d for several
generations; and much easier must it have been for the Greeks
to preserve these books, which their imagination invested with a
quasi-sanctity, and which constituted the greater part of the literary
furniture of their minds. In Xenophon's time there were educated
gentlemen at Athens who could repeat both Iliad and Odyssey verbatim.
(Xenoph. Sympos., III. 5.) Besides this, we know that at Chios there was
a company of bards, known as Homerids, whose business it was to recite
these poems from memory; and from the edicts of Solon and the Sikyonian
Kleisthenes (Herod., V. 67), we may infer that the case was the same in
other parts of Greece. Passages from the Iliad used to be sung at the
Pythian festivals, to the accompaniment of the harp (Athenaeus, XIV.
638), and in at least two of the Ionic islands of the AEgaean there were
regular competitive exhibitions by trained young men, at which prizes
were given to the best reciter. The difficulty of preserving the poems,
under such circumstances, becomes very insignificant; and the Wolfian
argument quite vanishes when we reflect that it would have been no
easier to preserve a dozen or twenty short poems than two long ones.
Nay, the coherent, orderly arrangement of the Iliad and Odyssey would
make them even easier to remember than a group of short rhapsodies not
consecutively arranged.

When we come to interrogate the poems themselves, we find in them quite
convincing evidence that they were originally composed for the ear
alone, and without reference to manuscript assistance. They abound in
catchwords, and in verbal repetitions. The "Catalogue of Ships," as Mr.
Gladstone has acutely observed, is arranged in well-defined sections,
in such a way that the end of each section suggests the beginning of
the next one. It resembles the versus memoriales found in old-fashioned
grammars. But the most convincing proof of all is to be found in the
changes which Greek pronunciation went through between the ages of
Homer and Peisistratos. "At the time when these poems were composed, the
digamma (or w) was an effective consonant, and figured as such in the
structure of the verse; at the time when they were committed to writing,
it had ceased to be pronounced, and therefore never found a place in any
of the manuscripts,--insomuch that the Alexandrian critics, though they
knew of its existence in the much later poems of Alkaios and Sappho,
never recognized it in Homer. The hiatus, an