet
in order to give increased pathos to the scene. Possibly the Homeric Greeks
were not so much disturbed as some moderns at such inconsistencies. Similar
discrepancies are found in the works of Vergil and other poets.
In 1846, the historian Grote, declaring that "the idea
that a poem as we read it grew out of atoms not originally designed for the
places which they now occupy, involves us in new and inextricable difficulties
when we seek to elucidate either the mode of coalescence or the degree of existing
unity," proposed the theory that the present Iliad was made up by the combination
of an original Iliad with an Achilleid. This latter poem on the Wrath of Achilles
gives all that is "really necessary to complete the programme in the opening
proem of the poem."
In 1878, Professor Geddes of Aberdeen, following in Grote's
footsteps, declared that "the Homeric corpus of Iliad and Odyssey falls
asunder into two great sections, on the one hand the Achilleid, and on the other
the non-Achilleid, plus the Odyssey.""A poet, who is also the author
of the Odyssey, has engrafted on a more ancient poem, the Achilleid, splendid
and vigorous saplings of his own, transforming and enlarging it into an Iliad."
This view was maintained by many indications: Achilles is more gentle in the
Odyssean books; Helen is not mentioned in the Achilleid; the dog is more honoured
in the Odyssean books, the horse in the Achilleid, etc.
Organic development from a brief epic poem was claimed for
the Odyssey by Kirchhoff of Berlin, Bankes in 1859. He considers the original
part to be the old Return (Nostos) of Odysseus, of just 1200 verses; to this
simple story was added a longer story of 3560 verses, narrating the adventures
of Odysseus after his return to Ithaca; still later were added (7185 verses)
the Telemachia, or account of the journey of Telemachus to Pylus and Sparta,
the experiences of Odysseus in Phaeacia, and his adventures in the cave of Polyphemus,
in the island of Circe, in the realm of Hades, etc.
Christ of Munich published in 1884 an edition of the Iliad
in which he divided the poem into forty lays, and indicated by the use of four
different styles of Greek type his view of the relative order of composition
of the different parts of the poem. Immediately after the first book he places
the eleventh, the Bravery of Agamemnon, believing that the intermediate books
were composed after the poet saw what a rich vein he had struck, and to what
a magnificent growth his germ might be developed. He holds that most of the
poem proves a poet revolving a great plan in his mind, and arranging the parts
to form a whole.
Von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff published in 1884 an important
work on this subject, Homerische Untersuchungen, dedicated to the well-known
Biblical scholar Wellhausen. Just as Wolf's Prole- gomena stimulated the investigation
of the historical sources and of the age of the Old Testament Scriptures, so
the method of the recent analysis of the Pentateuch has been applied to the
Homeric poems. Wilamowitz rejects Lachmann's lays as being fragments, unintelligible
when separated. He bases his work upon that of Kirchhoff, yet rejects many of
the latter's views. He follows him in putting the Odyssey in the front of the
discussion. Until Kirchhoff, no scholar had seriously attempted the critical
dissection of this poem, of which the artistic plan was not doubted. Two of
Wilamowitz's conclusions are that the Telemachia was composed in Asia Minor,
and that the Odyssey was brought into its present form in Greece proper --probably
near Corinth or in Euboea.
The Homeric Question is clearly full of difficulties. No
theory has been proposed which meets with general acceptance. The poems doubtless
contain a great mass of very ancient material. Professor Percy Gardner writes,
in his New Chapters in Greek History (1892), "There is a broad line dividing
mythical from political Hellas, a line which seems to coincide with the great
break made in the continuity of Hellas by the Dorian invasion. . . . The Homeric
poetry may have been reduced to form after the splendour of the Ionian and Achaean
chiefs had passed away. . . . In using the name of Homer, we do not, of course,
assert that the Homeric poems had a single author. But we do assert the antiquity
of those poems. Homer reflects the pre-historic age of Greece as truly as does
Herodotus the Greece of the Persian Wars, or Pausanias the Greece of the age
of the Antonines." The poet does not profess to have seen Priam's Troy;
he is clearly conscious that he belongs to a degenerate age, and that he is
dependent on the muse for his information. No one supposes that the poems are
an accurate record of a particular war. The recent excavations, however, establish
the fact that at Mycenae, the home of the Homeric Agamemnon, and on the shore
of the Hellespont, the home of the Homeric Priam, stood at the same period,
flourishing from about B.C. 1400 to about B.C. 1000, cities of wealth and power,
of similar culture. A war between these cities, which may have suggested the
Homeric story, is by no means an impossibility. The details, however, and perhaps
every name of a person, are due to the poet's imagination. The view that the
poems were essentially in their present condition before the historical period
in Greece began, early in the eighth century B.C., is moderate.
The Homeric dialect is artificial--that is, such as was never
spoken by any Greek tribe. It contains many ancient elements, but is far from
being the ancestor of all the later historical dialects. It is not even the
source of the Attic or Ionic dialects. The Aeolic element in it is so strong
as to suggest to Fick the view that the older parts of the poems were composed
in the Aeolic dialect and were afterwards translated into that of the Ionic.
The formulaic character of many of the Aeolic words and phrases, the large number
of Homeric proper names found in historical times in Northern Greece, the traditions
with regard to the seats of the Pierian Muses, and the prominence given to the
Thessalian hero, Achilles, make probable the view that epic poetry was first
cultivated by the Aeolians in Northern Greece, but was afterwards brought to
perfection by the Ionians in Asia Minor. The dialect certainly indicates a long
course of development. Obsolete words and forms were retained by the poets in
certain connections after they had been dropped from the ordinary speech of
the people. Certain late forms appear in the ordinary texts in sufficient number
to suggest to Paley the theory that the poems were brought into their present
form in the age of Pericles at Athens; but most of these forms can be explained
easily as the work of a careless copyist, who substituted a form which he heard
every day for one which was found only in old poems--just as a halfeducated
man would do to-day in copying the works of Chaucer, unless he were specially
warned and trained to be accurate in this matter. If the Homeric poems were
thoroughly worked over, revamped, in the time of Solon or of Pericles, some
clear trace would have been left of the culture and political relations of that
time. A strong indication of the falsity of the story that Pisistratus gathered
the poems and caused interpolations to be made to the glory of Athens, is the
simple fact that Athens is so insignificant in the Iliad and Odyssey. If the
unity of the poems were really due to Pisistratus, and he ordered the poets
of his court to insert passages which would honour Athens, we should find greater
distinction given to Athenian heroes and more myths of the Attic cycle. The
two or three verses assigned by the ancient critics to Athenian interpolators
are absolutely trifling.
Fortunately the Homeric poems exist, even though scholars
have not settled the question when and how they came into being. Destructive
criticism has not been able to disturb the fact that they remain the greatest
epic poems the world has seen-- admired by many ages and peoples of different
civilizations. They stand unrivalled. In comparison with them the vast epics
of India are as shapeless as the Hindoo idols, and are in their luxuriance like
to a tropical jungle; while the work of Vergil and of Milton, who take Homer
as their master, is artificial and unnatural in comparison with his--the "clearest-souled
of men."
This text is from: Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. Cited Oct 2002 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
Homerus (Homeros). The poems of Homer formed the basis of Greek literature. Every
Greek who had received a liberal education was perfectly well acquainted with
them from his childhood, and had learnt them by heart at school; but nobody could
state any thing certain about their author. In fact, the several biographies of
Homer which are now extant afford very little or nothing of an authentic history.
The various dates assigned to Homer's age offer no less a diversity than 500 years
(from B. C. 1184-684). Crates and Eratosthenes state, that he lived within the
first century after the Trojan war; Aristotle and Aristarchus make him a contemporary
of the Ionian migration, 140 years after the war; the chronologist, Apollodorus,
gives the year 240, Porphyrius 275, the Parian Marble 277, Herodotus 400 after
that event; and Theopompus even makes him a contemporary of Gyges, king of Lydia
(Nitzsch, Melet. de Histor. Hom. fasc. ii., de Hist. Hom.). The most important
point to be determined is, whether we are to place Homer beforee or after the
lonian migration. The latter is supported by the best authors, and by the general
opinion of antiquity, according to which Homer was by birth an Ionian of Asia
Minor. There were indeed more than seven cities which claimed Homer as their countryman;
for if we number all those that we find mentioned in different passages of ancient
writers, we have seventeen or nineteen cities mentioned as the birth-places of
Homer; but the claims of most of these are so suspicious and feeble, that they
easily vanish before a closer examination. Athens, for instance, alleged that
she was the metropolis of Smyrna, and could therefore number Homer amongst her
citizens. Many other poems were attributed to Homer besides the Iliad and Odyssey.
The real authors of these poems were forgotten, but their fellow-citizens pretended
that Homer, the supposed author, had lived or been born among them. The claims
of Cyme and Colophon will not seem entitled to much consideration, because they
are preferred by Ephorus and Nicander. who were citizens of those respective towns.
After sifting the authorities for all the different statements, the claims of
Smyrna and Chios remain the most plausible, and between these two we have to decide.
Smyrna is supported by Pindar, Scylax. and Stesimbrotus ; Chios by Simonides,
Acusilaus, Hellanicus, Thucydides, the tradition of a family of Homerids at Chios,
and the local worship of a hero, Homeros. The preference is now generally given
to Smyrna. Smyrna was first founded by Ionians from Ephesus, who were followed,
and afterwards expelled, by Aeolians from Cyme : the expelled Ionians fled to
Colophon, and Smyrna thus became Aeolic. Subsequentlyy the Colophonians drove
out the Aeolians from Smyrna, which from henceforth was a purely Ionic city. The
Aeolians were originally in possession of the traditions of the Trojan war, which
their ancestors had waged, and in which no Ionians had taken part. Homer therefore.
himself an Ionian, who had come from Ephesus, received these traditions from the
new Aeolian settlers, and when the lonians were driven out of Smyrna, either he
himself fled to Chios, or his descendants or disciples settled there, and formed
the famous family of Homerids. Thus we may unite the claims of Smyrna and Chios,
and explain the peculiarities of the Homeric dialect, which is different from
the pure Ionic, and has a large mixture of Aeolic elements. According to this
computation, Homer would have flourished shortly after the time of the Ionian
migration, a time best attested, as we have seen, by the au thorities of Aristotle
and Aristarchus. But this result seems not to be reconcilable with the follow
ing considerations:
1. Placing Homer more than a century and a half after the Trojan war, we have
a long period which is apparently quite destitute of poetical exertions. Is it
likely that the heroes should not have found a bard for their deeds till more
than a hundred and fifty years after their death? And how could the knowledge
of these deeds be preserved without poetical traditions and epic songs, the only
chronicles of an illiterate age?
2. In addition to this, there was a stirring active time between the Asiatic settlements
of the Greeks and the war with Troy. Of the exploits of this time, certainly nowise
inferior to the exploits of the heroic age itself, we should expect to find something
mentioned or alluded to in the work of a poet who lived during or shortly after
it. But of this there is not a trace to be found in Homer.
3. The mythology and the poems of Homer could not have originated in Asia. It
is the growth of a long period, during which the ancient Thracian bards, who lived
partly in Thessaly, round Mount Olympus, and partly in Boeotia, near Helicon,
consolidated all the different and various local mythologies into one great mythological
system. If Homer had made the mythology of the Greeks, as Herodotus (ii. 53) affirms,
he would not have represented the Thessalian Olympus as the seat of his gods,
but some mountain of Asia Minor; his Muses would not have been those of Olympus,
but they would have dwelt on Ida or Gargaros. Homer, if his works had first originated
in Asia, would not have compared Nausicaa to Artemis walking on Tayyetus or Erymanthus
(Od. vi. 102); and a great many other allusions to European countries, which show
the poet's familiar acquaintance with them, could have found no place in the work
of an Asiatic. It is evident that Homer was far better acquainted with European
Greece than lie was with Asia Minor, and even the country round Troy. Sir W. Cell,
and other modern travellers, were astonished at the accuracy with which Homer
has described places in Peloponnesus, and particularly the island of Ithaca. It
has been observed, that nobody could have given these descriptions, except one
who had seen the country himself. How shall we, with all this, maintain our proposition,
that Homer was an Ionian of Asia Minor? It is indispensable, in order to clear
up this point, to enter more at large into the discussion concerning the origin
of the Homerie poems.
The whole of antiquity unanimously viewed the Iliad and the Odyssey
as the productions of a certain individual, called Homer. No doubt of this fact
ever entered the mind of any of the ancients; and even a large number of other
poems were attributed to thesame author. This opinion continued unshaken down
to the year 1795, when F. A. Wolf wrote his famous Prolegomena, in which he endeavoured
to show that the Iliad and Odyssey were not two complete poems, but small, separate,
independent epic songs, celebrating single exploits of the heroes, and that these
lays were for the first time written down and united, as the Iliad and Odyssey,
by Peisistratus, the tyrant of Athens. This opinion, startling and paradoxical
as it seemed, was not entirely new. Casaubon had already doubted the common opinion
regarding Homer, and the great Bentley had said expressly "that Homer wrote a
sequel of songs and rhapsodies. These loose songs were not collected together
in the form of an epic poem till about 500 years after" (Letter by Phileleutherus
Lipsiensis, 7). Some French writers, Perrault and Hedelin, and the Italian Vico,
had made similar conjectures, but all these were forgotten and overborne by the
common and general opinion, and the more easily, as these bold conjectures had
been thrown out almost at hazard, and without sound arguments to support them.
When therefore Wolf's Prolegomena appeared, the whole literary world was startled
by the boldness and novelty of his positions. His book, of course, excited great
opposition, but no one has to this day been able to refute the principal arguments
of that great critic, and to re-establish the old opinion, which he overthrew.
His views, however, have been materially modified by protracted discussions, so
that now we can almost venture to say that the question is settled. We will first
state Wolf's principal arguments, and the chief objections of his opponents, and
will then endeavour to discover the most probable result of all these inquiries.
In 1770, R. Wood published a book on the original Genius of Homer,
in which he mooted the question whether the Homeric poems had originally been
written or not. This idea was caught up by Wolf, and proved the foundation of
all his inquiries. But the most important assistance which he obtained was from
the discovery and publication of the famous Venetian scholia by Villoison (1788).
These valuable scholia, in giving us some insight into the studies of the Alexandrine
critics, furnished materials and an historical basis for Wolf's inquiries. The
point from which Wolf started was, as we have said. the idea that the Homeric
poems were originally not written. To prove this, he entered into a minute and
accurate discussion concerning the age of the art of writing. He set aside, as
groundless fables, the traditions which ascribed the invention or introduction
of this art to Cadmus, Cecrops, Orpheus, Linus, or Palamedes. Then, allowing that
letters were known in Greece at a very early period, he justly insists upon the
great difference which exists between the knowledge of the letters and their general
use for works of literature. Writing is first applied to public monuments, inscriptions,
and religious purposes, centuries before it is employed for the common purposes
of social life. This is still more certain to be the case when the common ordinary
materials for writing are wanting, as they were among the ancient Greeks. Wood,
lead, brass, stone, are not proper materials for writing down poems consisting
of twenty-four books. Even hides, which were used by the Ionians, seem too clumsy
for this purpose, and, besides, we do not know when they were first in use (Herod.
v. 58). It was not before the sixth century B. C. that papyrus became easily accessible
to the Greeks, through the king Amasis, who first opened Egypt to Greek traders.
The laws of Lycurgus were not committed to writing; those of Zaleucus, in Locri
Epizephyrii, in the 29th 01. (B. C. 664), are particularly recorded as the first
laws that were written down (Scymn. Perieg. 313; Strab. vi.). The laws of Solon,
seventy years later, were written on wood and boustrophedon. Wolf allows that
all these considerations do not prove that no use at all was made of the art of
writing as early as the seventh and eighth centuries B. C., which would be particularly
improbable in the case of the lyric poets, such as Archilochus, Aleman, Pisander,
and Aion, but that before the time of the seven sages, that is, the time when
prose writing first originated, the art was not so common that we can suppose
it to have been employed for such extensive works as the poems of Homer. Wolf
alleges the testimony of Josephus (c. Apion. i. 2): Opse Kai molis egnosan hoi
Hellenes phusin grammaton..Kai phasin oude touton (i.e. Homerum) en grammasi ten
autou poiesin katalpein, alla diamnemoneuomenen ek ton aismaton husteron suntethenai
(Besides Schol. ap. Villois. Anecd. Gr. ii.). But Wolf draws still more convincing
arguments from the poems themselves. In II. vii. 175, the Grecian heroes decide
by lot who is to fight with Hector. The lots are marked by each respective hero,
and all thrown into a hellnet, which is shaken till one lot is jerked out. This
is handed round by the herald till it reaches Ajax, who recognises the mark he
had made on it as his own. If this mark had been any thing like writing, the herald
would have read it at once, and not have handed it round. In Il. vi. 168, we have
the story of Bellerophon, whom Proetus sends to Lycia:
poren d hoge semata lugra,
Grapsas en pinaki ptuktoi Dumophthora polla
Deixai d' enogei hoi pentheroi, ophr apoloito.
Wolf shows that semata lugra are a kind of conventional marks, and not letters, and that this story is far from proving the existence of writing. Throughout the whole of Homer every thing is calculated to be heard, nothing to be read. Not a single epitaph, nor any other inscription, is mentioned ; the tombs of the heroes are rude mounds of earth; coins are unknown. In Od. viii. 163, an overseer of a ship is mentioned, who, instead of having a list of the cargo, must remember it; he is phortou mnemon. All this seemed to prove, without the possibility of doubt, that the art of writing was entirely unknown at the time of the Trojan war, and could not have been common at the time when the poems were composed.
Among the opponents of Wolf, there is none superior to Greg. W. Nitzsch,
in zeal, perseverance, learning, and acuteness. He wrote a series of monographies
(Quaestion. Homeric. Specim. i. 1824; Indagandae per Odyss. Interpolationis Praeparatio,
1828; De Hist. Homeri, fascic. i. 1830; De Aristotele contra Wolfianos, 1831;
Patria et Aetas Hom) to refute Wolf and his supporters. and he has done a great
deal towards establishing a solid and well-founded view of this complicated question.
Nitzsch opposed Wolf's conclusions concerning the later date of written documents.
He denies that the laws of Lycurgus were transmitted by oral tradition alone,
and were for this purpose set to music by Terpander and Thaletas, as is generally
believed, on the authority of Plutarch (de Mus. 3). The Spartan nomoi, which those
two musicians are said to have composed, Nitzsch declares to have been hymns and
not laws, although Strabo calls Thaletas a nomothetikos oner (by a mistake, as
Nitzsch ventures to say). Writing materials were, according to Nitzsch, not wanting
at a very early period. He maintains that wooden tablets, and the hides (diphtherai)
of the Ionians were employed, and that even papyrus was known and used by the
Greeks long before the time of Amasis, and brought into Greece by Phoenician merchants.
Amasis, according to Nitzsch, only rendered the use of papyrus more general (6th
century B. C.), whereas formerly its use had been confined to a few. Thus Nitzsch
arrives at the conclusion that writing was common in Greece full one hundred years
before the time which Wolf had supposed, namely, about the beginning of the Olympiads
(8th century B. C.), and that this is the time in which the Homeric poems were
committed to writing. If this is granted, it does not follow that the poems were
also composed at this time. Nitzsch cannot prove that the age of Homer was so
late as the eighth century. The best authorities, as we have seen, place Homer
much earlier, so that we again come to the conclusion that the Homeric poems were
composed and handed down for a long time without the assistance of writing. In
fact, this point seems indisputable. The nature of the Homeric language is alone
a sufficient argument, but into this consideration Nitzsch never entered (Hermann,
Opusc. vi. 1, 75; Giese, d. Aeol. Dialect.). The Homeric dialect could never have
attained that softness and flexibility, which render it so well adapted for versification--that
variety of longer and shorter forms, which existed together-that freedom in contracting
and resolving vowels, and of forming the contractions into two syllables-if the
practice of writing had at that time exercised the power, which it necessarily
possesses, of fixing the forms of a language. The strongest proof is the Aeolic
Digamma, a sound which existed at the time of the composition of the poems, and
had entirely vanished from the language when the first copies were made.
It is necessary therefore to admit Wolf's first position, that the
Homeric poems were originally not committed to writing. We proceed to examine
the conclusions which he draws from these premises.
However great the genius of Homer may have been, says Wolf, it is
quite incredible that, without the assistance of writing, he could have conceived
in his mind and executed such extensive works. This assertion is very bold. "Who
can determine", says Mueller (Hist. of Greek Lit.), "how many thousand verses
a person thoroughly impregnated with his subject, and absorbed in the contemplation
of it, might produce in a year, and confide to the faithful memory of disciples
devoted to their master and his art"? We have instances of modern poets, who have
composed long poems without writing down a single syllable, and have preserved
them faithfully in their memory, before committing them to writing. And how much
more easily could this have been done in the time anterior to the use of writing,
when all those faculties of the mind, which had to dispense with this artificial
assistance, were powerfully developed, trained, and exercised. We must not look
upon the old bards as amateurs, who amused themselves in leisure hours with poetical
compositions, as is the fashion now-a-days. Composition was their profession.
All their thoughts were concentrated on this one point, in which and for which
they lived. Their composition was, moreover, facilitated by their having no occasion
to invent complicated plots and wonderful stories; the simple traditions, on which
they founded their songs, were handed down to them in a form already adapted to
poetical purposes. If now, in spite of all these advantages, the composition of
the Iliad and Odyssey was no easy task, we must attribute some superiority to
the genius of Homer, which caused his name and his works to acquire eternal glory,
and covered all his innumerable predecessors, contemporaries, and followers, with
oblivion.
The second conclusion of Wolf is of more weight and importance. When
people neither wrote nor read, the only way of publishing poems was by oral recitation.
The bards therefore of the heroic age, as we see from Homer himself, used to entertain
their hearers at banquets, festivals, and similar occasions. On such occasions
they certainly could not recite more than one or two rhapsodies. Now Wolf asks
what could have induced any one to compose a poem of such a length, that it could
not be heard at once ? All the charms of an artificial and poetical unity, varied
by episodes, but strictly observed through many books, must certainly be lost,
if only fragments of the poem could be heard at once. To refute this argument,
the opponents of Wolf were obliged to seek for occasions which afforded at least
a possibility of reciting the whole of the Iliad and Odyssey. Banquets and small
festivals were not sufficient; but there were musical contests (agones), connected
with great national festivals, at which thousands assembled, anxious to hear and
patient to listen. "If", says Mueller, "the Athenians could at one festival hear
in succession about nine tragedies, three satyric dramas, and as many comedies,
without ever thinking that it might be better to distribute this enjoyment over
the whole year, why should not the Greeks of earlier times have been able to listen
to the Iliad and Odyssey, and perhaps other poems, at the same festival? Let us
beware of measuring by our loose and desultory reading the intention of mind with
which a people enthusiastically devoted to such enjoyments, hung with delight
on the flowing strains of the minstrel. In short, there was a time when the Greek
people, not indeed at meals, but at festivals, and under the patronage of their
hereditary princes, heard and enjoyed these and other less excellent poems, as
they were intended to be heard and enjoyed, viz. as complete wholes". This is
credible enough, but it is not quite so easy to prove it. We know that, in the
historical times, the Homeric poems were recited at Athens at the festival of
the Panathenaea (Lycurg. c. Leoer.); and that there were likewise contests of
rhapsodists at Sicyon in the time of the tyrant Cleisthenes (Herod. v. 67), in
Syracuse, Epidaurus, Orchomenus,Thespiae, Acraephia, Chios, Teos, Olympia (See
the authors cited by Mueller). Hesiod mentions musical contests (Op. 652, and
Frag. 456), at which he gained a tripod. Such contests seem to have been ever
anterior to the time of Homer, and are alluded to in the Homeric description of
the Thracian bard Thamyris (Il. ii. 594), who on his road from Eurytus, the powerful
ruler of Oechalia, was struck blind at Dorium by the Muses, and deprived of his
entire art, because he had boasted of his ability to contend even with the Muses
(Comp. Diog. Laert. ix. 1). It is very likely that at the great festival of Panionium
in Asia Minor such contests took place (Heyne, Exc. ad Il. vol. viii.; Welcker,
Ep. Cycl.; Heinrich, Epimenides); but still, in order to form an idea of the possible
manner in which such poems as the Iliad and Odyssey were recited, we must have
recourse to hypotheses, which have at best only internal probability, but no external
authority. Such is the inference drawn from the later custom at Athens, that several
rhapsodists followed one another in the recitation of the same poem (Welcker,
Ep. Cycl.), and the still bolder hypothesis of Nitzsch, that the recitation lasted
more than one day (Vorr. z. Anm. z. Od. vol. ii.). But, although the obscurity
of those times prevents us from obtaining a certain and positive result as to
the way in which such long poems were recited, yet we cannot be induced by this
circumstance to doubt that the Iliad and Odyssey, and other poems of equal length,
were recited as complete wholes, because they certainly existed at a time anterior
to the use of writing. That such was the case follows of necessity from what we
know of the Cyclic poets (See Proclus, Chrestomathia in Gaisford's Hephaestion).
The Iliad and Odyssey contained only a small part of the copious traditions concerning
the Trojan war. A great number of poets undertook to fill up by separate poems
the whole cycle of the events of this war, from which circumstance they are commonly
styled the Cyclic poets. The poem Cypria, most probably by Stasinus, related all
the events which preceded the beginning of the Iliad fiom the birth of Helen to
the ninth year of the war. The Aethiopis and Iliupersis of Arctinus continued
the narrative after the death of Hector, and related the arrival of the Amazons,
whose queen, Penthesileia, is slain by Achilles, the death and burial of Thersites,
the arrival of Memnon with the Aethiopians, who kills Antilochus, and is killed
in return by Achilles, the death of Achilles himself by Paris, and the quarrel
between Ajax and Ulysses about his arms. The poem of Arctinus then related the
death of Ajax, and all that intervened between this and the taking of Troy, which
formed the subject of his second poem, the Ilinpersis. These same events were
likewise partly treated by Lesches, in his Little Ilias, with some differences
in tone and form. In this was told the arrival of Philoctetes, who kills Paris,
that of Neoptolemus, the building of the wooden horse, the capture of the palladium
by Ulysses and Diomede, and, finally, the taking of Troy itself. The interval
between the war and the subject of the Odyssey is filled up by the return of the
different heroes. This furnished the subject for the Nostoi by Agias, a poem distinguished
by great excellencies of composition. The misfortunes of the two Atreidae formed
the main part, and with this were artfully interwoven the adventures of all the
other heroes, except Ulysses. The last adventures of Ulysses after his return
to Ithaca were treated in the Telegonia of Eugammon. All these poems were grouped
round those of Homer, as their common centre. "It is credible", says Mueller (Ibid.
p. 64), "that their authors were Homeric rhapsodists by profession (so also Nitzsch,
Hall. Encycl. s. v. Odyss.), to whom the constant recitation of the ancient Homeric
poems would naturally suggest the notion of continuing them by essays of their
own in a similar tone. Hence too it would be more likely to occur that these poems,
when they were sung by the same rhapsodists, would gradually acquire themselves
the name of Homeric epics". Their object of completing and spinning out the poems
of Homer is obvious. It is necessary therefore to suppose that the Iliad and Odyssey
existed entire, i.e. comprehending the same series of events which they now comprehend,
at least in the time from the first to the tenth Olympiad, when Arctinus, Agias
(Thiersch, Act. Monac. ii. 583), and probably Stasinus, lived. This was a time
when nobody yet thought of reading such poems. Therefore there must have been
an opportunity of reciting in some way or another, not only the Homeric poems,
but those of the Cyclic poets also, which were of about equal length (Nitzsch,
Vorr. z. Anmerk. vol. ii.). The same result is obtained from comparing the manner
in which Homer and these Cyclic poets treat and view mythical objects. A wide
difference is observable on this point, which justifies the conclusion, that as
early as the period of the composition of the first of the Cyclic poems, viz.
before the tenth Olympiad, the Homeric poems had attained a fixed form, and were
no longer, as Wolf supposes, in a state of growth and development, or else they
would have been exposed to the influence of the different opinions which then
prevailed respecting mythical subjects. This is the only inference we can draw
from an inquiry into the Cyclic poets. Wolf, however, who denied the existence
of long epic poets previous to the use of writing, because he thought they could
not be recited as wholes, and who consequently denied that the Iliad and Odyssey
possessed an artificial or poetical unity, thought to find a proof of this proposition
in the Cyclic poems, in which he professed to see no other unity than that which
is afforded by the natural sequence of events. Now we are almost unable to form
an accurate opinion of the poetical merits of those poems, of which we possess
only dry prosaic extracts; but, granting that they did not attain a high degree
of poetical perfection, and particularly, that they were destitute of poetical
unity, still we are not on this account at liberty to infer that the poems of
Homer, their great example, are likewise destitute of this unity. But this is
the next proposition of Wolf, which therefore we must now proceed to discuss.
Wolf observes that Aristotle first derived the laws of epic poetry
from the examples which he found laid down in the Iliad and Odyssey. It was for
this reason, says Wolf, that people never thought of suspecting that those examples
themselves were destitute of that poetical unity which Aristotle, from a contemplation
of them, drew up as a principal requisite for this kind of poetry. It was transmitted,
says Wolf, by old traditions, how once Achilles withdrew from the battle; how,
in consequence of the absence of the great hero, who alone awed the Trojans. the
Greeks were worsted; how Achilles at last allowed his friend Patroclus to protect
the Greeks; and how, finally, he revenged the death of Patroclus by killing Hector.
This simple course of the story Wolf thinks would have been treated by any other
poet in very much the same manner as we now read it in the Iliad; and he maintains
that there is no unity in it except a chronological one, in so far as we have
a narration of the events of several days in succession. Nay, he continues, if
we examine closely the six last books, we shall find that they have nothing to
do with what is stated in the introduction as the object of the poem,--namely,
the wrath of Achilles. This wrath subsides with the death of Patroclus, and what
follows is a wrath of a different kind, which does not belong to the former. The
composition of the Odyssey is not viewed with greater favour by Wolf. The journey
of Telemachus to Pylos and Sparta, the sojourn of Ulysses in the island of Calypso,
the stories of his wanderings, were originally independent songs, which, as they
happened to fit into one another, were afterwards connected into one whole, at
a time when literature, the arts, and a general cultivation of the mind began
to flourish in Greece, supported by the important art of writing.
These bold propositions have met with almost universal disapprobation.
Still this is a subject on which reasoning and demonstration are very precarious
and almost impossible. The feelings and tastes of every individual must determine
the matter. But to oppose to Wolf's sceptical views the judgment of a man whose
authority on matters of taste is as great as on those of learning, we copy what
Mueller says on this subject:
"All the laws which reflection and experience can suggest for the epic form are
observed (in Homer) with the most refined taste; all the means are employed by
which the general effect can be heightened. The anger of Achilles is an event
which did not long precede the final destruction of Troy, inasmuch as it produced
the death of Hector, who was the defender of the city. It was doubtless the ancient
tradition, established long before Homer's time, that Hector had been slain by
Achilles in revenge for the slaughter of his friend Patroclus, whose fall in battle,
unprotected by the son of Thetis, was explained by the tradition to have arisen
from the anger of Achilles against the other Greeks for an affront offered to
him, and his consequent retirement from the contest. Now the poet seizes, as the
most critical and momentous period of the action, the conversion of Achilles from
the foe of the Greeks into that of the Trojans: for as on the one hand the sudden
revolution in the fortunes of war, thus occasioned, places the prowess of Achilles
in the strongest light, so, on the other hand, the change of his firm and resolute
mind must have been the more touching to the feelings of the hearers. From this
centre of interest there springs a long preparation and gradual developement,
since not only the cause of the anger of Achilles, but also the defeats of the
Greeks occasioned by that anger, were to be narrated; and the display of the insufficiency
of all the other heroes at the same time offered the best opportunity for exhibiting
their several excellencies. It is in the arrangement of this preparatory part
and its connection with the catastrophe, that the poet displays his perfect acquaintance
with all the mysteries of poetical composition ; and in his continual postponement
of the crisis of the action, and his scanty revelations with respect to the plan
of the entire work, he shows a maturity of knowledge which is astonishing for
so early an age. To all appearance, the poet, after certain obstacles have been
first overcome, tends only to one point, viz. to increase perpetually the disasters
of the Greeks, which they have drawn on themselves by the injury offered to Achilles;
and Zeus himself, at the beginning, is made to pronounce, as coming from himself,
the vengeance and consequent exaltation of the son of Thetis. At the same time,
however, the poet plainly shows his wish to excite, in the feelings of an attentive
hearer, an anxious and perpetually increasing desire not only to see the Greeks
saved from destruction, but also that the unbearable and more than human haughtiness
and pride of Achilles should be broken. Both these ends are attained through the
fulfilment of the secret counsel of Zeus, which he did not communicate to Thetis,
and through her to Achilles (who, if he had known it, would have given up all
enmity against the Achaeans), but only to Hera, and to her not till the middle
of the poem; and Achilles, through the loss of his dearest friend, whom he had
sent to battle not to save the Greeks, but for his own glory, suddenly changes
his hostile attitude towards the Greeks, and is overpowered by entirely opposite
feelings. In this manner the exaltation of the son of Thetis is united to that
almost imperceptible operation of destiny, which the Greeks were required to observe
in all human affairs. To remove from this collection of various actions, conditions,
and feelings any substantial part, as not necessarily belonging to it, would in
fact be to dismember a living whole, the parts of which would necessarily lose
their vitality. As in an organic body life does not dwell in one single point,
but requires a union of certain systems and members, so the internal connection
of the Iliad rests on the union of certain parts; and neither the interesting
introduction describing the defeat of the Greeks up to the burning of the ship
of Protesilaus, nor the turn of affairs brought about by the death of Patroclus,
nor the final pacification of the anger of Achilles, could be spared from the
Iliad, when the fruitful seed of such a poem had once been sown in the soul of
Homer, and had begun to develop its growth" (Hist. of Gr. Lit. p. 48, &c.).
If we yield our assent to these convincing reflections, we shall hardly
need to defend the unity of the Odyssey, which has always been admired as one
of the greatest masterpieces of Greek genius, against the aggressions of Wolf,
who could more easily believe that chance and learned compilers had produced this
poem, by connecting loose independent pieces, than that it should have sprung
from the mind of a single man. Nitzsch (Hall. Encyclop. s. v. Odyssee, and Anmerk.
z. Odyss. vol. ii. pref.) has endeavoured to exhibit the unity of the plan of
this poem. He has divided the whole into four large sections, in each of which
there are again subdivisions facilitating the distribution of the recital for
several rhapsodists and several days.
1. The first part treats of the absent Ulysses (books i.--iv.). Here we are introduced
to the state of affairs in Ithaca during the absence of Ulysses. Telemachus goes
to Pylos and Sparta to ascertain the fate of his father.
2. The song of the returning Ulysses (books v.-xiii. 92) is naturally divided
into two parts; the first contains the departure of Ulysses from Calypso, and
his arrival and reception in Scheria; the second the narration of his wanderings.
3. The song of Ulysses meditating revenge (book xiii. 92--xix). Here the two threads
of tile story are united; Ulysses is conveyed to I thaca, and is met in the cottage
of Eumaeus by his son, who has just returned from Sparta.
4. The song of the revenging and reconciled Ulysses (xx.--xxiv.) brings all the
manifold wrongs of the suitors and the sufferings of Ulysses to the desired and
long-expected conclusion.
Although we maintain the unity of both the Homeric poems, we cannot deny that
they have suffered greatly from interpolations, omissions, and alterations; and
it is only by admitting some original poetical whole, that we are able to discover
those parts which do not belong to this whole. Wolf, therefore, in pointing out
some parts as spurious, has been led into an inconsistency in his demonstration,
since lie is obliged to acknowledge something as the genuine centre of the two
poems, which he must suppose to have been spun out more and more by subsequent
rhapsodists. This altered view, which is distinctly pronounced in the preface
to his edition of Homer, appears already in the Prolegomena, and has been subsequently
embraced by Hermann and other critics. It is, as we have said, a necessary consequence
from the discovery of interpolations. These interpolations are particularly apparent
in the first part of the Iliad. The catalogue of the ships has long been recognised
as a later addition, and can be omitted without leaving the slightest gap. The
battles from the third to the seventh book seem almost entirely foreign to the
plan of the Iliad. Zeus appears to have quite forgotten his promise to Thetis,
that he would honour her son by letting Agamemnon feel his absence. The Greeks
are far from feeling this. Diomede fights successfully even against gods; the
Trojans are driven back to the town. In an assembly of the gods, the glory of
Achilles is no motive to deliver Troy from her fate; it is not till the eighth
book that Zeus all at once seems mindful of his promise to Thetis. The preceding
five books are not only loosely connected with the whole of the poem, but even
with one another. The single combat between Menelaus and Paris (hook iii.), in
which the former was on the point of despatching the seducer of his wife, is interrupted
by the treacherous shot of Pandarus. In the next book all this is forgotten. The
Greeks neither claim Helen as the prize of the victory of Menelaus, nor do they
complain of a breach of the oath: no god revenges the perjury. Paris in the sixth
book sits quietly at home, where Hector severely upbraids him for his cowardice
and retirement from war; to which Paris makes no reply, and does not plead that
he had only just encountered Menelaus in deadly fight. The tenth book, containing
the nocturnal expedition of Ulysses and Diomede, in which they kill the Thracian
king Rhesus and take his horses, is avowedly of later origin (Schol. Ven. ad II.
x. 1). No reference is subsequently made by any of the Greeks or Trojans to this
gallant deed. The two heroes were sent as spies, but they never narrate the result
of their expedition; not to speak of many other improbabilities. To enumerate
all those passages which are reasonably suspected as interpolated, would lead
us too far. Muller (lbid. p. 50) very judiciously assigns "two principal motives
for this extension of the poem beyond its original plan, which might have exercised
an influence on the mind of Homer himself but had still more powerful effects
upon his successors, the later Homerids. In the first place, it is clear that
a design manifested itself at an early period to make this poem complete in itself,
so that all the subjects, descriptions, and actions which could alone give an
interest to a poem on the entire war, might find a place within the limits of
this composition. For this purpose, it is not improbable that many lays of earlier
bards, who had sung single adventures of the Trojan war, were laid under contribution,
and that the finest parts of them were adopted into the new poem, it being the
natural course of popular poetry propagated by oral tradition, to treat the best
thoughts of previous poets as common property, and to give them a new life by
working them up in a different context". Thus it would be explained why it is
not before the ninth year of the war that the Greeks build a wall round their
camp, and think of deciding the war by single combat. For the same reason the
catalogue of the ships could find a place in the Iliad, as well as the view of
Helen and Priam from the walls (Teichoskopia), by which we become acquainted with
the chief heroes along the Greeks, who were certainly not unknown to Priam till
so late a period of the war. "The other motive for the great extension of the
preparatory part of the catastrophe may, it appears, be traced to a certain conflict
between the plan of the poet and his own patriotic feelings. An attentive reader
cannot fail to observe that, while Homer intends that the Greeks should be made
to suffer severely from the anger of Achilles, he is yet, as it were, retarded
in his progress towards that end by a natural endeavour to avenge the death of
each Greek by that of a yet more illustrious Trojan, and thus to increase the
glory of the numerous Achaean heroes, so that even on the days in which the Greeks
are defeated, more Trojans than Greeks are described as being slain".
The Odyssey has experienced similar extensions, which, far from inducing
us to believe in an atomistical origin of the poem, only show that the original
plan has been here and there obscured. The poem opens with an assembly of the
gods, in which Athene complains of the long detention of Ulysses in Ogygia; Zeus
is of her opinion. She demands to send Hermes to Calypso with an order from Zeus
to dismiss Ulysses, whilst she herself goes to Ithaca to incite young Telenmachus
to determined steps. But in the beginning of the fifth book we have almost the
same proceedings, the same assembly of the gods, the same complaints of Athene,
the same assent of Zeus, who now at last sends his messenger to the island of
Calypso. Telemachus refuses to stay with Menelaus; he is anxious to return home;
and still, without our knowing how and why, he remains at Sparta for a time which
seems disproportionably long; for on his return to Ithaca he meets Ulysses, who
had in the meantime built his ship, passed twenty days on the sea, and three days
with the Phaeacians.
Nitzsch has tried to remove these difficulties, but he does not deny
extensive interpolations, particularly in the eighth book, where the song of Demodocos
concerning Ares and Aphrodite is very suspicious; in the nineteenth, the recognition
of Ulysses by his old nurse, and, most of all, some parts towards the end. All
that follows after xxiii. 296 was declared spurious even by the Alexandrine critics
Aristophanes and Aristarchus. Spohn (Comment. de extrem. Odysseae Parte, 1816)
has proved the validity of this judgment almost beyond the possibility of doubt.
Yet, as Mueller and Nitzsch observe, it is very likely that the original Odyssey
was concluded in a somewhat similar manner; in particular, we can hardly do without
the recognition of Laertes, who is so often alluded to in the course of the poem,
and without some reconciliation of Ulsses with the friends of the murdered suitors.
The second Necyia (xxiv. init.) is evidently spurious, and, like many parts of
the first Necyia (xi.), most likely taken from a similar passage in the Nostoi,
in which was narrated the arrival of Agamemnon in Hades (Paus. x. 23.4..)
Considering all these interpolations and the original unity, which
has only been obscured and not destroyed by them, we must come to the concluston
that the Homeric poems were originally composed as poetical wholes, but that a
long oral tradition gave occasion to great alterations in their original form.
We have hitherto considered only the negative part of Wolf's arguments.
He denied, 1st, the existence of the art of writing at the time when the Homeric
poems were composed; 2d. the possibility of composing and delivering them without
that art; and, 3rdly, their poetical unity. From these premises he came to the
conclusion, that the Homeric poems originated as small songs, unconnected with
one another, which, after being preserved in this state for a long time, were
at length put together. The agents, to whom he attributed these two tasks of composing
and preserving on the one hand, and of collecting and combining on the other,
are the rhapsodists and Peisistratus.
The subject of the rhapsodists is one of the most complicated and
difficult of all; because the fact is, that we know very little about them, and
thus a large field is opened to conjecture and hypothesis. Wolf derives the name
of rhapsodist from rhaptein, oiden, which he interprets breviora carmina modo
et ordine publicae recitationi apto connectere. These breviora carmina are the
rchapsodies of which the Iliad and Odyssey consist, not indeed containing originally
one book each, as they do now, but sometimes more and sometimes less. The nature
and condition of these rhapsodists may be learned from Homer himself, where they
appear as singing at the banquets, games, and festivals of the princes, and are
held in high honour (Od. iii. 267, xviii. 383). In fact, the first rhapsodists
were the poets themselves, just as the first dramatic poets were the first actors.
Therefore Homer and Hesiod are said to have rhapsodised. (Plat. Rep. x.; Schol.
ad Pind. Nem. ii. 1). We must imagine that these minstrels were spread over all
Greece, and that they did not confine themselves to the recital of the Homeric
poems. One class of rhapsodists at Chios, the Homerids (Harpocrat. s. v. Homeridai),
who called themselves descendants of the poet, possessed these particular poems,
and transmitted them to their disciples by oral teaching, and not by writing.
This kind of oral teaching was most carefully cultivated in Greece even when the
use of writing was quite common. The tragic and comic poets employed no other
way of training the actors than this oral didaskalia, with which the greatest
accuracy was combined. Therefore, says Wolf, it is not likely that, although not
committed to writing, the Homeric poems underwent very great changes by a long
oral tradition; only it is impossible that they should have remained quite unaltered.
Many of the rhapsodists were not destitute of poetical genius, or they acquired
it by the constant recitation of those beautiful lays. Why should they not have
sometimes adapted their recitation to the immediate occasion, or even have endeavoured
to make some passages better than they were?
We can admit almost all this, without drawing from it Wolf's conclusion.
Does not such a condition of the rhapsodists agree as well with the task which
we assign to them, of preserving and reciting a poem which already existed as
a whole? Even the etymology of the name of rhapsodist, which is surprisingly inconsistent
with Wolf's general view, favours that of his adversaries. Wolf's fundamental
opinion is, that the original songs were unconnected and singly recited. How then
can the rhapsodists have obtained their name from connecting poems ? On the other
hand, if the Homeric poems originally existed as wholes, and the rhapsodists connected
the single parts of these wholes for public recitation, they might per haps be
called "connecters of songs". But this etymology has not appeared satisfactory
to some, who have thought that this process would rather be a keeping together
than a putting together. They have therefore supposed that the word was derived
from rhabdos, the staff or ensign of the bards (Hes. Theog. 30); an etymology
which seemed countenanced by Pindar's (Isthm. iii. 5) expression rhabdon thespesion
epeon. But Pindar in another passage gives the other etymology (Nem. ii. 1) ;
and, besides, it does not appear how rhapsoidos could be formed from rhabdos,
which would make rhabdoidos. Others, therefore, have thought of rhapis (a stick),
and formed rhapisoidos, rhapsoidos. But even this will not do; for leaving out
of view that rhatis does not occur in the signification of rhabdos the word would
be rhapidoidos. Nothing is left, therefore, but the etymology from rhaptein oidas,
which is only to be interpreted in the proper way. Mueller (Ibid. p. 33) says
that rhapsoidein "signifies nothing more than the peculiar method of epic recitation",
consisting in some high-pitched sonorous declamations, with certain simple modulations
of the voice, not in singing regularly accompanied by an instrument, which was
the method of reciting lyrical poetry. "Every poem", says Mueller, "can be rhapsodised
which is composed in an epic tone, and in which the verses are of equal length,
without being distributed into correspond ing parts of a larger whole, strophes,
or similar systems. Rhapsodists were also not improperly called dtichoidoi , because
all the poems which they recited were composed in single lines independent of
each other (stichoi)". He thinks, therefore, that rhaptein oiden denotes the coupling
together of verses without any considerable divisions or pauses; in other words,
the even, continuous, and unbroken flow of the epic poem. But oide does not mean
a verse ; and besides a reference to the manner of epic recitation, as different
from that of lyrical poetry, could only be imparted to the word rhapsoidos at
a time when lyrical composition and recitation originated, that is, not before
Archilochus. Previous to that time the meaning of rhapsodist must have been different.
In fine, we do not see why rhaptein oidas should not have been used in the signification
of planning and making lays, as rhaptein kaka is to plan or make mischief. But
whatever may be the right derivation of the word, and whatever may have been the
nature and condition of the rhapsodists, so much is evident that no support can
be derived from this point for Wolf's position. We pass on, therefore, to the
last question -the collection of the Homeric poems ascribed to Peisistratus.
Solon made the first step towards that which Peisistratus accomplished.
Of him Diogenes Laertius (i. 57) says, ta Homeronu ech hupoboles egrapse rhapsoideideisthai,
i. e., according to Wolf's interpretation, Solon did not allow the rhapsodists
to recite arbitrarily, as they had been wont to do, such songs successively as
were not connected with one another, but he ordered that they should rehearse
those parts which were according to the thread of the story suggested to them.
Peisistratus did not stop here. The unanimous voice of antiquity ascribed to him
the merit of having collected the disjointed and confused poems of Homer, and
of having first committed them to writing (Cic. de Or. iii. 34; Paus. vii. 26;
Joseph, c. Ap. i. 2 ; Aelian, V. H. xiii. 14; Liban. Paneg. in Julian. i.)
In what light Wolf viewed this tradition has been already mentioned.
He held it to have been the first step that was taken in order to connect the
loose and incoherent songs into continued and uninterrupted stories, and to preserve
the union which he had thus imparted to these poems by first committing them to
writing. Pausanias mentions associates (hetairoi) of Peisistratus, who assisted
him in his undertaking. These associates Wolf thought to have been the diaskeuastai
mentioned sometimes in the Scholia; but in this he was evidently mistaken. Diaskeuastai
are, in the phraseology of the Scholia, interpolators, and not arrangers (Heinrich,
de Diask. Homericis ; Lehrs, Aristarchi stud. Hom.). Another weak point in Wolf's
reasoning is, that he says that Peisistratus was the first who committed the Homeric
poems to writing; this is expressly stated by none of the ancient writers. On
the contrary, it is not unlikely that before Peisistratus, persons began in various
parts of Greece, and particularly in Asia Minor, which was far in advance of the
mother-country, to write down parts of the Iliad and Odyssey, although we are
not disposed to extend this hypothesis so far as Nitzsch, who thinks that there
existed in the days of Peisistratus numbers of copies, so that Peisistratus only
compared and revised them, in order to obtain a correct copy for the use of the
Athenian festivals. Whom Peisistratus employed in his undertaking Wolf could only
conjecture. The poet Onomacritus lived at that time at Athens, and was engaged
in similar pursuits respecting the old poet Musaeus. Besides him, Wolf thought
of a certain Orpheus of Croton ; but nothing certain was known on this point,
till Professor Ritschl discovered, in a MS. of Plautus at Rome, an old Latin scholion
translated from the Greek of Tzetzes (published in Cramer's Anecdota). This scholion
gives the name of four poets who assisted Peisistratus, viz. Onomacritus, Zopyrus,
Orpheus, and a fourth, whose name is corrupted, Concylus (Ritschl, de Alex. Bibl.
u. d. Sammlung d. Hom. Gedichte durch Peisistr. 1838; Id. Corollar. Disput. de
Bibl. Alex. deque Peisistr. Curis Hom. 1840). These persons may have interpolated
some passages, as it suited the pride of the Athenians or the political purposes
of their patron Peisistratus. In fact, Onomacritus is particularly charged with
having interpolated Od. xi. 604 (Schol. Harlei. ed. Porson. ad loc.). The Athenians
were generally believed to have had no part in the Trojan war; therefore Il. ii.
547, 552-554, were marked by the Alexandrine critics as spurious, and for similar
reasons Od. vii. 80, 81, and Od. iii. 308. But how unimportant are these alterations
in comparison with the long interpolations which must be attributed to the rhapsodists
previous to Peisistratus ! It must be confessed that these four men accomplished
their task, on the whole, with great accuracy. However inclined we may be to attribute
this accuracy less to their critical investigations and conscientiousness, than
to the impossibility of making great changes on account of the general knowledge
of what was genuine, through the number of existing copies; and although we may,
on the whole, be induced, after Wolf's exaggerations, to think little of the merits
of Peisistratus, still we must allow that the praise bestowed on Peisistratus
by the ancient writers is too great and too general to allow us to admit of Nitzsch's
opinion, that he only compared and examined various MSS. If, then, it does not
follow, as Wolf thought, that the Homeric poems never formed a whole before Peisistratus,
it is at the same time undeniable that to Peisistratus we owe the first written
text of the whole of the poems, which, without his care, would most likely now
exist only in a few disjointed fragments. Some traditions attributed to Hipparchus,
the son and successor of Peisistratus, regulations for the recital of the Homeric
poems of a kind similar to those which had been already made by Solon (Plat. Hipp.).
He is said to have obliged the rhapsodists ech hupolepseos hepheches ta Homerou
diienai. The meaning of the words ech hupolepseos, and their difference from hech
hupoboles, which was the manner of recitation, ordained by Solon, has given rise
to a long controversy between Bockh and Hermann (comp Nitzsch, Melet. ii.); to
enter into which would be foreign to the purpose of this article.
Having taken this general survey of the most important arguments for
and against Wolfs hypothesis concerning the origin of the poems of Homer, the
following may be regarded as the most probable conclusion. There can be no doubt
that the seed of the Homeric poems was scattered in the time of the heroic exploits
which they celebrate, and in the land of the victorious Achaeans, that is, in
European Greece. An abundance of heroic lays preserved the records of the Trojan
war. It was a puerile idea, which is now completely exploded, that the events
are fictitious on which the Iliad and Odyssey are based, that a Trojan war never
was waged, and so forth. Whoever would make such a conclusion from the intermixture
of gods in the battles of men, would forget what the Muses say (Hes. Theog. 27):
*)/Idmen yeu/dea polla\ le/gein e)tu/moisin o(moi=a,
*)/Idmen d', eu)=t' e)qe/lwmen, a)lhqe/a muqh/sasqai.
and he would overlook the fact, that these songs were handed down a long time
before they attained that texture of truth and fiction which forms one of their
peculiar charms. Europe must necessarily have been the country where these songs
originated, both because here the victorious heroes dwelt, and because so many
traces in the poems still point to these regions. It was here that the old Thracian
bards had effected that unity of mythology which, spreading all over Greece, had
gradually absorbed and obliterated the discrepancies of the old local myths, and
substituted one general mythology for the whole nation, with Zeus as the supreme
ruler, dwelling on the snowy heights of Olympus. Impregnated with this European
mythology, the heroic lays were brought to Asia Minor by the Greek colonies, which
left the mother-country about three ages after the Trojan war. In European Greece
a new race gained the ascendancy, the Dorians, foreign to those who gloried in
having the old heroes among their ancestors. The heroic songs, therefore, died
away more and more in Europe; but in Asia the Aeolians fought, conquered, and
settled nearly in the same regions in which their fathers had signalised themselves
by immortal exploits, the glory or which was celebrated, and their memory still
preserved by their national bards. Their dwelling in the same locality not only
kept alive the remesmbrance of the deeds of their fathers, but gave a new impulse
to their poetry, just as in the middle ages in Germany the foundation of the kingdom
of the Hungarians in the East, and their destructive invasions, together with
the origin of a new empire of the Burgundians in the West, awakened the old songs
of the Niebelungen, after a slumber of centuries. (Gervinus, Poetical Lit. of
Germ. vol. i.)
Now the Homeric poems advanced a step further. From unconnected songs,
they were, for the first time, united by a great genius, who, whether he was really
called Homer, or whether the name be of later origin and significant of his work
of uniting songs (Welcker, Ep. Cycl.; Ilgen, Hymn. Hom. praef.; Heyne, ad Il.
vol. viii.), was the one individual who conceived in his mind the lofty idea of
that poetical unity which we cannot help acknowledging and admiring. What were
the peculiar excellencies which distinguished this one Homer among a great number
of contemporary poets, and saved his works alone from oblivion, we do not venture
to determine ; but the conjecture of Mueller (Greek Lit.; see also Nitzsch, Anm.
vol. ii.), is not improbable, that Homer first undertook to combine into one great
unity the scattered and fragmentary poems of earlier bards, and that it was a
task which established his great renown. We can now judge of the probability that
Homer was an Ionian, who in Smyrna, where Ionians and Aeolians were mixed, became
acquainted with the subject of his poems, and moulded them into the form which
was suited to the taste of his Ionian countrymen. But as a faithful preservation
of these long works was impossible in an age unacquainted with, or at least not
versed in the art of writing, it was a natural consequence, that in the lapse
of ages the poems should not only lose the purity with which they proceeded from
the mind of the poet, but should also become more and more dismembered, and thus
return into their original state of loose independent songs. Their public recitation
became more and more fragmentary, and the time at festivals and musical contests
formerly occupied by epic rhapsodists exclusively was encroached upon by the rising
lyrical performances and players of the flute and lyre. Yet the knowledge of the
unity of the different Homeric rhapsodies was not entirely lost. Solon, himself
a poet, directed the attention of his countrymen towards it; and Peisistratus
at last raised a lasting monument to his high merits, in fixing the genuine Homeric
poems by the indelible marks of writing, as far as was possible in his time and
with his means. That previous to the famous edition of Peisistratus parts of Homer,
or the entire poems, were committed to writing in other towns of Greece or Asia
Minor is not improbable, but we do not possess sufficient testimonies to prove
it. We can therefore safely affirm that from the time of Peisistratus, the Greeks
had a written Homer, a regular text, the source and foundation of all subsequent
editions.
Having established the fact, that there was a Homer, who must be considered
as the author of the Homeric poems, there naturally arises another question, viz.
which poems are Homeric? We have seen already that a great number of cyclic poems
were attributed to the great bard of the Anger of Achilles. Stasinus, the author
of the Cypria, was said to have received this poem from Homer as a dowry for his
daughter, whom he married. Creophylus is placed in a similar connection with Homer.
But these traditions are utterly groundless; they were occasioned by the authors
of the cyclic poems being at the same time rhapsodists of the Homeric poems, which
they recited along with their own. Nor are the hymns, which still bear the name
of Homer, more genuine productions of the poet of the Iliad than the cyclic poems.
They were called by the ancients prooimia, i. e. overtures or preludes, and were
sung by the rhapsodists as introductions to epic poems at the festivals of the
respective gods, to whom they are addressed. To these rhapsodists the hymns most
probably owe their origin. "They exhibit such a diversity of language and poetical
tone, that in all probability they contain fragments from every century from the
time of Homer to the Persian war" (Mueller, Ibid.). Still most of them were reckoned
to be Homeric productions by those who lived in a time when Greek literature still
flourished. This is easily accounted for; being recited in, connection with Hmeric
poems, they were gradually attributed to the same author, and continued to be
so regarded more or less generally, till critics, and particularly those of Alexandria,
discovered the differences between their style and that of Homer. At Alexandria
they were never reckoned genuine, which accounts for the circumstance that none
of the great critics of that school is known to have made a regular collection
of them (Wolf, Proleg.). Of the hymns now extant five deserve particular attention
on account of their greater length and mythological contents; they are those addressed
to the Delian and Pythian Apollo, to Hermes, Demeter, and Aphrodite. The hymn
to the Delian Apollo, formerly regarded as part of the one to the Pythian Apollo,
is the work of a Homerid of Chios, and approaches so nearly to the true Homeric
tone, that the author, who calls himself the blind poet, who lived in the rocky
Chios, was held even by Thucydides to be Homer himself. It narrates the birth
of Apollo in Delos, but a great part of it is lost. The hymn to the Pythian Apollo
contained the foundation of the Pythian sanctuary by the god himself, who slays
the dragon, and, in the form of a dolphin, leads Cretan men to Crissa, whom he
established as priests of his temple. The hymn to Hermes, which, on account of
its mentioning the seven-stringed lyre, the invention of Terpander, cannot have
been composed before the 30th olympiad, relates the tricks of the newborn Hermes,
who, having left his cradle, drove away the cattle of Apollo from their pastures
in Pieria to Pylos, there killed them, and then invented the lyre, made of a tortoise-shell,
with which he pacified the anger of Apollo. The hymn to Aphrodite celebrates the
birth of Aeneas in a style not very different from that of Homer. The hymn to
Demeter, first discovered 1778, in Moscow, by Mathaei, and first published by
Ruhnken, 1780, gives an account of Demeter's search after her daughter, Persephone,
who had been carried away by Hades. The goddess obtains from Zeus, that her daughter
should pass only one third part of the year with Hades, and return to her for
the rest of the year. With this symbolical description of the corn, which, when
sown, remains for some time under ground, and then springs up, the poet has connected
the mythology of the Eleusinians, who hospitably received the goddess on her wanderings,
afterwards built her a temple, and were rewarded by instruction in the mysterious
rites of Demeter.
Beside the cyclic epics and the hymns, we find poems of quite a different
nature erroneously ascribed to Homer. Such was the case with the Margites, a poem,
which Aristotle regarded as the source of comedy, just as he called the Iliad
and Odyssey the fountain of all tragic poetry. From this view of Aristotle, we
may judge of the nature of the poem. It ridiculed a man who was said "to know
many things, and to know all badly". The subject was nearly related to the scurrilous
and satirical poetry of Archilochus and other contemporary iambographers, although
in versification, epic tone, and language, it imitated the Iliad. The iambic verses
which are quoted from it by grammarians were most likely interspersed by Pigres,
brother of Artemisia, who is also called the author of this poem, and who interpolated
the Iliad with pentameters in a similar manner.
The same Pigres was perhaps the author of the Batrachomyomachia, the
Battle of the Frogs and Mice (Suid. s. v.; Plut. de Malign. Herod. 43), a poem
frequently ascribed by the ancients to Homer. It is a harmless playful tale, without
a marked tendency to sarcasm and satire, amusing as a parody, but without any
great poetical merit which could justify its being ascribed to Homer.
Besides these poems, there are a great many more, most of which we
know only by name, and which we find attributed to Homer with more or less confidence.
But we have good reasons for doubting all such statements concerning lost poems,
whose claims we cannot examine, when we see that even Thucydides and Aristotle
considered as genuine not only such poems as the Margites and some of the hymns,
but also all those passages of the Iliad and Odyssey which are evidently interpolated,
and which at the present day nobody would dream of ascribing to their reputed
author (Nitzsch, Anm. z. Od. vol. ii.) The time in which Greek literature flourished
was not adapted for tracing out the poems which were spurious and interpolated.
People enjoyed all that was beautiful, without caring who was the author. The
task of sifting and correcting the works of literature was left to the age in
which the faculties of the Greek mind had ceased to produce original works, and
had turned to scrutinise and preserve former productions. Then it was not only
discovered that the cyclic poems and the hymns had no title to be styled " Homeric"
but the question was mooted and warmly discussed, whether the Odyssey was to be
attributed to the author of the Iliad. Of the existence of this interesting controversy
we had only a slight indication in Seneca (de Brevit. Vitae, 13) before the publication
of the Venetian Scholia. From these we know now that there was a regular party
of critics, who assigned the Iliad and Odyssey to two different authors, and were
therefore called Chorizontes (Chorizontes), the Separaters. Their arguments were
probably not very convincing, and might fairly be considered to be entirely refuted
by such reasonings as Longinus made use of, who affirmed (just as if he had heard
it from Homer himself) that the Iliad was composed by Homer in the vigour of life,
and the Odyssey in his old age. With this decision all critics were satisfied
for centuries, till, in modern times, the question has been opened again. Traces
have been discovered in the Odyssey which seemed to indicate a later time; and
although this is a difficult and doubtful point, because we do not know in many
cases whether the discrepancies in the two poems are to be considered as genuine
parts or as interpolations, yet there is so much in the one poem which cannot
be reconciled with the whole tenor of the other, that a later origin of the Odyssey
seems very probable (Nitzsch in Hall. Encycl.). We cannot lay much stress on the
observation, that the state of social life in the Odyssey appears more advanced
in refinement, comfort, and art, than in the Iliad, because this may be regarded
as the result of the different nature of the subjects. The magnificent palaces
of Menelaus and Alcinous, and the peaceful enjoyments of the Phaeacians, could
find no place in the rough camp of the heroes before Troy. But a great and essential
difference, which pervades the whole of the two poems, is observable in the notions
that are entertained respecting the gods. In the Iliad the men are better than
the gods; in the Odyssey it is the reverse. In the latter poem no mortal dares
to resist, much less to attack and wound a god; Olympus does not resound with
everlasting quarrels; Athene consults humbly the will of Zeus, and forbears offending
Poseidon, her uncle, for the sake of a mortal man. Whenever a god inflicts punishment
or bestows protection in the Odyssey. it is for some moral desert; not as in the
Iliad, through mere caprice, without any consideration of the good or bad qualities
of the individual. In the Iliad Zeus sends a dream to deceive Agamemnon; Athene,
after a general consultation of the gods, prompts Pandarus to his treachery; Paris,
the violator of the sacred laws of hospitality, is never upbraided with his crime
by the gods; whereas, in the Odyssey, they appear as the awful avengers of those
who do not respect the laws of the hospitable Zeus. The gods of the Iliad live
on Mount Olympus; those of the Odyssey are further removed from the earth; they
inhabit the wide heaven. There is nothing which obliges us to think of the Mount
Olympus. In the Iliad the gods are visible to every one except when they surround
themselves with a cloud; in the Odyssey they are usually invisible, unless they
take the shape of men. In short, as Benjamin Constant has well observed (de la
Relig. iii.), there is more mythology in the Iliad, and more religion in the Odyssey.
If we add to all this the differences that exist between the two poems in language
and tone, we shall be obliged to admit, that the Odyssey is of considerably later
date than the Iliad. Every one who admires the bard of the Iliad, with whom are
connected all the associations of ideas which have been formed respecting Homer,
feels naturally inclined to give him' credit for having composed the Odyssey also,
and is unwilling to fancy another person to be the author who would be quite an
imaginary and uninteresting personage. It is no doubt chiefly owing to these feelings
that many scholars have tried in various ways to prove that the same Homer is
the author of both the poems, although there seem sufficient reasons to establish
the contrary. Thus Mueller says: "If the completion of the Iliad and Odyssey seems
too vast a work for the lifetime of one man, we may perhaps have recourse to the
supposition, that Homer, after having sung the Iliad in the vigour of his youthful
years, in his old age communicated to some devoted disciple the plan of the Odyssey,
which had long been working in his mind, and left it to him for completion". Nitzsch
(Anmerk. z. Od. vol. ii.) has found out another expedient. He thinks, that in
the Iliad Homer has followed more closely the old traditions, which represented
the former and ruder state of society; whilst, in the Odyssey, he was more original,
and imprinted upon his own inventions his own ideas concerning the gods.
The history of the Homeric poems may be divided conveniently into
two great periods: one in which the text was transmitted by oral tradition, and
the other of the written text after Peisistratus. Of the former we have already
spoken: it therefore only remains to treat of the latter. The epoch from Peisistratus
down to the establishment of the first critical school at Alexandria, i. e. to
Zenodotus, presents very few facts concerning the Homeric poems. Oral tradition
still prevailed over writing for a long time; though in the days of Alcibiades
it was expected that every schoolmaster would have a copy of Homer with which
to teach his boys (Plut. Alcib.). Homer became a sort of ground-work for a liberal
education, and as his influence over the minds of the people thus became still
stronger, the philosophers of that age were naturally led either to explain and
recommend or to oppose and refute the moral principles and religious doctrines
contained in the heroic tales. It was with this practical view that Pythagoras,
Xenophanes, and Heracleitus, condemned Homer as one who uttered falsehoods and
degraded the majesty of the gods; whilst Theagenes, Metrodorus, Anaxagoras, and
Stesimbrotus, expounded the deep wisdom of Homer, which was disguised from the
eyes of the common observer under the veil of an apparently insignificant tale.
So old is the allegorical explanation, a folly at which the sober Socrates smiled,
which Plato refuted, and Aristarchus opposed with all his might, but which, nevertheless,
outlived the sound critical study of Homer among the Greeks, and has thriven luxuriantly
even down to the present day.
A more scientific study was bestowed on Homer by the sophists of Pericles'
age, Prodicus, Protagoras, Hippias, and others. There are even traces which seem
to indicate that the aporiai and luseis, such favourite themes with the Alexandrian
critics, originated with these sophists. Thus the study of Homer increased, and
the copies of his works must naturally have been more and more multiplied. We
may suppose that not a few of the literary men of that age carefully compared
the best MSS. within their reach, and choosing what they thought best made new
editions (diorthoseis). The task of these first editors was not an easy one. It
may be concluded from the nature of the case, and it is known by various testimonies,
that the text of those days offered enormous discrepancies, not paralleled in
the text of any other classical writer. There were passages left out, transposed,
added, or so altered, as not easily to be recognised; nothing, in short, like
a smooth vulgate existed before the time of the Alexandrine critics. This state
of the text must have presented immense difficulties to the first editors in the
infancy of criticism. Yet these early editions were valuable to the Alexandrians,
as being derived from good and ancient sources. Two only are known to us through
the scholia, one of the poet Antimachus, and the famous one of Aristotle (he ek
tou narthekos), which Alexander the Great used to carry about with him in a splendid
case (narthex) on all his expeditions. Besides these editions, called in the scholia
hai kat' andra, there were several other old diorthoseis at Alexandria, under
the name of hai kata poleis, or hai ek poleon, or hai politikai. We know six of
them, those of Massilia, Chios, Argos, Sinope, Cyprus, and Crete. It is hardly
likely that they were made by public authority in the different states, whose
names they bear; on the contrary, as the persons who had made them were unknown,
they were called, just as manuscripts are now, from the places where they had
been found. We are acquainted with two more editions, the aiolike, brought most
likely from some Aeolian town, and the kuklike, which seems to have been the copy
of Homer which formed part of the series of cyclic poems in the Alexandrian library.
All these editions, however, were only preparatory to the establishment
of a regular and systematic criticism and interpretation of Homer, which began
with Zenodotus at Alexandria. For such a task the times after Alexander were quite
fit. Lite had fled from the literature of the Greeks; it was become a dead body,
and was very properly carried into Egypt, there to be embalmed and safely preserved
for many ensuing centuries. It was the task of men, who, like Aristarchus, could
judge of poetry without being able to write any themselves, to preserve carefully
that which was extant, to clear it from all stains and corruptions, and to explain
what was no longer rooted in and connected with the institutions of a free political
life, and therefore was become unintelligible to all but the learned. Three men,
who stand in the relation of masters and pupils, were at the head of a numerous
host of scholars, who directed their attention either occasionally or exclusively
to the study and criticism of the Homeric poems. Zenodotus laid the foundation
of systematic criticism, by establishing two rules for purifying the corrupted
text. He threw out, 1st, whatever was contradictory to, or not necessarily connected
with, the whole of the work; 2d, what seemed unworthy of the genius of the author.
To these two rules his followers, Aristophanes and Aristarchus, added two more;
they rejected, 3d, what was contrary or foreign to the customs of the Homeric
age, and 4th, what did not agree with the epic language and versification. It
is not to be wondered at that Zenodotus, in his first attempt, did not reach the
summit of perfection. The manner in which he cut out long passages, arbitrarily
altered others, transposed and, in short, corrected Homer's text as he would have
done his own, seemed shocking to all sober critics of later times, and would have
proved very injurious to the text had not Aristophanes, and still more Aristarchus,
acted on sounder principles, and thus put a stop to the arbitrary system of Zenodotus.
Aristophanes of Byzantium, a man of vast learning, seems to have been more occupied
with the other parts of the Greek literature, particularly the comic poets, than
with Homer. He inserted in his edition many of the verses which had been thrown
out by Zenodotus, and in many respects laid the foundations for what his pupil
Aristarchus executed. The reputation of the latter as the prince of grammarians
was so great throughout the whole of antiquity, that before the publication of
the Venetian scholia by Villoison, we hardly knew how to account for it. But these
excellent scholia, which have chiefly enabled us to understand the origin of the
Homeric poems, teach us also to appreciate their great and unrivalled interpreter,
and have now generally led to the conclusion, that the highest aim of the ambition
of modern critics with respect to Homer is to restore the edition of Aristarchus,
an under-taking which is believed to be possible by one of the most competent
judges, chiefly through the assistance afforded by these scholia (Lehrs, de Aristarchi
Studiis Homericis, 1883). Lehrs has discovered the sources from which these scholia
are derived. 1. Aristonicus, Peri semeion ton tes Hiliados kai Odusseias. These
semeia are the critical marks of Aristarchus, so that from Aristonicus we learn
a great many of the readings of Aristarchus. 2. Didymus, Peri tes Aristarchou
diorthoseos. 3. Herodian, nrpoowyla Peri tes Aristarchou : the word prosody contained,
according to the use of those grammarians, not merely what is called prosody now,
but the rules of accentuation, contraction, spiritus, and the like. 4. Nicanor,
Peri stigmes, on the stoppings. On Aristarchus we need not say much here: we will
only add, that the obelos, one of the critical marks used by Aristarchus, and
invented, like the accents, by his master, Aristophanes, was used for the athetesis
i. e. to mark those verses which seemed improper and detrimental to the beauty
of the poem, but which Aristarchus dared not throw out of the text, as it was
impossible to determine whether they were to be ascribed to an accidental carelessness
of the author, or to interpolations of rhapsodists. Those verses which Aristarchus
was convinced to be spurious he left out of his edition altogether. Aristarchus
was in constant opposition to Crates of Mallus, the founder of the Pergamene school
of grammar. This Crates had the merit of transplanting the study of literature
to Rome. With regard to Homer, he zealously defended the allegorical explication
against his rival Aristarchus. In the time of Augustus the great compiler, Didymus,
wrote most comprehensive commentaries on Homer, copying mostly the works of preceding
Alexandrian grammarians, which had swollen to an enormous extent. Under Tiberius,
Apollonius Sophista lived, whose lexicon Homericum is very valuable (ed. Bekker,
1833). Apion, a pupil of Didymus, was of much less importance than is generally
believed, chiefly on the authority of Wolf: he was a great quack, and an impudent
boaster (Lehrs, Quaest. Epicae, 183). Longinus and his pupil, Porphyrius, of whom
we possess some tolerably good scholia, were of more value. The Homeric scholia
are dispersed in various MSS. Complete collections do not exist, nor are they
desirable, as many of them are utterly useless. The most valuable scholia on the
Iliad are those which have been referred to above, which were published by Villoison
from a MS. of the tenth century in the library of St. Mark at Venice, together
with the scholia to the Iliad previously published, Ven. 1788, fol. These scholia
were reprinted with additions, edited by I. Bekker, Berlin, 1825, with an appendix,
1826, which collection contains all that is worth reading. A few additions are
to be found in Bachmann's Scholia ad Homeri Iliadem, Lips. 1835. The most valuable
scholia to the Odyssey are those published by Buttmann, Berl. 1821, mostly taken
from the scholia originally published by A. Mai from a MS. at Milan in 1819. The
extensive commentary of Eustathius is a compilation destitute of judgment and
of taste, but which contains much valuable information from sources which are
now lost. The old editions of Homer, as well as the MSS., are of very little importance
for the restoration of the text, for which we must apply to the scholia. The Editio
Princeps by Demetrius Chalcondylas, Flor. 1488, was the first large work printed
in Greek (one psalm only and the Batrachomyomachia having preceded). This edition
was frequently reprinted. Wolf reckons scarcely seven critical editions from the
Editio Princeps to his time. That of H. Stephanus, in Poet. Graec. Princ. her.
Carm., Paris, 1566, was one of the best. In England the editions of Barnes, Cantab.,
1711, and of Clarke, who published the Iliad in 1729, and the Odyssey in 1740,
were generally used for a long time, and often reprinted. The latter was published
with additions by Ernesti, Lips. 1759-1764.. This edition was reprinted at Glasgow,
with Wolf's Prolegomena, in 1814, and again at Leipzig in 1824.
A new period began with Wolf's second edition (Homeri et Homeridarum
Op. et Rel. Halis, 1794), the first edition (1784 and 1785) being merely a copy
of the vulgate. Along with the second edition were published the Prolegomena.
A third edition was published from 1804-1807. It is very much to be regretted
that the editions of Wolf are without commentaries or critical notes, so that
it is impossible to know in many cases on what grounds he adopted his readings,
which differ from the vulgate. Heyne began in 1802 to publish the Iliad, which
was finished in eight volumes, and was most severely and unsparingly reviewed
by Wolf, Voss, and Eichstädt, in the Jenaer Literatur Zeitung, 1803. A ninth
volume, containing the Indices, was published by Grofenhan in 1822. A curious
and most ridiculous attempt was made by Payne Knight, who published (London, 1820)
the Homeric text cleared of all interpolations, so far at least as his judgment
reached, and well crammed (by way of compensation) with digammas, it being the
intention of the editor to restore the genuine spelling. This edition is a palpable
confirmation of the fact, that to restore the edition of Aristarchus is all which
modern critics can attempt to achieve. The best recension of the text is that
by I. Bekker, Berlin, 1843. A very good edition of the Iliad, with critical notes,
was published by Spitzner, Gotha, 1832-1836, but the author did not live to publish
his explanatory commentary. There is an excellent commentary to the two first
books of the Iliad by Freytag, Petersburgh, 1837; but the best of all commentaries
which have yet appeared on the Homeric poems are those of Nitzsch on the Odyssey,
Hannov. 1825, &c., of which the three volumes now published extend only as far
as the twelfth book. The most valuable of the separate editions of the Hymns are
those by Ilgen, Hal., 1791, and Hermann, Lips. 1806. The Lexicon Novum Homericum
(et Pindaricum) of Damm, originally published at Berlin in 1765, and reprinted,
London, 1827, is still of some value, though the author was destitute of all sound
principles of criticism; but a far more important work for the student is Buttmann's
Lexilogus, Berlin, 1825 and 1837, translated by Fishlake, Lond. 1840, 2nd edition.
Homer has been translated into almost all the modern European languages.
Of these translations the German one by Voss is the best reproduction of the great
original: the English translations by Chapman, Pope, and Cowper must be regarded
as failures.
The most important works on the Homeric poems and the controversy
respecting their original have been mentioned in the course of this article. A
complete account of the literature of the Homeric poems will be found in the Bibliotheca
Homerica, Halis, 1837, and in the notes to the first volume of Bode's Geschichte
der Hellenischen Dichtkunst. An account of the present state of the controversy
is given in an appendix to the first volume of the new edition of Thirlwall's
Hist. of Greece, London, 1845.
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Editor's Information
The e-texts of the works by Homer are found in Greece (ancient country) under the category Ancient Greek Writings.
A Homeric Dictionary, Georg Autenrieth
Epos.
(1) Greek. Many indications point to the fact that the oldest poetry of
the Greeks was connected with the worship of the gods, and that religious poetry
of a mystical kind was composed by the priests of the Thracians, a musical and
poetical people, and diffused in old times through Northern Greece. The worship
of the Muses was thus derived from the Thracians, who in later times had disappeared
from Greece Proper; and accordingly the oldest bards whose names are known to
the Greeks-- Orpheus, Musaeus, Eumolpus, Thamyris--are supposed to have been Thracians
also. The current ideas of the nature and action of the gods tended more and more
to take the form of poetical myths respecting their birth, actions, and sufferings.
Hence, these compositions, of which an idea may be derived from some of the so-called
Homeric Hymns, gradually assumed an epic character. In course of time the epic
writers threw off their connection with religion, and struck out on independent
lines. Confining themselves no longer to the myths about the gods, they celebrated
the heroic deeds both of mythical antiquity and of the immediate past. Thus, in
the Homeric descriptions of the epic age, while the bards Phemius and Demodocus
appear as favourites of the gods, to whom they are indebted for the gift of song,
they are not attached to any particular worship. The subjects of their song are
not only stories about the gods, such as the loves of Ares and Aphrodite, but
the events of recent times, the conquest of Troy by means of the wooden horse,
and the tragic return of the Achaeans from Troy. Singers like these, appearing
at public festivals, and at the tables of princes, to entertain the guests with
their lays, must have existed early in Greece Proper. It was, however, the Ionian
Greeks of Asia Minor who first fully developed the capacities of epic poetry.
By long practice, extending probably through centuries, a gradual progress was
probably effected from short lays to long epic narratives; and at the same time
a tradition delivered from master to scholar handed on and perfected the outer
form of style and metre. Thus, about B.C. 900, epic poetry was brought
to its highest perfection by the genius of Homer, the reputed author of the Iliad
and Odyssey. After Homer it sank, never to rise again, from the height to which
he had raised it.
It is true that in the following centuries a series of epics, more
or less comprehensive, were composed by poets of the Ionic school in close imitation
of the style and metre of Homer. But not one of them succeeded in coming even
within measurable distance of their great master. The favourite topics of these
writers were such fables as served either to introduce, or to extend and continue,
the Iliad and Odyssey. They were called Cyclic Poets perhaps because the most
important of their works were afterwards put together with the Iliad and Odyssey
in an epic cycle, or circle of lays. The Cyprian poems (ta Kupria), of Stasinus
of Salamis in Cyprus (B.C. 776), formed the introduction to the Iliad. These embraced
the history of the period between the marriage of Peleus and the opening of the
Iliad. At about the same time Arctinus of Miletus composed his Aethiopis in five
books. This poem started from the conclusion of the Iliad, and described the death
of Achilles, and of the Ethiopian prince Memnon, the contest for the arms of Achilles,
and the suicide of Aias. The Destruction of Ilium, by the same author, was in
two books. By way of supplement to the Homeric Iliad, Lesches of Mitylene, either
about B.C. 708 or 664, wrote a Little Iliad, in four books. This embraced the
contest for the arms of Achilles, the appearance of Neoptolemus and Philoctetes,
and the capture of the city. The transition from the Iliad to the Odyssey was
formed by the five books of Nostoi (The Return of the Heroes), written by Agias
of Troezen. The Telegonia, by Eugammon of Cyrene (about 570), continued the Odyssey.
This was in two books, embracing the history of Odysseus from the burial of the
suitors until his death at the hands of his son Telegonus. These poems and those
of the other cyclics were, after Homer, the sources from which the later lyric
and dramatic poets drew most of their information. But only fragments of them
remain. See Cyclic Poets below.
A new direction was given to epic poetry in Greece Proper by the didactic
and genealogical poems of Hesiod
of Ascra, about a hundred years after Homer. Hesiod was the founder of a school,
the productions of which were often attributed to him as those of the Ionic school
were to Homer. One of these disciples of Hesiod was Eumelus of Corinth (about
B.C. 750), of the noble family of the Bacchiadae. But his poems, like those of
the rest, are lost.
The most notable representatives of mythical epic poetry in the following
centuries are Pisander of Camirus (about B.C. 640), and Panyasis of Halicarnassus
(during the first half of the fifth century). In the second half of the fifth
century Choerilus of Samos wrote a Perseis on the Persian Wars, the first attempt
in Greece at an historical epic. His younger contemporary, Antimachus of Colophon,
also struck out a new line in his learned Thebais, the precursor and model of
the later epic of Alexandria. The Alexandrians laid great stress on learning and
artistic execution in detail, but usually confined themselves to poems of less
magnitude. The chief representatives of the Alexandrian school are Callimachus
(about B.C. 250), Rhianus, Euphorion, and Apollonius of Rhodes. The last made
a futile attempt to return to the simplicity of Homer. His Argonautica is, with
the exception of the Homeric poems, the only Greek epic which has survived from
the ante-Christian era. In the 200 years between the fourth and sixth centuries
A.D., the mythical epic is represented by Quintus Smyrnaeus, Nonnus, Colluthus,
Tryphiodorus, Musaeus, and the apocryphal Orpheus. Nonnus, Colluthus, and Tryphiodorus
were Egyptians. Nonnus and Musaeus, alone among these writers, have any claim
to distinction. The talent of Nonnus is genuine, but undisciplined; Musaeus knows
how to throw a charm into his treatment of a narrow subject. The whole series
is closed by the Iliaca of Joannes Tzetzes, a learned but tasteless scholar of
the twelfth century A.D. .
As Homer was the master of the mythical, so Hesiod was the master
of the didactic epic. After him this department of poetry was best represented
by Xenophanes of Colophon, Parmenides of Elea, and Empedocles of Agrigentium,
in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. In the Alexandrian period, didactic poetry
was much taken up, and employed upon the greatest possible variety of subjects.
But none of its representatives succeeded in writing more than poetic prose, or
in handling their intractable material with the mastery which Vergil shows in
his Georgics. The period produced the astronomical epic of Aratus of Sicyon (about
B.C. 275), and two medical poems by Nicander of Colophon (about 150). Under the
Roman Empire more didactic poetry was produced by the Greek writers. Maximus and
the so-called Manetho wrote on astrology. Dionysius Periegetes on geography, Oppian
on angling, and an imitator of Oppian on hunting. The Alexandrian period also
produced didactic poems in iambic senarii, as, e. g., several on geography bearing
the names of Dicaearchus and Scymnus, which still survive.
(2) Roman. The Romans possibly had songs of an epic character from the
earliest times; but these were soon forgotten. They had, however, a certain influence
on the later and comparatively artificial literature, for both Livius Andronicus
in his translation of the Odyssey, and Naevius in his Punic War, wrote in the
traditional Italian metre, the versus Saturnius. Naevius was, it is true, a national
poet, and so was his successor Ennius, but the latter employed the Greek hexameter
metre, instead of the rude Saturnian. To follow the example of Ennius, and celebrate
the achievements of their countrymen in the form of the Greek epic, was the ambition
of several poets before the fall of the Republic. A succession of poets, as Hostius,
the tragedian Attius, and Furius were the authors of poetical annals. Here it
is proper also to mention cicero's epics on Marius and on his own consulship,
besides the poem of Terentius Varro of Atax (Atacinus) on Caesar's war with the
Sequani (Bellum Sequanicum). Latin epics on Greek mythical subjects seem to have
been rare in the republican age. At least we know of only a few translations,
as that of the Iliad by Mattius and Ninnius Crassus, and of the Cypria by Laevinus.
Toward the end of the republican age it was a favourite form of literary activity
to write in free imitation of the learned Alexandrians. Varro of Atax, for example,
followed Apollonius of Rhodes in his Argonautica; others, like Helvius Cinna and
the orator Licinius Calvus, preferred the shorter epics so much in favour with
the Alexandrians. Only one example in this style is completely preserved, the
quasi epithalamium (lxiv.) of Catullus. This is the only example we possess of
the narrative epic of the Republic.
But in the Augustan Age both kinds of epic, the mythic and the historical,
are represented by a number of poets. Varius Rufus, Rabirius, Cornelius Severus,
and Pedo Albinovanus treated contemporary history in the epic style; Domitius
Marsus and Macer turned their attention to the mythology. The Aeneid of Vergil,
the noblest monument of Roman epic poetry, combines both characters. Of all the
epic productions of this age, the only ones which are preserved intact are the
Aeneid, a panegyric on Messala, which found its way into the poems of Tibullus,
and perhaps two poems, the Culexand Ciris, both often attributed to Vergil.
In the first century A.D. we have several examples of the historical
epic: the Pharsalia of Lucan, the Punica of Silius Italicus, a Bellum Civile in
the satirical romance of Petronius, and an anonymous panegyric on Calpurnius Piso,
who was executed for conspiracy under Nero, A.D. 65. The heroic style is represented
by the Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus, and the Thebais and Achilleis of Statius,
to which we may add the metrical epitome of the Iliad by the so-called Pindarus
Thebanus. The politico-historical poems of the succeeding centuries, by Publius
Porfirius Optatianus in the fourth century, Claudianus, Merobaudes, Sidonius Apollinaris
in the fifth, Priscian, Corippus, and Venantius Fortunatus in the sixth, are entirely
panegyric in character, and intended to do homage to the emperor or men of influence.
Of all these poets, Claudianus is the most important. He and Dracontius (towards
the end of the fifth century) are among the last who take their subjects from
mythology.
Didactic poetry, which suited the serious character of the Romans,
was early represented at Rome. In this the Romans were in many ways superior to
the Greeks. Appius Claudius Caecus and the elder Cato were authors of gnomic poetry.
Ennius, the tragedian Attius, and several of his contemporaries wrote didactic
pieces; the satires of Lucilius and Varro were also in part didactic. It was,
however, not till the end of the republican period that the influence of Greek
literature gave predominance to the Greek epic form. It was then adopted by Varro
of Atax, by M. Cicero, and above all by Lucretius, whose philosophical poem De
Rerum Natura is the only didactic poem of this period that has been preserved
intact, as it is one of the most splendid monuments of Roman genius. In the Augustan
Age many writers were active in this field. Valgius Rufus and Aemilius Macer followed
closely in the steps of the Alexandrians. Grattius wrote a poem on hunting, a
part of which still survives; Manilius, an astronomical poem which survives entire.
But the Georgics of Vergil throw all similar work, Greek or Latin, into the shade.
Ovid employs the epic metre in his Metamorphoses and Halieutica, the elegiac in
his Fasti.
In the first century A.D. Germanicus translated Aratus. Columella
wrote a poem on gardening; an unknown author (often called Lucilius), the Aetna.
The third century produced the medical poem of Sammonicus Serenus, and that of
Nemesianus on hunting. In the fourth we have Ausonius, much of whose work is didactic;
Palladius on agriculture; an adaptation of Aratus and of Dionysius Periegetes
by Avienus, with a description of the sea-coasts of the known world in iambics;
in the fifth, besides some of Claudianus's pieces, a description by Rutilius Namatianus
in elegiacs of his return home. The book of Dionysius Periegetes was adapted by
Priscian in the sixth century. A collection of proverbs, bearing the name of Cato
, belongs to the fourth century. In most of these compositions the metrical form
is a mere set off; and in the school verses of the grammarians, as in those by
Terentianus Maurus on metres, and in those by an anonymous author on rhetorical
figures, and on weights and measures, there is no pretence of poetry at all.
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Cyclic Poets. A name given by the ancient grammarians to a class of minor poets, who selected, for the subjects of their productions, events occurring as well during the Trojan War as before and after, and who, in treating of these subjects, confined themselves within a certain round or cycle (kuklos, circulus) of fable. In order to understand the subject more fully, we must observe that there was both a Mythic and a Trojan cycle. The former of these embraced the whole series of fable, from the genealogies of the gods down to the time of the Trojan War; the latter comprised the fables that had reference to, or were in any way connected with, the Trojan War. Of the first class were Theogonies, Cosmogonies, Titanomachies, and the like; of the second, the poems of Arctinus, Lesches, Agias, Eugammon, Stasinus, and others. (See Homeric Question.) At a later period the term cyclic was applied, as a mark of contempt, to two species of poems--one, where the poet confined himself to a trite and hackneyed round (kuklos) of particulars (cf. Horace, Ars Poet. 132); the other, where, from an ignorance of the true nature of epic poetry, he indulged in an inordinate and tiresome amount of detail, going back to the remotest beginnings of a subject. The most celebrated of the Cyclic poems were the Cypria, the Aethiopis of Arctinus, the Little Iliad (Ilias Mikra) of Pausanias, the Nostoi of Agias, the Telegonia of Eugammon, the Batrachomyomachia, and the Margites of Pigres.
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IOULIS (Ancient city) KEA
557 - 468
Of Ceos, one of the most celebrated lyric poets of Greece. He
was the perfecter of the Elegy and Epigram, and the rival of Lasus and Pindar
in the Dithyramb and the Epinician Ode. He was born at Iulis, in Ceos, B.C. 556,
and was the son of Leoprepes. He appears to have been brought up to music and
poetry as a profession. From his native island he proceeded to Athens, probably
on the invitation of Hipparchus, who attached him to his society by great rewards.
After remaining at Athens some time, probably even after the expulsion of Hippias,
he went to Thessaly, where he lived under the patronage of the Aleuads and Scopads.
He afterwards returned to Athens, and soon had the noblest opportunity of employing
his poetic powers in the celebration of the great events of the Persian Wars.
In 489 he conquered Aeschylus in the contest for the prize which the Athenians
offered for an elegy on those who fell at Marathon. Ten years later he composed
the epigrams which were inscribed upon the tomb of the Spartans who fell at Thermopylae,
as well as an encomium on the same heroes; and he also celebrated the battles
of Artemisium and Salamis, and the great men who commanded in them. He had completed
his eightieth year, when his long poetical career at Athens was crowned by the
victory which he gained with the dithyrambic chorus (477), being the fifty-sixth
prize which he had carried off. Shortly after this he was invited to Syracuse
by Hiero, at whose court he lived till his death in 467.
Simonides was a great favourite with Hiero, and was treated
by the tyrant with the greatest munificence. He still continued, when at Syracuse,
to employ his talents occasionally in the service of other Grecian States. Simonides
is said to have been the inventor of the mnemonic art and of the long vowels and
double letters in the Greek alphabet. He made literature a profession, and is
said to have been the first who took money for his poems; and the reproach of
avarice is too often brought against him by his contemporary and rival, Pindar,
as well as by subsequent writers, to be altogether discredited. The chief characteristics
of the poetry of Simonides were sweetness (whence his surname of Melicertes) and
elaborate finish, combined with the truest poetic conception and perfect power
of expression; though in originality and fervour he was far inferior, not only
to the early lyric poets, such as Sappho and Alcaeus, but also to his contemporary
Pindar. He was probably both the most prolific and the most universally popular
of all the Grecian lyric poets. The general character of his dialect is the Epic,
mingled with Doric and Aeolic forms.
Leoprepides. The poet Simonides, as son of Leoprepes
(Herod. vii. 228).
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557 - 468
The Shipwreck of Simonides, Phaedrus, The Fables of Phaedrus (ed. Christopher Smart)
Epigramma: Properly an inscription, such as was often written upon a tomb, a votive offering, a present, a work of art, and the like, to describe its character. Inscriptions of this sort were from early times put into metrical form, and the writer generally tried to combine good sense and spirit in them. They were generally, though not always, written in the elegiac metre. The greatest master of Greek epigram was Simonides of Ceos, the author of several of the sepulchral inscriptions on the warriors who fell in the Persian Wars. His lines are remarkable for repose, clearness, and force, both of thought and expression (. . .)
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Elegia: a distich consisting of an hexameter line followed by
a pentameter; then in the plural, a collection of such distichs, and hence elegeia).
The general term in Greek for any poem written in the elegiac metre, a combination
of the dactylic hexameter and pentameter in a couplet. The word elegos is probably
not Greek, but borrowed from the Lydians, and means a plaintive melody accompanied
by the flute. How it happened that the word was applied to elegiac poetry, the
earliest representatives of which by no means confined it to mournful subjects,
is doubtful. It may be that the term was chosen only in reference to the musical
setting, the elegy having originally been accompanied by the flute.
Like the epic, the elegy was a production of the Ionians of
Asia Minor. (See Epos.) Its dialect was the same as that of the epos, and its
metre only a variation of the epic metre, the pentameter being no more than an
abbreviation of the hexameter. The elegy marks the first transition from the epic
to lyric proper ( . . .)
The elegy of mourning or sorrow was brought to perfection by
Simonides of Ceos. After him the emotional element predominated.
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Simonides of Ceos. Poet from Ceos who lived both in Athens
and Thessaly. In Athens
he became famous for celebrating the heroes and battles against the Persians.
He is said to have written some of the epigrams that were put on plaques at Thermopyle
in memorandum of the great battle between the Greeks and the Persians. One of
them said “Here fought once against three million barbarians, four thousand
Peloponnesian men.”
His last years were spent on Sicily,
at the court of the tyrant Hero in Syracusae.
This text is cited Sept 2003 from the In2Greece URL below.
A lyric poet (6th cent. B.C.). He was the grandson of Simonides Senior.
Bacchylides (Bakchulides). A Greek lyric poet who flourished in the middle of the fifth century B.C. He was a native of Iulis in the island of Ceos, the nephew and pupil of Simonides, and a contemporary of Pindar. For a long time he lived with his uncle at the court of Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse. He also resided for a considerable time at Athens, where he won many victories in the dithyrambic contests. Later on his home was in the Peloponnesus. It would appear that he attempted to rival the many-sided talent of his uncle, but was inferior to him in sublimity and force. He attempted a great variety of styles: hymns, paeans, dithyrambs, drinking-songs, love-songs, and epigrams. Only fragments were known to exist until 1897, when the British Museum announced the discovery on an Egyptian papyrus of some 15 to 20 lyrics varying in length from 14 to 200 lines, but with serious lacunae.
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Bacchylides (Bakchulides). One of the great lyric poets of Greece, was a native
of Iulis in the island of Ceos, and the nephew as well as fellow-townsman of Simonides.
(Strab. x.; Steph. Byz. s. v. Ioulis.) His father is variously called Medon (Suidas,
s. v. Bakchulides), Meilon (Epigr. in novem Lyr. ap. Bockh, Schol. Pind.), or
Meidylus (Etym. M.): his paternal grandfather was the athlete Bacchylides. We
know nothing of his life, except that he lived at the court of Hiero in Syracuse,
together with Simonides and Pindar. (Aelian, V. H. iv. 15.) Eusebius makes him
flourish in B. C. 450; but as Hiero died B. C. 467, and Bacchylides obtained great
fame at his court, his poetical reputation must have been established as early
as B. C. 470. The Scholiast on Pindar frequently states (ad Ol. ii. 154, 155,
ad Pyth. ii. 131, 161, 166, 167, 171) that Bacchylides and Pindar were jealous
of and opposed to one another; but whether this was the fact, or the story is
to be attributed to the love of scandal which distinguishes the later Greek grammarians,
it is impossible to determine.
The poems of Bacchylides were numerous and of various kinds. They
consisted of Epinici (songs, like Pindar's, in honour of the victors in the public
games), Hymns, Paeans, Dithyrambs, Prosodia, Hyporchemata, Erotica, and Paroenia
or Drinking-songs : but all of these have perished with the exception of a few
fragments. It is, therefore, difficult to form an independent opinion of their
poetical value; but as far as we can judge from what has come down to us, Bacchylides
was distinguished, like Simonides, for the elegance and finish of his compositions.
He was inferior to Pindar in strength and energy, as Longinus remarks (c. 33);
and in his lamentations over the inexorable character of fate, and the necessity
of submitting to death, he reminds one of the Ionic elegy. Like his predecessors
in Lyric poetry, he wrote in the Doric dialect, but frequently introduces Attic
forms, so that the dialect of his poems very much resembles that of the choruses
in the Attic tragedies.
Besides his lyrical poems there are two epigrams in the Greek Anthology
attributed to Bacchylides, one in the Doric and the other in the Ionic dialect,
and there seems no reason to doubt their genuineness.
This text is from: A dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology, 1873 (ed. William Smith). Cited Sep 2005 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
Bacchylides. Lyric poet from Ceos
who was the nephew (through his mother) of Simonides. Bacchylides wrote dithyrambs
(narrative poems with mythological subjects, sung by a chorus with one solo singer)
and took part in poetry competitions in Athens.
For example, he wrote two imaginary episodes from the life of Theseus and a poem
about Croesus.
He called himself “the nightingale of Ceos”.
Both Bacchylides and his uncle Simonides were rivals to Pindar. They went to Syracusae
and together they wrote victory odes for Hieron of Syracusae,
among others a tribute to Hieron's victory at the horse races in the Olympic Games
in 476 BC.
His style was genuine and clear and he had a narrative talent, but
is generally considered not to have been a genius. 14 victory odes and 6 dithyrambs
of his survive to this day.
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Editor’s Information
The e-texts of the works by Bacchylides are found in Greece (ancient country) under the category Ancient Greek Writings.
MILOS (Ancient city) GREECE
Melanippides of Melos (5th century BC) was the most famous lyre-player of the Classical period. It was said that he had increased the number of lyre strings from eleven to twelve. Innovations in the composition of dithyrambs (hymns in praise of Dionysus) are also attributed to him. He spent the last years of his life at the court of the Macedonian king Perdikkas II. Fragments of three of his works, "Marsyas", "Danaides" and "Persephone", have survived .
This text is cited May 2003 from the Macedonian Heritage URL below.
Melanippides. A celebrated Greek lyric poet in the department of the dithyramb, who flourished about B.C. 440 at Melos. His fragments will be found in Bergk, Poet. Lyric. Graec.
Dithyrambus (dithurambos). A hymn sung at the festivals of Dionysus to the accompaniment of a flute and a dance round the altar. . .
There was a very considerable number of dithyrambic poets. The best known are Melanippides (q.v.) of Melos (about B.C. 415), who is generally held responsible for the degeneracy of the dithyramb and the excess of instrumental music; his disciple Philoxenus of Cythera, who died in 380; Timotheus of Miletus, who died in 357, and his contemporaries Polyidus and Telestes. Of the whole literature we possess nothing but fragments.
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A native of the island of Melos and a follower of Democritus. Having been sold as a captive in his youth, he was redeemed by Democritus and trained up in the study of philosophy. He attached himself also to lyric poetry and was much distinguished for his success. His name, however, has been transmitted to posterity as that of an avowed advocate for the rejection of all religious belief. It is expressly asserted by ancient writers that when, in a particular instance, he saw a perjured person escape punishment, he publicly declared his disbelief of Divine Providence, and from that time spoke of the gods and all religious ceremonies with ridicule and contempt. He even attempted to lay open the sacred Mysteries, writing two books on the subject, called Phrugioi. A price at last was set upon his head, and he fled to Corinth, where he died. He lived about 416 years before Christ ( Cic. N. D.i. 23; iii. 37; Val. Max. i. 1. 7).
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Diagoras, the son of Telecleides or Teleclytus, was born in the island of Melos
(Milo), one of the Cyclades. He was a poet and a philosopher, who throughout antiquity
was regarded as an atheist (atheos). With the exception of this one point, we
possess only very scanty information concerning his life and literary activity.
All that is known is carefully collected by M. H. E. Meier (in Ersch. u. Gruber's
Allgem. Encyclop. xxiv.).
The age of this remarkable man can be determined only in a general
way by the fact of his being called a disciple of Democritus of Abdera, who taught
about B. C. 436. But the circumstance that, besides Bacchylides (about B. C. 435),
Pindar also is called his contemporary, is a manifest anachronism, as has been
already observed by Brandis. (Gesch. d. Griech. Rom. Philos. i.) Nearly all the
ancient authorities agree that Melos was his native place, and Tatian, a late
Christian writer, who calls him an Athenian, does so probably for no other reason
but because Athens was the principal scene of the activity of Diagoras. (Tatian,
Orat. adv. Graec.) Lobeck (Aglaoph.) is the only one among modern critics who
maintains that the native country of Diagoras is uncertain. According to a tradition
in Hesychius Milesius and Suidas, Democritus the philosopher ransomed him for
a very large sum from the captivity into which he had fallen in the cruel subjugation
of Melos under Alcibiades (B. C. 411), and this account at all events serves to
attest the close personal relation of these two kindredminded men, although the
details respecting the ransom, for instance, may be incorrect. The same authorities
further state, that in his youth Diagoras had acquired some reputation as a lyric
poet, and this is probably the cause of his being mentioned together with the
lyric poets Simonides, Pindar, and Bacchylides. Thus he is said to have composed
aismata, mele, paianes, enkomia, and dithyrambs. Among his encomia is mentioned
in particular an eulogy on Arianthes of Argos, who is otherwise unknown, (1) another
on Nicodorus, a statesman of Mantineia, and a third upon the Mantineians. Diagoras
is said to have lived in intimate friendship with Nicodorus, who was celebrated
as a statesman and lawgiver in his native place, and lived, according to Perizonius
(ad Aelian. V. H. ii. 23), at the time of Artaxerxes Mnemon. The foolish Aelian,
who has preserved this statement, declines any further discussion of this relation,
although he knew more about it, under the pretext that he thought it objectionable
to say anything in praise of a man who was so hostile to the gods (Deois echthron
Diagoran). But still he informs us, that Diagoras assisted Nicodorus in his legislation,
which he himself praises as very wise and good. Wachsmuth (Hellen. Alterth. i.
2) places this political activity of the two friends about the beginning of the
Peloponnesian war.
We find Diagoras at Athens as early as B. C. 424, for Aristophanes
in the Clouds (830), which were performed in that year, alludes to him as a well-known
character; and when Socrates, as though it were a mistake, is there called a Melian,
tile poet does so in order to remind his hearers at once of Diagoras and of his
attacks upon the popular religion. In like manner Hippon is called a Melian, merely
because he was a follower of Diagoras. It can scarcely be doubted that Diagoras
was acquainted with Socrates, a connexion which is described in the scholia on
Aristophanes as if he had been a teacher of Socrates. Fifteen years later, B.
C. 411, he was involved, as Diodorus (xiii. 6) informs us, by the democratical
party in a lawsuit about impiety (diaboles tuchon ep asebeiai), and he thought
it advisable to escape its result by flight. Religion seems to have been only
the pretext for that accusation, for the mere fact of his being a Melian made
him an object of suspicion with the people of Athens. In B. C. 416, Melos had
been conquered and cruelly treated by the Athenians, and it is not at all impossible
that Diagoras, indignant at such treatment, may have taken part in the party-strife
at Athens, and thus have drawn upon himself the suspicion of the democratical
party, for the opinion that heterodoxy was persecuted at Athens, and that the
priests in particular busied themselves about such matters, is devoid of all foundation.
(Bernhardy, Gesch. d. Griech. Lit. i.) All the circumstances of the case lead
us to the conclusion, that the accusation of Diagoras was altogether and essentially
of a political nature.
All that we know of his writings, and especially of his poems, shews
no trace of irreligion, but on the contrary contains evidence of the most profound
religious feeling. (Philodemus in the Herculanens. ed. Drummond and Walpole) Moreover,
we do not find that out of Athens the charge of asebeia was taken notice of in
any other part of Greece. All that we know for certain on the point is, that Diagoras
was one of those philosophers who, like Socrates, certainly gave offence by their
views concerning the worship of the national gods; but we know what liberties
the Attic comedy could take in this respect with impunity. There is also an anecdote
that Diagoras, for want of other fire-wood, once threw a wooden statue of Heracles
into the fire, in order to cook a dish of lentils, and, if there is any truth
in it, it certainly shews his liberal views respecting polytheism and the rude
worship of images. (Meier, l. c.) In like manner he may have ridiculed the common
notions of the people respecting the actions of the gods, and their direct and
personal interference with human affairs. This, too, is alluded to in several
very characteristic anecdotes. For example, on his flight from Athens by sea to
Pallene he was overtaken by a storm, and on hearing his fellowpassengers say,
that this storm was sent them by the gods as a punishment, because they had an
atheist on board, Diagoras shewed them other vessels at some distance which were
struggling with the same storm without having a Diagoras on board. (Cic. de Nat.
Deor. iii. 37.) This and similar anecdotes (Diog. Laert. vi. 59) accurately describe
the relation in which our philosopher stood to the popular religion. That he maintained
his own position with great firmness, and perhaps with more freedom, wit, and
boldness than was advisable, seems to be attested by the fact, that he in particular
obtained the epithet of atheos in antiquity. Many modern writers maintain that
this epithet ought not to be given to him, because he merely denied the direct
interference of God with the world; but though atheists, in the proper sense of
the word, have never existed, and in that sense Diagoras was certainly not an
atheist, yet as he did not believe in the personal existence of the Athenian gods
and their human mode of acting, the Athenians could hardly have regarded him as
other than an atheist. In the eulogy on his friend Nicodorus he sang
Kata daimona kai tuchan ta panta Brotoisin ekteleitai.
But to return to the accusation of Diagoras, in consequence of which
he was obliged to quit Athens. That time was one in which scepticism was beginning
to undermine the foundations of the ancient popular belief. The trial of those
who had broken down the statues of Hermes, the profanation of the mysteries, and
the accusation of Alcibiades, are symptoms which shew that the unbelief, nourished
by the speculations of philosophers and by the artifices of the sophists, began
to appear very dangerous to the conservative party at Athens. There is no doubt
that Diagoras paid no regard to the established religion of the people, and he
may occasionally have ridiculed it; but he also ventured on direct attacks upon
public institutions of the Athenian worship, such as the Eleusinian mysteries,
which he endeavoured to lower in public estimation, and he is said to have prevented
many persons from becoming initiated in them. These at least are the points of
which the ancients accuse him (Craterus, ap. Scol. Aristoph. l. c. ; Tarrhaeus,
ap. Said.; Lysias, c. Andocid.; Joseph. c. Apion. ii. 37; Tatian, adv. Graec.),
and this statement is also supported by the circumstance, that Melanthius, in
his work on the mysteries, mentions the decree passed against Diagoras. But, notwithstanding
the absence of accurate information, we can discover political motives through
all these religious disputes. Diagoras was a Melian, and consequently belonged
to the Doric race ; he was a friend of the Doric Mantineia, which was hated by
Athens, and had only recently given up its alliance with Athens; the Dorians and
Ionians were opposed to each other in various points of their worship, and this
spark of hostility was kindled into a glowing hatred by the Peloponnesian war.
Diagoras fled from Athens in time to escape the consequences of the attacks which
his enemies had made upon him. He was therefore punished by Steliteusis, that
is, he was condemned, and the psephisma was engraved on a column, promising a
prize for his head, and one talent to the person who should bring his dead body
to Athens, and two talents to him who should deliver him up alive to the Athenians.
(Schol. ad Aristoph. Av. 1013, 1073; Diod. xiii. 6.) Melanthius, in his work on
the mysteries, had preserved a copy of this psephisma. That the enemies of the
philosopher acted on that occasion with great injustice and animosity towards
him, we may infer from the manner in which Aristophanes, in his Birds, which was
brought upon the stage in that year, speaks of the matter; for he describes that
decree as having been framed in the republic of the birds, and ridicules it by
the ludicrous addition that a prize was offered to any one who should kill a dead
tyrant. Meier, with full justice, infers from this passage of Aristophanes, that
the poet did not approve of the proceedings of the people, who were instigated
by their leaders, had become frightened about the preservation of the constitution,
and were thus misled to various acts of violence. The mere fact that Aristophanes
could venture upon such an insinuation shews that Diagoras was by no means in
the same bad odour with all the Athenians.
From Athens Diagoras first went to Pallene (2) in Achaia, which town
was on the side of Lacedaemon from the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, and
before any other of the Achaean towns. (Thuc. ii. 9.) It was in vain that the
Athenians demanded his surrender, and in consequence of this refusal, they included
the inhabitants of Pallene in the same decree which had been passed against Diagoras.
This is a symptom of that fearful passion and blindness with which the Athenian
people, misguided as it was by demagogues, tore itself to pieces in those unfortunate
trials about those who had upset the Hermae. (Wachsmuth, l. c. i. 2; Droysen,
in his Introduct. to the Birds of Aristoph.) For all that we know of Diagoras,
his expressions and opinions, his accusation and its alleged cause, leads us to
see in him one of the numberless persons who were suspected, and were fortunate
enough to escape the consequences of the trial by flight. From Pallene he went
to Corinth, where, as Suidas states, he died.
Among the works of Diagoras we have mention of a work entitled Phrngioi
logoi (3), in which he is said to have theoretically explained his atheism, and
to have endeavoured to establish it by arguments. This title of the work, which
occurs also as a title among the works of Democritus and other Greek philosophers
(Diog. Laert. ix. 49, mentions the logos Phrngios of Democritus, and concerning
other works of the same title, see Lobeck, Aglaoph.), leads us to suppose that
Diagoras treated in that work of the Phrygian divinities, who were received in
Greece, and endeavoured to explain the mythuses which referred to them; it is
probable also that he drew the different mysteries within the circle of his investigations,
and it may be that his accusers at Athens referred to this work. The relation
of Diagoras to the popular religion and theology of his age cannot be explained
without going back to the opinions of his teacher, Democritus, and the intellectual
movement of the time. The atomistic philosophy had substituted for a world-governing
deity the relation of cause and effect as the sources of all things. Democritus
explained the wide-spread belief in gods as the result of fear of unusual and
unaccountable phaenomena in nature; and, starting from this principle, Diagoras,
at a time when the ancient popular belief had already been shaken, especially
in the minds of the young, came forward with the decidedly sophistical doctrine,
that there were no gods at all. His attacks seem to have been mainly directed
against the dogmas of Greek theology and mythology, as well as against the established
forms of worship. The expression of the Scholiast on Aristophanes (Ran. 323),
that Diagoras, like Socrates, introduced new divinities, must probably be referred
to the fact, that according to the fashion of the sophists, which is caricatured
by Aristophanes in the Clouds, he substituted the active powers of nature for
the activity of the gods; and some isolated statements thtt have come down to
us render it probable that he did this in a witty manner, somewhat bordering upon
frivolity; but there is no passage to shew that his disbelief in the popular gods,
and his ridicule of the established, rude, and materialistic belief of the people,
produced anything like an immoral conduct in the life and actions of the man.
On the contrary, all accounts attest that he discharged the duties of life in
an exemplary manner, that he was a moral and very estimable man, and that he was
in earnest when in the eulogy on Arianthes of Argos he said : Deos, Deos pro pantos
ergon nomai phren npertatan! We do not feel inclined, with Meier, to doubt the
statement that he distinguished himself not only as a philosopher, but also as
an orator, and that he possessed many friends and great influence; for though
we find it in an author of only secondary weight (Dion Chrysost. Horn. IV in prim.
Epist. ad Corinth. Op. v., ed. Montf.), yet it perfectly agrees with the fate
which Diagoras experienced for the very reason that he was not an unimportant
man at Athens. (Fabric. Bibl. Graec. ii.; Brucker, Hist. Crit. Philos. i.; Thienemann,
in Fulleborn's Beitrage zur Gesch. der Philos. xi.; D. L. Mounier, Disputatio
de Diagora Melio, Roterod. 1838.)
1. The change in the constitution of Mantineia by the sunoikismos took place with
the assistance of Argos (Wachsmuth, Hellen. Alterth. i. 2, i. 1), and Arianthes
of Argos was probably a person of some political importance.
2. This statement is founded upon a conjecture of Meier, who proposes to read
in the scholion on Aristoph. Av. l. c. kai tons ME ekdidontas Pelleneis.
3. Suidas calls it tous apopurgizontas logous, an explanation of which has been
attempted by Meier.
This text is from: A dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology, 1873 (ed. William Smith). Cited Oct 2005 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
PAROS (Ancient city) KYKLADES
Archilochus, (Archilochos). A Greek lyric poet, especially eminent
as a writer of lampoons. Born at Paros, he was the son of Telesicles by a slave-woman,
but was driven by poverty to go with a colony to Thasos in B.C. 640 or 650. From
Thasos he was soon driven by want, and by the enmities which his unrestrained
passion for invective had drawn upon him. He seems to have roamed restlessly from
place to place, until, on his return to Paros, he was slain in a fight by the
Naxian, Calondas. Long afterwards, when this man visited the Delphian temple,
the god is said to have driven him from his threshold as the slayer of a servant
of the Muses, and refused to admit him until he had propitiated the soul of the
poet at his tomb--a story which expresses the high value set on his art by the
ancients, who placed him on a level with Homer, Pindar, and Sophocles; for Archilochus
had an extraordinary poetical genius, which enabled him to invent a large number
of new metres, and to manipulate them with the ease of a master. He brought iambic
poetry, in particular, to artistic perfection. The many misfortunes of his stormy
life had bred in his irritable nature a deeply settled indignation, which in poems
perfect in form and alive with force and fury, vented itself in bitter mockery
even of his friends, and in merciless, unpardonable abuse of his foes. Such was
the effect of his lampoons that Lycambes, who had first promised and then refused
him his daughter Neobule, hanged himself and his family in the despair engendered
by the poet's furious attacks. Of his poems, which were written in the Old-Ionic
dialect, and taken by Horace for his model in his epodes, only a number of short
fragments are preserved. The best text of these will be found in the collection
of Bergk.
This text is from: Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. Cited Nov 2002 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
708 - 628
Archilochus (Archilochos), of Paros, was one of the earliest Ionian lyric poets,
and the first Greek poet who composed Iambic verses according
to fixed rules. He flourished about 714-676 B. C. (Bode, Geschichte der Lyr. Dichtk.
i. pp. 38, 47.) He was descended from a noble family, who held the priesthood
in Paros. His grandfather was Tellis, who brought the worship of Demeter into
Thasos, and whose portrait was introduced by Polygnotus into his painting of the
infernal regions at Delphi. His father was Telesicles, and his mother a slave,
named Enipo. In the flower of his age (between 710 and 700 B. C.), and probably
after he had already gained a prize for his hymn to Demeter (Schol. in Aristoph.Av.
1762), Archilochus went from Paros to Thasos with a colony, of which one account
makes him the leader. The motive for this emigration can only be conjectured.
It was most probably the result of a political change, to which cause was added,
in the case of Archilochus, a sense of personal wrongs. He had been a suitor to
Neobule, one of the daughters of Lycambes, who first promised and afterwards refused
to give his daughter to the poet. Enraged at this treatment, Archilochus attacked
the whole family in an iambic poem, accusing Lycambes of perjury, and his daughters
of the most abandoned lives. The verses were recited at the festival of Demeter,
and produced such an effect, that the daughters of Lycambes are said to have hung
themselves through shame. The bitterness which he expresses in his poems towards
his native island (Athen. iii. p. 76, b.) seems to have arisen in part also from
the low estimation in which he was held, as being the son of a slave. Neither
was he more happy at Thasos. He draws the most melancholy picture of his adopted
country, which he at length quitted in disgust (Plut. de Exil. 12.; Strabo, xiv,
viii.; Eustath. in Odyss. i.; Aelian, V. H. xii. 50). While at Thasos, he incurried
the disgrace of losing his shield in an engagement with the Thracians of the opposite
continent but, like Alcaeus under similar circumstances, instead of being ashamed
of the disaster, he recorded it in his verse. Plutarch (Inst. Lacou) states, that
Archilochus was banished from Sparta the very hour that he had arrived there because
he had written in his poems, that a man had better throw away his arms than lose
his life. But Valerius Maximus (vi. 3, ext. 1) says, that the poems of Archilochus
were forbidden at Sparta because of their licentiousness, and especially on account
of the attack on the daughters of Lycambes. It must remain doubtful whether a
confusion has been made between the personal history of the poet and the fate
of his works, both in this instance and in the story that he won the prize at
Olympia with his hymn to Heracles (Tzetzes, Chil. i. 685), of which thus much
is certain, that the Olympic victors used to sing a hymn by Archilochus in their
triumphal procession (Pindar, Olymp. ix. 1). These traditions, and the certain
fact that the fame of Archilochus was spread, in his lifetime, over the whole
of Greece, together with his unsettled character, render it probable that he made
many journeys of which we have no account. It seems, that he visited Siris in
Lower Italy, the only city of which he speaks well (Athen. xii.). At length he
returned to Paros, and, in a war between the Parians and the people of Naxos,
he fell by the hand of a Naxian named Calondas or Corax. The Delphian oracle,
which, before the birth of Archilochus, had promised to his father an immortal
son, now pronounced a curse upon the man who had killed him, because "he had slain
the servant of the Muses" (Dion Chrysost. Orat. 33).
Archilochus shared with his contemporaries, Thaletas and Terpander,
in the honour of establishing lyric poetry throughout Greece. The invention of
the elegy is ascribed to him, as well as to Callinus; and though Callinus was
somewhat older than Archilochus, there is no doubt that the latter was one of
the earliest poets who excelled in this species of composition. Meleager enumerates
him among the poets in his Corona (38).
But it was on his satiric iambic poetry that the fame of Archilochus
was founded. The first place in this style of poetry was awarded to him by the
consent of the ancient writers, who did not hesitate to compare him with Sophocles,
Pindar, and even Homer -meaning, doubtless, that as they stood at the head of
tragic, lyric, and epic poetry, so was Archilochus the first of iambic
satirical writers; while some place him, next to Homer, above all other
poets (Dion Chrysost.; Longin. xiii. 3; Velleius, i. 5; Cicero, Orat. 2; Heracleitus,
ap. Diog. Laet. ix. 1). The statues of Archilochus and of Homer were dedicated
on the same day (Antip. Thessal. Epigr. 45), and two faces, which are thought
to be their likenesses, are found placed together in a Janus-like bust (Visconti,
Icon. Gree. i.). The emperor Hadrian judged that the Muses had shown a special
mark of favour to Homer in leading Archilochus into a different department of
poetry (Epig. 5).
The Iambics of Archilochus expressed the strongest feelings in the
most unmeasured language. The licence of Ionian democracy and the bitterness of
a disappointed man were united with the highest degree of poetical power to give
them force and point. In countries and ages unfamiliar with the political and
religious licence which at once incited and protected the poet, his satire was
blamed for its severity; and the emetion accounted most conspicuous in his verses
was "rage," as we see in the line of Horace (A. P. 79): "Archilochum proproi rabies
armavit iambo", and in the expression of Hadrian, lussontas iambous; and his bitterness
passed into a proverb. Archilochou pateis. But there must have been something
more than mere sarcastic power, there must have been truth and delicate wit, in
the sarcasms of the poet whom Plato does not hesitate to call "the very wise",
(tou sophotatou, Repub. ii.). Quintilian (x. 1.60) ascribes to him the greatest
power of expression, displayed in sentences sometimes strong, sometimes brief,
with rapid changes (quum validae, tum breves vibrantesque sententiae), the greatest
life and nervousness plurimum sanguinis atque nervorum, and considers that whatever
blame his works deserve is the fault of his subjects and not of his genius. In
the latter opinion the Greek critics seem to have joined (Plut. de Aud. 13). Of
modern writers, Archilochus has been perhaps best understood by Muller, who says,
"The ostensible object of Archilochus' Iambics, like that of the later comedy,
was to give reality to caricatures, every hideous feature of which was made more
striking by being magnified. But that tllese pictures, like caricatures from the
hand of a master, had a striking truth, may be inferred from the impression which
Archilochus' iambics produced, both upon contemporaries and posterity. Mere calumnies
could never have driven the daughters of Lycambes to hang themselves,--if, indeed,
this story is to be believed, and is not a gross exaggeration. But we have no
need of it; the universal admiration which was awarded to Archilochus' iambics
proves the existence of a foundation of truth; for when had a satire, which was
not based on truth, universal reputation for excellence? When Plato produced his
first dialogues against the sophists, Gorgias is said to have exclaimed "Athens
has given birth to a new Archilochus !" This comparison, made by a man not unacquainted
with art, shows at all events that Archilochus must have possessed somewhat of
the keen and delicate satire which in Plato was most severe where a dull listener
would be least sensible of it" (History of the Literature of Greece).
The satire of preceding writers, as displayed for example in the Margites,
was less pointed, because its objects were chosen out of the remote world which
furnished all the personages of epic poetry; while the iambics of Archilochus
were aimed at those along whom he lived. Hence their personal bitterness and sarcastic
power. This kind of satire had already been employed in extemporaneous effusions
of wit, especially at the festivals of Demeter and Cora, and Dionysus. This raillery,
a specimen of which is preserved in some of the songs of the chorus in Aristophanes'
Frogs, was called iambus; and the same name was applied to the verse which Archilochus
invented when he introduced a new style of poetry in the place of these irregular
effusions. For the measured movement of the heroic hexameter, with its arsis and
thesis of equal lengths, he substituted a movement in which the arsis was twice
as long as the thesis, the light tripping character of which was admirably adapted
to express the lively play of wit. According as the arsis followed or preceded
the thesis, the verse gained, in the former case, strength, in the latter, speed
and lightness, which. are the characteristics respectively of the iambus and of
the trochee. These short feet he formed into continued systems, by uniting every
two of them into a pair (a metre or dipodia), in which one arsis was more strongly
accentuated than the other, and one of the two theses was left doubtful as to
quantity, so that, considered with reference to musical rhythm, each dipod formed
a bar. Hence arose the great kindred dramatic metres, the iambic trimeter and
the trochaic tetrameter, as well as the shorter forms of iambic and trochaic verse.
Archilochus was the inventor also of the epode, which was formed by subjoining
to one or more verses a shorter one. One form of the epode, in which it consists
of three trochees, was called the ithyphallic verse (ithuphallos. He used also
a kind of verse compounded of two different metrical structures, which was called
asynartete. Some writers ascribe to him the invention of the Saturnian verse (Bentley's
Dissertation on Phalaris). Archilochus introduced several improvements in music,
which began about his time to be applied to the public recitations of poetry.
The best opportunity we have of judging of the structure of Archilochus' poetry, though not of its satiric character, is furnished by the Epodes of Horace, as we learn from that poet himself (Epist. i. 19. 23) :
" Parios ego primum iambos
Ostendi Latio, numeros animosque secutus
Archilochi, non res et agentia verba Lycamben."
Some manifest translations of Archilochus may be traced in the Epodes. The fragments
of Archilochus which remain are collected in Jacobs' Anthol. Graec., Gaisford's
Poet. Graec. Min., Bergk's Poet. Lyrici Graec., and by Liebel, Archilochi Reliquiae,
Lips. 1812.
Fabricius discusses fully the passages in which other writers of the name are
supposed to be mentioned.
This text is from: A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890) (eds. William Smith, LLD, William Wayte, G. E. Marindin). Cited Oct 2005 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
Lycambes: A Theban who promised his daughter to Archilochus, and afterwards refused her; for which he was pursued by the poet with such bitter sarcasm that he hung both himself and his daughter
Epodos (Επωδός): a form of lyric metre invented by Archilochus, in which a longer verse is followed by a shorter one, not including the elegiac distich. So in Roman literature, the Epodi of Horace
Dialects: A dialect, in the usual acceptance of the word, is a form of speech used by a limited number of people, or within a limited region, and differing from the language of the main branch of the race by reason of local usages due to separation and special conditions. The term also denotes any of the divisions of a linguistic family. It sometimes happens that those who use a particular dialect of a language come to be politically the most powerful branch, with greater wealth, refinement, and literary cultivation. Their dialect then ultimately becomes the standard form of the language, while the other variations of it sink to a subordinate position, and are then spoken of as dialects, and the first, which was originally of no more authority, is accepted as the normal form of speech. . .The New Ionic dialect is found in the writings of the iambic elegiac poets Archilochus . . .
Lyric poetry: Archilochus of Paros, whose lifetime probably fell in the early seventh century, became famous for his range of poems on themes as diverse as friends lost at sea, mockery of martial valor, and love gone astray. The bitter power of his poetic invective reportedly caused a father and his two daughters to commit suicide when Archilochus ridiculed them in anger after the father had put an end to Archilochus's affair with his daughter Neobule. Some modern literary critics think the poems about Neobule and her family are fictional, not autobiographical, and were meant to display Archilochus's dazzling talent for "blame poetry", the mirror image of lyric as the poetry of praise.
Other types of poetry besides epic also flourished in Greece from time immemorial. The first "lyric poet" (i.e., someone who wrote songs that were to be sung accompanied by music of the lyre) whose work survives to us, Archilochus of Paros, became a celebrity in ancient times: his poetry fascinated his audience both because of its quality and because of what it revealed (or purported to reveal) about his personal life.
But critics are in dispute in regard to the terms "Hellas," "Hellenes," and "Panhellenes." For Thucydides says that the poet nowhere speaks of barbarians, "because the Hellenes had not as yet been designated by a common distinctive name opposed to that of the barbarians." And Apollodorus says that only the Greeks in Thessaly were called Hellenes: "and were called Myrmidons and Hellenes." He says, however, that Hesiod andArchilochus already knew that all the Greeks were called, not only Hellenes, but also Panhellenes, for Hesiod, in speaking of the daughters of Proteus, says that the Panhellenes wooed them, and Archilochus says that
"the woes of the Panhellenes centered upon Thasos."
Thasos colonized by the Parians, B.C. 708, and among the colonists was the poet Archilochus
Similarly, in order to prove that men of talent are everywhere honored, Alcidamas said: "The Parians honored Archilochus, in spite of his evil-speaking; the Chians Homer, although he had rendered no public services; the Mytilenaeans Sappho, although she was a woman; the Lacedaemonians, by no means a people fond of learning, elected Chilon one of their senators; the Italiotes honored Pythagoras, and the Lampsacenes buried Anaxagoras, although he was a foreigner, and still hold him in honor.
Euboeus, (Euboios) of Paros, a very celebrated writer of parodies, who lived about the time of Philip of Macedonia. In his poems, which seem to have been written in the style of Homer, he ridiculed chiefly the Athenians. Euboeus and Boeotus are said to have excelled all other parodists. In the time of Athenaeus a collection of his Parodies in four books was still extant, but all of them are lost with the exception of a few short fragments. (Athen. xv.; comp. Weland, Dissert. de Parodiar. Homeric. Scriptoribus)
Evenus, (Euenos). In the Greek Anthology there are sixteen epigrams under this
name, which are, however, the productions of different poets. (Brunck, Anal. vol.
i.; Jacobs, Anth. Graec vol. i.) In the Vatican MS. some of the epigrams are headed
Euinou, the 7th is headed Euenou Askalonitou, the 12th Euinou Athenaiou, the 14th
Euenou Sikeliotou, and the last Euenou grammatikou. The best known poets of this
name are two elegiac poets of Paros, mentioned by Eratosthenes (ap. Harpocrat.
s. v. Euenos), who says that only the younger was celebrated, and that one of
them (he does not say which) was mentioned by Plato. There are, in fact, several
passages in which Plato refers to Evenus, somewhat ironically, as at once a sophist
or philosopher and a poet. (Apolog. Socr., Phaed., Phaedr.) According to Maximus
Tyrius (Diss. xxxviii. 4. ), Evenus was the instructor of Socrates in poetry,
a statement which derives some countenance from a passage in Plato (Phaed. l.
c.), from which it may also be inferred that Evenus was alive at the time of Socrates's
death, but at such an advanced age that lie was likely soon to follow him. Eusebius
(Chron. Arm.) places him at the 30th Olympiad (B. C. 460) and onwards. His poetry
was gnomic, that is, it formed the vehicle for expressing philosophic maxims and
opinions. The first six of the epigrams in the Anthology are of this character,
and may therefore be ascribed to him with tolerable certainty. Perhaps, too, the
fifteenth should be assigned to him.
The other Evenus of Paros wrote Erotika, as we learn from the express
testimony of Artemidortus (Oneirocr. i. 5), and from a passage of Arrian (Epictet.
iv. 9), in which Evenus is mentioned in conjunction with Aristeides. A few other
fragments of his poetry are extant. Among them is a line which Aristotle (Metaphys.
iv. 5, Eth. Eudem. ii. 7) and Plutarch (Moral. ii.) quote by the name of Evenus,
but which is found in one of the elegies of Theognis (vv. 467-474), whence it
is supposed that that elegy should be ascribed to Evenus. There are also two hexameters
of Evenus. (Aristot. Eth. Nicom. vii. 11.)
None of the epigrams in the Anthology are expressly assigned to this
Evenus; but it is not unlikely that the 12th is his. If the 8th and 9th, on the
Cnidian Aphrodite of Praxiteles, and the 10th and 11th, on Myron's cows, are his,
which seems not improbable, then his date would be fixed. Otherwise it is very
difficult to determine whether he lived before or after the other Evenus. As he
was certainly less famous than the contemporary of Socrates, the statement of
Eratosthenes that only the younger was celebrated, would imply that lie lived
before him : and this view is maintained, in opposition to the general opinion
of scholars, in the Zeitschrift fur die Allerthumswissenschaft, 1840, p. 118.
Of the other poets of this name next to nothing is known beyond the
titles, quoted above, in the Palatine Anthology. Jacobs conjectures that the Sicilian
and the Ascalonite are the same, the name Sikeliotou being a corruption of Askalonitou,
but he gives no reason for this conjecture. The epigrams of one of these poets,
we know not which, were in the collection of Philip, which contained chiefly the
verses of poets nearly contemporary with Philip himself.
This text is from: A dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology, 1873 (ed. William Smith). Cited Oct 2005 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
TINOS (Island) KYKLADES
Baucis (Baukis), a Greek poetess, who is called a disciple of Sappho. She was
a native of Tenos, and a friend of Erinna. She died at a youthful age, just before
her marriage, and Erinna is said to have written the epitaph upon her which is
still extant, and which, together with another fragment of Erinna, contains all
we know about Baucis. (Anthol. Gr. vii. 710, 712; Bergk, Poet. Lyr. Gr.)
SERIFOS (Island) KYKLADES
Towards the latter end of the reign of Augustus, Severus was banished by Augustus to the island of Crete on account of his libellous verses; but as he still continued to write libels, he was removed by Tiberius in A.D. 24 to the desert island of Seriphus, where he died in great poverty in the twenty-fifth year of his exile, A.D. 33.
This extract is from: Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. Cited Feb 2003 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
ANDROS (Island) KYKLADES
Psellus (Psellos) Michael, a native of Andros in the ninth century A.D. He was probably the author of some of the works which are ascribed to the younger Psellus.
PAROS (Ancient city) KYKLADES
Sculptor and architect from the island of Paros.
He worked on the Mausoleum in Halicarnassus,
depicting the hunt of the Caledonian swine on the east side. Some of the building
has survived, as well as parts of a temple of Athena in Tegea.
Characteristic of Scopas' sculptures is their heads with half-open
mouths and deep-set eyes.
Scopas was together with Praxiteles e leader of the Attic school.
This text is cited Sept 2003 from the In2Greece URL below.
First-century Delian inscriptions record restoration work by Aristandros
of Paros, son of Skopas; if the sequence holds, the Aristandros of Paros active
around 400 thus becomes the great Skopas' father. Skopas' recorded works, all
marbles but for no. 1, are:
Divinities
1. Aphrodite Pandemos riding a goat, at Elis
2. Aphrodite and Pothos, in Samothrace
3. Aphrodite, later in Rome
4. Apollo Kitharoidos at Rhamnous, taken to Rome by Augustus
5. Apollo Smintheus and a mouse, at Chryse in the Troad
6. Ares, seated and colossal, later in Rome
7. Artemis Eukleia at Thebes
8. Asklepios and Hygieia at Gortys in Arkadia
9. Asklepios and Hygieia at Tegea
10. Athena at Knidos
11. Athena Pronaos at Thebes
12. Dionysos at Knidos
13. Hekate at Argos
14. Hermes (a herm)
15. Hestia, later in Rome
16. Leto and Ortygia with the babies Apollo and Artemis, at Ephesos
Others
17. Two Erinyes (Furies) flanking another by Kalamis, at Athens
18. Eros, Himeros and Pothos, grouped with the Peitho and Paregoros of Praxiteles
around the ancient Aphrodite Praxis at Megara
19. Herakles at Sikyon
20. Basket-bearer ('kanephoros') and two pillars, later in Rome
21. A Maenad
Architectural sculpture
22. Poseidon, Thetis, Achilles, and their train, later in the Circus Flaminius
at Rome
23. Reliefs on one of the columns of the temple of Artemis at Ephesos
24. East side of the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos
25. Temple of Alea Athena at Tegea
Uncertain or spurious
26. The dying children of Niobe, later in Rome (also given to Praxiteles)
27. 'Janus' taken by Augustus from Alexandria to Rome (ditto)
28. Eros/Alkibiades with a thunderbolt, later in Rome (ditto)
29. Artemis, supposedly in an Athenian private collection ca. A.D. 150
The Mausoleum apart (24), none of these is exactly datable, and the
floruit of Pliny (N.H.
35.49-52) is clearly wrong. What other information we have tends to cluster
in the 340s and 330s. The old temple at Tegea (25) was burnt in 395, but it now
seems that Skopas's replacement postdates the Mausoleum (Norman 1986), with which
it shares the same foot-module. A relief with Ada, Idrieus, and Zeus Stratios
found at the site and dated to 345 was presumably dedicated by a worker he brought
back with him from Halikarnassos. The Temenos at Samothrace, probably the location
of (2) and provided with coffer reliefs in the style of the Tegea heads (25) was
built in the 330s. (7) and (11), on the other hand, must predate the destruction
of Thebes in 335. Finally, (23) was also begun around 340, to replace the temple
burnt in 356.
Skopas' career is thus only documented from ca. 360 to ca. 335, though
most studies assume that it began in the 370s, and make him an exact contemporary
of Praxiteles. In fact, Praxiteles apparently collaborated on (18) and was a rival
candidate for (26)-(28); elsewhere, the two are often paired by Greek and Roman
writers, Pliny included:
"Scopas rivals these [Praxiteles and his sons] in merit. He made the Venus
and Pothos which are worshipped with the most solemn ritual in Samothrace, also
the Palatine Apollo, the seated and much-praised Vesta in the Gardens of Servilius,
two turning-posts beside her (duplicated in Asinius [Pollio's] collection, where
his Basket-bearer is also to be found). But most highly esteemed are those works
in the shrine of Cn. Domitius in the Circus Flaminius: Neptune himself, Thetis,
Achilles, Nereids seated on dolphins, sea-dragons, or sea-horses, Tritons, the
chorus of Phorcys, swordfish and many other sea-creatures, all carved by the same
hand, a magnificent achievement, even if it had taken his whole life. As it is,
apart from the works just mentioned and those unknown to us, there is furthermore
the colossal seated Mars by the same artist in the temple of Brutus Callaecus,
also in the Circus, and especially a nude Venus, that surpasses the one by Praxiteles
and would have brought fame to anywhere else but Rome. (Pliny N.H. 36.25-6)
Given the limitations of ancient connoisseurship (Dionysios
of Halikarnassos, Demosthenes 50), some caution is necessary, but such a consistent
pattern of association may shed unexpected light on Skopas' style, at least in
those genres where their work overlapped.
Of the 25 secure works, fragments of only (25) and perhaps (9) and
(22) can be recognized in the original, thanks to unusually detailed accounts
in the literature:
" [The old temple at Tegea] was completely destroyed by a sudden fire when
Diophantos was archon at Athens, in the 2nd year of the 96th Olympiad, when Eupolemos
of Elis won the foot-race [395]. The present temple is far superior to all other
temples in the Peloponnese on many grounds, but particularly as regards its embellishment
and size. The first colonnade is Doric, and the one after that is Corinthian;
also [in]side the temple stand Ionic columns. I learnt that its architect was
Skopas of Paros, who made the images in many places in ancient Greece, and some
besides in Ionia and Caria.
Concerning the pedimental sculptures, on the front is the Hunt of the Kalydonian
Boar. The boar stands right in the center, and on one side are Atalante, Meleager,
Theseus, Telamon and Peleus, Polydeukes, and Iolaos -- Herakles' companion in
most of his Labors -- and the sons of Thestios and brothers of Althaia, Prothoos
and Kometes. On the other side of the boar comes [. . . lacuna? . . .], Epochos
supporting Ankaios who is now wounded and has dropped his axe, then Kastor, Amphiaraos
son of Oikles, then Hippothous son of Kerkyon, son of Agamedes, son of Stymphalos.
The last figure is Peirithous. On the rear pediment is the battle between Telephos
and Achilles on the plain of Kaikos." (Pausanias 8.45)
"The ancient image of Alea Athena was carried off by the Roman emperor Augustus,
together with the tusks of the Kalydonian boar, after he defeated Antony and his
allies , among whom were all the Arcadians except the Mantineans . . . . It is
in the Forum of Augustus, right in the entrance, . . . made throughout of ivory,
the work of Endoios." (Pausanias 8.46)
"The present image at Tegea was brought from the deme of Manthyrenses, and
was surnamed by them "Hippia" . . . On one side of it stands Asklepios, on the
other Hygieia, works of Skopas of Paros in Pentelic marble. Of the votives in
the temple the following are the most notable..." (Pausanias 8.47)
On the Tegea sculptures: head of Telephos (Tegea Museum 60), head
of a warrior from the west pediment (Athens, NM 180), head supposedly from Tegea
(Malibu 79.AA.1); the Getty head (Stewart 1982b; Hafner 1984) is a fake. The Grimani
Triton in Berlin is a likely survivor from (22), whose base is often thought to
be the so-called 'Ahenobarbus Ara' (marriage of Poseidon and Amphitrite (Munich
239), census, with Mars looking on (Louvre MA 975; Stewart 1990, figs. 843-46),
though the arguments deployed in support are both tortuous and ultimately unconvincing.
P.W. Lehmann 1973 and P.W. Lehmann1982 adds the Samothracian coffer reliefs, together
with the architecture of the propylon to the Temenos itself.
As to copies, replicas of (2) or (18), (4), (19), and (21) have been
identified with varying degrees of certainty, and the Lansdowne-type Herakles
(Malibu 70.AA.109) and Meleager (Vatican 490) added to the list. Most secure among
these is the Maenad (21), thanks once again to an extended description:
"Skopas, as if moved by some inspiration, imparted to the making of his statue
the divine frenzy that possessed him. Why should I not describe to you from the
beginning the inspiration of this work of art?
The statue of a Maenad, wrought from Parian marble, has been transformed into a real Maenad. For the stone, while retaining its own nature, yet seemed to depart from the law which governs stone; what one saw was really an image, but art carried imitation over into actual reality. You would have seen that, hard as it was, it became soft to resemble the feminine, though its vigor corrected the femininity, and that, though it lacked the power to move, it knew how to dance in Bacchic frenzy, responding to the god as he entered within.
When we saw her face we stood speechless, so clear upon it was the evidence of sense perception, though perception was not present; so clear was the intimation of Bacchic divine possession stirring Bacchic frenzy, though no such possession aroused it; and as many signs of passion that a soul goaded by divine madness displays, these blazed out from it, fashioned by art in fashion indescribable. The hair fell free to be tossed by the wind, and was divided to show the glory of each strand; this most of all transcended reason, since, stone though the material was, it obeyed the lightness of hair and yielded to imitation of its tresses, and though void of life's vitality it was vital withal.
Indeed you might say that art has harnessed the impulses of growth, so unbelievable
is what you see, so visible is what you do not believe. It actually even showed
hands in motion -- for it was not waving the Bacchic thyrsos, but carried a victim
as if crying "Euoi"! -- sign of a more poignant madness. And the figure of the
kid was livid in color, and the stone took on the appearance of dead flesh; and
though the material was one and the same, it severally imitated life and death
. . (Kallistratos, Descriptions 2.1-4)
Finally, as well as (19), (1) and perhaps (5) are pictured on coins.
. .
Yet it is here if anywhere that the heroic manner of the extant marbles would
be most muted and his rivalry with Praxiteles would be most intense. Together,
Pliny
N.H. 36.25-6 and the copies of the Pothos might confirm this if only we could
be sure that his work in this most Praxitelean of subjects was typical. His major
concerns -- and with them, his relationship to the great Athenian -- still remain
tantalizingly beyond our grasp.
This extract is from: Andrew Stewart, One Hundred Greek Sculptors: Their Careers and Extant Works. Cited July 2003 from Perseus Project URL below, which contains extracts from the ancient literature, bibliography & interesting hyperlinks.
Scopas (Skopas). A distinguished sculptor, a native of Paros, who appears to have belonged to a family of artists in that island. He flourished from B.C. 395 to 350. He was probably somewhat older than Praxiteles, with whom he stands at the head of that second period of perfected art which is called the Later Attic School (in contradistinction to the Earlier Attic School of Phidias), and which arose at Athens after the Peloponnesian War. Scopas was an architect and a statuary as well as a sculptor. He was the architect of the Temple of Athene Alea at Tegea, in Arcadia, which was commenced soon after B.C. 394. He was one of the artists employed in executing the bas-reliefs that decorated the frieze of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in Caria. A portion of these bas-reliefs are now deposited in the British Museum. Among the single statues and groups of Scopas, the best known in modern times is his group of figures representing the destruction of the sons and daughters of Niobe. In Pliny's time the statues stood in the Temple of Apollo Sosianus. The remaining statues of this group, or copies of them, are all in the Florence Gallery, with the exception of the so-called Ilioneus at Munich, which some suppose to have belonged to the group. There is a head of Niobe in the collection of Lord Yarborough, which has some claim to be considered as the original. But the most esteemed of all the works of Scopas, in antiquity, was his group which stood in the shrine of Cn. Domitius in the Flaminian Circus, representing Achilles conducted to the island of Leuce by the divinities of the sea. It consisted of figures of Poseidon, Thetis, and Achilles, surrounded by Nereids, and attended by Tritons, and by an assemblage of sea monsters.
This text is from: Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. Cited Oct 2002 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
No absolute dates are available for Agorakritos, but his career evidently
coincided roughly with Alkamenes'. Furthermore, only three works of his are recorded
in the sources, as follows:
1. Nemesis at Rhamnous in Attica, of Parian marble
2. Mother of the Gods, in the Metroon at Athens, of marble
3. Athena Itonia and Zeus/Hades at Koroneia in Boiotia, of bronze
Of these, the first two were regularly attributed to Pheidias. Pliny
attempts to explain why:
"Another of [Phidias'] pupils was Agoracritus of Paros, who pleased him also
because of his youth and beauty, so that Phidias is said to have allowed him to
put his name to several of his, the master's, own works. In any case, the two
pupils [Alcamenes and Agoracritus] competed with each other in making a Venus,
and Alcamenes won the contest not through superior skill but through the votes
of the citizenry, who favored one of their own against a foreigner. So Agoracritus
is said to have sold his statue on condition that it should not remain in Athens,
and that it should be named "Nemesis". It was set up at Rhamnus, a deme of Attica,
and Marcus Varro preferred it above all other statues"(Pliny, N.H.
36.16-17).
This passage is richer and more revealing of the strengths and weaknesses
of Greek and Roman connoisseurship than first appears, though only with Despinis's
recent rediscovery of the statue's fragments (Despinis1971) has its
full significance become clear. To help demonstrate this, two second-century A.D.
accounts of the piece (much renowned in antiquity) must be quoted first:
"About 60 stades from Marathon as you go along the coast-road
to Oropos is Rhamnous. The inhabitants live by the sea, but a little way inland
is the sanctuary of Nemesis, the most implacable of the gods towards hybristai
. It seems that the wrath of this goddess descended upon the barbarians who landed
at Marathon [490]; for thinking in their pride that no obstacle stood in the way
of their taking Athens, they brought a piece of Parian marble to make a trophy,
as if their task were already finished. It was this stone that Pheidias made into
a statue of Nemesis; on her head she wears a crown with deer and some small images
of Nike; in her left hand she holds an apple branch, and in her right an offering
dish, embellished with Ethiopians. [Pausanias now expresses puzzlement over their
presence, noting that they dwell "near Ocean" at the ends of the earth, and remarks
upon Ethiopian geography.] I must now resume. Neither this nor any of the old
statues of Nemesis have wings, not even the holiest xoana of the Smyrnaeans, but
later artists, maintaining that the goddess is wont to appear most of all after
a love-affair, gave wings to Nemesis as they do to Eros. Now I will describe the
scene on the base of the image, having made this preface for clarity's sake. The
Greeks say that Nemesis was the mother of Helen, but that Leda suckled and nursed
her; as to Helen's father, the Greeks like everyone else think it was Zeus, not
Tyndareus. Having heard this legend Pheidias represented Helen being led to Nemesis
by Leda, Tyndareus and his children, and a man called Hippeus standing by with
a horse. There are Agamemnon, Menelaos, and Pyrrhos the son of Achilles and first
husband of Helen's daughter Hermione. Orestes was omitted because of his crimes
against his mother, yet Hermione stood by him through it all and even bore him
a child. Next on the base is a man called Epochos and another youth; all I heard
about them was that they were the brothers of Oinoe, from whom the name of the
deme comes" (Pausanias 1.33).
"The Nemesis at Rhamnous. In Rhamnous there stands an image of Nemesis, ten
cubits [15 feet] in height, stone throughout, the work of Pheidias; she holds
an apple branch in her hand. Antigonos of Karystos claims that a little tablet
hangs from this, and is inscribed as follows: "Agorakritos of Paros made [me]."
Yet this is no wonder, for many others have inscribed someone else's name upon
their own work. It is likely that Pheidias conceded this to Agorakritos because
he was his lover, and was generally much excited over boys" (Zenobios
5.82).
Antigonos' careful epigraphical researches, accepted by Varro and
then Pliny must have been undertaken to counter the very tendency to give works
by Pheidias' pupils to the master himself that surfaces in Pausanias and a host
of other writers. The fact that even the normally acute Pausanias made this mistake
only reinforces one's suspicion about such attributions in genera.
The feeble rebuttal of Antigonos' conclusions may derive from the
antiquary Polemon of Ilion, who wrote a six-book polemic against him around 130
B.C. The story that Pheidias was Agorakritos' lover was either invented by Polemon
or (perhaps more likely) was already current, and he simply recognized its utility
as ammunition for his feud. Typically, Varro's synthesis of the two authors was
evidently accepted wholesale by the uncritical Pliny, who cites neither Antigonos
nor Polemon in his source-list for book 36 (N.H. 1.36) but
(in N.H. 36.16-17) repeats the gist of the rebuttal in his first sentence.
What then of the contest and the claim that the Nemesis was originally
an Aphrodite? To begin with the later point, Wilamowitz-Moellendorf 1881, was
the first to realize that this story was coined to explain the fact that Agorakritos'
statue differed from the winged type in use by the Hellenistic period (with an
even wilder account of the statue's origins); indeed, not only did the sculptor
employ the same generic schema used for Aphrodite, Kore, and other goddesses in
the fifth century, but Nemesis' apple branch was also an attribute of Aphrodite.
Antigonos, an iconographical specialist too thereby becomes this anecdote's probable
source as well.
As for the contest, though any such event would have involved maquettes
(paradeigmata), not finished statues, Paionios' inscription on his Nike (Nike
of Paionios; Olympia Museum) certifies that sculptors' competitions were held
in the fifth century. This leaves two possibilities: either that the contest is
basically historical, and only its association with the supposed "Venus"/Nemesis
was Antigonos' doing, or that he actually invented the entire affair, perhaps
working up a tradition of rivalry between the two star pupils, in order to explain
the statue's otherwise puzzling iconography. The first seems altogether more credible,
for while Antigonos was certainly apt to rationalize, outright fabrication seems
alien to his personality, at least as reconstructed by Wilamowitz and others.
Also accepting the story's basic historicity, Schlorb 1964, 14-15
further suggests that it reflects a supposed political (as well as stylistic)
polarization among Pheidias' followers, whereby Alkamenes aligned himself with
Athenian "conservatives" and Agorakritos with "radicals". Yet as argued concerning
Alkamenes this not only oversimplifies the politics but also finds no clear support
in the testimonia; indeed Pliny explicitly attributes Agorakritos' defeat to chauvinism,
not to politics.
As to the Nemesis herself (Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek 304a;
Stewart 1990, figs. 403-07), the base is not yet fully reconstructed (relief with
figures excerpted from the base of the Nemesis: Stockholm, Nationalmuseum Sk 150),
and new fragments are appearing occasionally in the excavations: fragment from
right side of the chiton overfold of the Nemesis (Athens, NM), corresponding area
of another reduced copy of the Nemesis (Athens, NM 3949). Preliminary reports
(B. Petrakos 1981, V. Petrakos 1986) suggest that at the least, Pausanias' account
is incomplete; see Shapiro-Lapatin 1992 for a thorough discussion and convincing
reinterpretation of the iconography. Despinis 1971 dates the statue to ca. 430,
the base ten years later, though the rather small discrepancies between them may
reflect differences in quality rather than chronology. The drapery style is certainly
novel, but Pausanias' acceptance of Pheidias as author should be a further caution
against labeling Agorakritos a "radical", rebelling against Pheidian and Alkamenean
"orthodoxy". . .
This extract is from: Andrew Stewart, One Hundred Greek Sculptors: Their Careers and Extant Works. Cited Mar 2003 from Perseus Project URL below, which contains extracts from the ancient literature, bibliography & interesting hyperlinks.
Agoracritus (Agorakritos), a famous statuary and sculptor, born in the island of Paros, who flourished from about Ol. 85 to Ol. 88 (Plin. H. N. xxxvi. 5. s. 4). He was the favourite pupil of Phidias (Paus. ix. 34.1), who is even said by Pliny to have inscribed some of his own works with the name of his disciple. Only four of his productions are mentioned, viz. a statue of Zeus and one of the Itonian Athene in the temple of that goddess at Athens; a statue, probably of Cybele, in the temple of the Great Goddess at Athens (Plin. l. c.); and the Rhamnusian Nemesis. Respecting this last work there has been a great deal of discussion. The account which Pliny gives of it is, that Agoracritus contended with Alcamenes (another distinguished disciple of Phidias) in making a statue of Venus ; and that the Athenians, through an undue partiality towards their countryman, awarded the victory to Alcamenes. Agoracritus, indignant at his defeat, made some slight alterations so as to change his Venus into a Nemesis, and sold it to the people of Rhammus, on condition that it should not be set up in Athens. Pausanias (i. 33.2), without saying a word about Agoracritus, says that the Rhamnusian Nemesis was the work of Phidias, and was made out of the block of Parian marble which the Persians under Datis and Artaphernes brought with then for the purpose of setting up a trophy. This account however has been rejected as involving a confusion of the ideas connected by the Greeks with the goddess Nemesis. The statue moreover was not of Parian, but of Pentelic marble. Strabo (ix.), Tzetzes (Chiliad. vii. 154), Suidas and Photius give other variations in speaking of this statue. It seems generally agreed that Pliny's account of the matter is right in the main; and there have been various dissertations on the way in which a statue of Venus could have been changed into one of Nemesis.
This text is from: A dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology, 1873 (ed. William Smith). Cited Oct 2005 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
The sculptors of the temple of Asklepios at Epidauros:
. . .Thrasymedes took up the contract for the ceiling, the cella door, and the gates between the columns, for 9,800 drs.; his guarantors were Pythokles, Theopheides, and Hagemon. . .
Thrasymedes son of Arignotos of Paros is slightly better documented, for he made the temple's chryselephantine cult statue (elsewhere inevitably attributed to Pheidias):
" The image of Asklepios is half the size of that of the Olympian Zeus at
Athens, and is made of ivory and gold. An inscription says that it was made by
Thrasymedes son of Arignotos of Paros. The god is seated on a throne and holds
a staff in one hand; his other hand is above the head of the serpent, and a dog
lies by his side. On the throne are wrought the exploits of Argive heroes: Bellerophon
against the Chimaira, and Perseus carrying off the head of Medusa" (Pausanias
2.27.2).
A new fragment of an inscription hitherto identified as the accounts for this
statue now shows that it actually refers to the incubation-building or enkoimaterion
of the sanctuary: Here Thrasymedes appears only as a hardware-supplier, but elsewhere
he emerges as an extremely versatile carpenter and metalworker, able to turn his
hand to a ceiling, a grille, a bronze statue or a chryselephantine one, as required.
Krause 1972 has identified a replica of this cult image in Copenhagen from representations
on Epidaurian coins.
This extract is from: Andrew Stewart, One Hundred Greek Sculptors: Their Careers and Extant Works. Cited Mar 2003 from Perseus Project URL below, which contains extracts from the ancient literature, bibliography & interesting hyperlinks.
Colotes A sculptor from the island of Paros, who assisted Phidias in executing the colossus of Zeus at Olympia, and left several beautiful works, principally in gold and ivory, in Elis, where he seems to have lived in banishment. He appears to belong to Ol. 84, &c. (B. C. 444), and is praised for his statues of philosophers. (Strab. viii.; Plin. H. N. xxxiv. 19, xxxv. 34; Paus. v. 20.1; Eustath. ad Il. ii. 603)
1839 - 1919
Was born in Pirgos of a family of sculptors. He studied in Rome and later opened his studio in Athens. He contributed much to the development of sculpture in our country
1862 - 1911
Was born in Isternia. He studied first in Athens, then in Paris; and became professor of the Fine Arts School in Athens in 1908.
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