Various - Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, August 1847

Very easily conceived, but not rendered a jot more easy by aid of this legend of Hercules. The story of him of the Twelve Labours, who had been cheated of the divine mares for which he had bargained, and had mere earthly mares given to him, and who therefore, in revenge, had sacked the town of Troy, is, in the first place, so interpreted as to show "that the opulence of that city had in former times tempted the cupidity of the Greeks;" and then this interpretation is made a ground for supposing that a similar motive had led to the expedition of Agamemnon and his chiefs. As well, surely, have said at once of the second war, what is said of the first, that it was an ordinary case of plunder and violence. It is hard to understand how the earlier legend can assist in giving an historical character to the later.

But the elder legend may assist in explaining how a siege of Troy became the great subject of the Homeric poems; and thus, whatever there was of actual siege may be carried altogether into that remote anterior epoch which is shadowed forth, if you will, under the exploits of Hercules. For with that charming candour by which he often contrives to neutralise the errors of his conjectural method of writing history, Dr Thirlwall himself adds:—"This expedition of Hercules may indeed suggest a doubt whether it was not an earlier and simpler form of the same tradition, which grew at length into the argument of the Iliad ; for there is a striking resemblance between the two wars, not only in the events, but in the principal actors. As the prominent figures in the second siege are Agamemnon and Achilles, who represent the royal house of Mycenæ, and that of the Æacids; so in the first the Argive Hercules is accompanied by the Æacid Telamon; and even the quarrel and reconciliation of the allied chiefs are features common to both traditions." 6 6 Thirlwall , vol. i. p. 154. On the subject of the Trojan war we quote the following passage from the same historian, as an instance of the extremely slender thread which a conjectural writer will think it worth his while to weave in amongst his arguments for the support of some dubious fact. "One inevitable result," he says, "of such an event as the Trojan war, must have been to diffuse amongst the Greeks a more general knowledge of the isles and coasts of the Ægean, and to leave a lively recollection of the beauty and fertility of the region in which their battles had been fought. This would direct the attention of future emigrants in search of new homes toward the same quarter; and the fact that the tide of migration really set in this direction first, when the state of Greece became unsettled, may not unreasonably be thought to confirm the reality of the Trojan war ." (P. 250.) Little need, one would think, of a Trojan war to direct the tide of emigration to the opposite coasts of Asia Minor.

The disquisition on the legend of Troy naturally leads the historian, and will naturally suggest to our own readers, the mooted question of the authorship of the Homeric poems. Some of them be happy to learn that the opinion of Mr Grote is not of so sceptical a nature as they may have been prepared to expect. The Wolfian hypothesis he by no means adopts—namely, that before the time of Pisistratus, there was no such thing in existence as an extended and entire epic, but that the two great epics we now possess were then constructed by stringing together a number of detached poems, the separate chants of the old Greek bards or rhapsodists. Mr Grote sees in the Odyssey all the marks of unity of design, and of what he rather quaintly calls "single-headed authorship." With regard to the Iliad , he admits that there is not the same stringent evidence of an original plan according to which the whole poem has been written, and he detects here the signs of interpolation and addition. According to his view, there is in the poem, as we possess it, an original whole, which he calls the Achilleis, to which additions have been made from other sources, converting the Achilleis into an Iliad. But our readers would prefer to have the words themselves of the author; and the following passage will present them with a very intelligent view of this famous controversy:—

"That the Iliad is not so essentially one piece as the Odyssey , every man agrees. It includes a much greater multiplicity of events, and what is yet more important, a greater multiplicity of prominent personages: the very indefinite title which it bears, as contrasted with the speciality of the name Odyssey , marks the difference at once. The parts stand out more conspicuously from the whole, and admit more readily of being felt and appreciated in detached recitation. We may also add, that it is of more unequal execution than the Odyssey- -often rising to a far higher pitch of grandeur, but also occasionally tamer: the story does not move on continually; incidents occur without plausible motive, nor can we shut our eyes to evidences of incoherence and contradiction.

"To a certain extent, the Iliad is open to all these remarks, though Wolf and W. Müller, and above all, Lachmann, exaggerate the case in degree. And from hence has been deduced the hypothesis which treats the part in their original state as separate integers, independent of, and unconnected with each other, and forced into unity only by the afterthought of a subsequent age; or sometimes not even themselves as integers, but as aggregates grouped together out of fragments still smaller—short epics formed by the coalescence of still shorter songs. Now there is some plausibility in these reasonings, so long as the discrepancies are looked upon as the whole of the case. But in point of fact they are not the whole of the case; for it is not less true that there are large portions of the Iliad , which present positive and undeniable evidences of coherence , as antecedent and consequent, though we are occasionally perplexed by inconsistencies of detail. To deal with these latter, is a portion of the duties of a critic; but he is not to treat the Iliad as if inconsistency prevailed every where throughout its parts; for coherence of parts—symmetrical antecedence and consequence—is discernible throughout the larger half of the poem.

"Now the Wolfian theory explains the gaps and contradictions throughout the narrative, but it explains nothing else. If (as Lachmann thinks) the Iliad originally consisted of sixteen songs or little substantive epics, not only composed by different authors, but by each without any view to conjunction with the rest—we have then no right to expect any intrinsic continuity between them; and all that continuity which we now find must be of extraneous origin. Where are we to look for the origin? Lachmann follows Wolf in ascribing the whole constructive process to Peisistratus and his associates, at the period when the creative epical faculty is admitted to have died out. But upon this supposition, Peisistratus (or his associate) must have done much more than omit, transpose, and interpolate, here and there; he must have gone far to re-write the whole poem. A great poet might have re-cast pre-existing separate songs into one comprehensive whole, but no mere arrangers or compilers would be competent to do so; and we are thus left without any means of accounting for that degree of continuity and consistency which runs through so large a portion of the Iliad , though not through the whole. The idea that the 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.

"Admitting, then, premeditated adaptation of parts to a certain extent as essential to the Iliad , we may yet inquire whether it was produced all at once or gradually enlarged—whether by one author or by several; and, if the parts be of different age, which is the primitive kernel, and which are the additions?