not
occurred till some more modern period. As to this the answer is at once:
Why should they not have been written down? What answer could be given?
Only this: For the same reason that other nations did not commit to
writing their elder institutions. And why did they not? Was it to save
trouble? So far from that, this one privation imposed infinite trouble
that would have been evaded by written copies. For because they did not
write down, therefore, as the sole mode of providing for accurate
remembrance, they were obliged to compose in a very elaborate metre; in
which the mere _pattern_ as it were of the verse, so intricate and so
closely interlocked, always performed thus two services: first, it
assisted the memory in mastering the tenor; but, secondly, it checked
and counterpleaded to the lapses of memory or to the artifices of fraud.
This explanation is well illustrated in the 'Iliad'--a poem elder by a
century, it is rightly argued, than the 'Odyssey,' ergo the eldest of
Pagan literature. Now, when the 'Iliad' had once come down safe to
Pisistratus 555 years B.C., imagine this great man holding out his hands
over the gulf of time to Homer, 1,000 years before, who is chucking or
shying his poems across the gulf. Once landed in those conservative
hands, never trouble yourself more about the safety of the 'Iliad.'
After that it was as safe as the eyes in any Athenian's head. But before
that time there _was_ a great danger; and this danger was at all
surmounted (scholars differ greatly and have sometimes cudgelled one
another with real unfigurative cudgels as to the degree in which it
_did_ surmount the danger) only by the metre and a regular orchestra in
every great city dedicated to this peculiar service of chanting the
'Iliad'; insomuch that a special costume was assigned to the chanters of
the 'Iliad,' viz., scarlet or crimson, and also another special costume
to the chanters of the 'Odyssey,' viz., violet-coloured. Now, this
division of orchestras had one great evil and one great benefit. The
benefit was, that if locally one orchestra went wrong (as it might do
upon local temptations) yet surely all the orchestras would not go
wrong: ninety-nine out of every hundred would check and expose the
fraudulent hundredth. _There_ was the good. But the evil was concurrent.
For by this dispersion of orchestras, and this multiplication, not only
were the ordinary chances of error according to the doctrine of chances
multiplied