our early ideas on
the subject; let us now see what are the discoveries to which more modern
investigations lay claim.

At the end of the seventeenth century, doubts had begun to awaken on the
subject, and we find Bentley remarking that "Homer wrote a sequel of songs
and rhapsodies, to be sung by himself, for small comings and good cheer,
at festivals and other days of merriment. These loose songs were not
collected together, in the form of an epic poem, till about Peisistratus'
time, about five hundred years after."(23)

Two French writers--Hedelin and Perrault--avowed a similar scepticism on the
subject; but it is in the "Scienza Nuova" of Battista Vico, that we first
meet with the germ of the theory, subsequently defended by Wolf with so
much learning and acuteness. Indeed, it is with the Wolfian theory that we
have chiefly to deal, and with the following bold hypothesis, which we
will detail in the words of Grote(24)--

"Half a century ago, the acute and valuable Prolegomena of F. A. Wolf,
turning to account the Venetian Scholia, which had then been recently
published, first opened philosophical discussion as to the history of the
Homeric text. A considerable part of that dissertation (though by no means
the whole) is employed in vindicating the position, previously announced
by Bentley, amongst others, that the separate constituent portions of the
Iliad and Odyssey had not been cemented together into any compact body and
unchangeable order, until the days of Peisistratus, in the sixth century
before Christ. As a step towards that conclusion, Wolf maintained that no
written copies of either poem could be shown to have existed during the
earlier times, to which their composition is referred; and that without
writing, neither the perfect symmetry of so complicated a work could have
been originally conceived by any poet, nor, if realized by him,
transmitted with assurance to posterity. The absence of easy and
convenient writing, such as must be indispensably supposed for long
manuscripts, among the early Greeks, was thus one of the points in Wolf's
case against the primitive integrity of the Iliad and Odyssey. By Nitzsch,
and other leading opponents of Wolf, the connection of the one with the
other seems to have been accepted as he originally put it; and it has been
considered incumbent on those who defended the ancient aggregate character
of the Iliad and Odyssey, to maintain that they were written poems from
the be