tos, or of Athens itself in the sixth century B. C., so
authoritative as to compel all Greeks to recognize the recension then
and there made of their revered poet? Besides which the celebrated
ordinance of Solon respecting the rhapsodes at the Panathenaia obliges
us to infer the existence of written manuscripts of Homer previous to
550 B. C. As Mr. Grote well observes, the interference of Peisistratos
"presupposes a certain foreknown and ancient aggregate, the main
lineaments of which were familiar to the Grecian public, although many
of the rhapsodes in their practice may have deviated from it both by
omission and interpolation. In correcting the Athenian recitations
conformably with such understood general type, Peisistratos might hope
both to procure respect for Athens and to constitute a fashion for the
rest of Greece. But this step of 'collecting the torn body of sacred
Homer' is something generically different from the composition of a new
Iliad out of pre-existing songs: the former is as easy, suitable, and
promising as the latter is violent and gratuitous." [151]

As for Wolf's objection, that the Iliad and Odyssey are too long to
have been preserved by memory, it may be met by a simple denial. It is a
strange objection indeed, coming from a man of Wolf's retentive memory.
I do not see how the acquisition of the two poems can be regarded as
such a very arduous task; and if literature were as scanty now as in
Greek antiquity, there are doubtless many scholars who would long since
have had them at their tongues' end. Sir G. C. Lewis, with but little
conscious effort, managed to carry in his head a very considerable
portion of Greek and Latin classic literature; and Niebuhr (who
once restored from recollection a book of accounts which had been
accidentally destroyed) was in the habit of referring to book and
chapter of an ancient author without consulting his notes. Nay, there
is Professor Sophocles, of Harvard University, who, if you suddenly stop
and interrogate him in the street, will tell you just how many times any
given Greek word occurs in Thukydides, or in AEschylos, or in Plato, and
will obligingly rehearse for you the context. If all extant copies of
the Homeric poems were to be gathered together and burnt up to-day,
like Don Quixote's library, or like those Arabic manuscripts of which
Cardinal Ximenes made a bonfire in the streets of Granada, the poems
could very likely be reproduced and orally transmitte