s very real; and I should
like to try to make it clear by an example that the most significant
steps of classical philology never lead away from the ideal antiquity,
but to it; and that, just when people are speaking unwarrantably of the
overthrow of sacred shrines, new and more worthy altars are being
erected. Let us then examine the so-called _Homeric question_ from this
standpoint, a question the most important problem of which Schiller
called a scholastic barbarism.

The important problem referred to is _the question of the personality of
Homer_.

We now meet everywhere with the firm opinion that the question of
Homer's personality is no longer timely, and that it is quite a
different thing from the real "Homeric question." It may be added that,
for a given period--such as our present philological period, for
example--the centre of discussion may be removed from the problem of the
poet's personality; for even now a painstaking experiment is being made
to reconstruct the Homeric poems without the aid of personality,
treating them as the work of several different persons. But if the
centre of a scientific question is rightly seen to be where the swelling
tide of new views has risen up, i.e. where individual scientific
investigation comes into contact with the whole life of science and
culture--if any one, in other words, indicates a historico-cultural
valuation as the central point of the question, he must also, in the
province of Homeric criticism, take his stand upon the question of
personality as being the really fruitful oasis in the desert of the
whole argument. For in Homer the modern world, I will not say has
learnt, but has examined, a great historical point of view; and, even
without now putting forward my own opinion as to whether this
examination has been or can be happily carried out, it was at all
events the first example of the application of that productive point of
view. By it scholars learnt to recognise condensed beliefs in the
apparently firm, immobile figures of the life of ancient peoples; by it
they for the first time perceived the wonderful capability of the soul
of a people to represent the conditions of its morals and beliefs in the
form of a personality. When historical criticism has confidently seized
upon this method of evaporating apparently concrete personalities, it is
permissible to point to the first experiment as an important event in
the history of sciences, without considering whe