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 beginning.


“To me it appears, that the architectonic functions ascribed by Wolf to

Peisistratus and his associates, in reference to the Homeric poems, are nowise

admissible. But much would undoubtedly be gained towards that view of the

question, if it could be shown, that, in order to controvert it, we were driven

to the necessity of admitting long written poems, in the ninth century before

the Christian aera. Few things, in my opinion, can be more improbable; and Mr.

Payne Knight, opposed as he is to the Wolfian hypothesis, admits this no less

than Wolf himself. The traces of writing in Greece, even in the seventh century

before the Christian aera, are exceedingly trifling. We have no remaining

inscription earlier than the fortieth Olympiad, and the early inscriptions are