appears as the enunciator of opinions as different in their tone as those of

the writers who have handed them down. When we have read Plato or

Xenophon, we think we know something of Socrates; when we have fairly read and

examined both, we feel convinced that we are something worse than ignorant.


It has been an easy, and a popular expedient of late years, to deny the

personal or real existence of men and things whose life and condition were too

much for our belief. This system—which has often comforted the religious

sceptic, and substituted the consolations of Strauss for those of the New

Testament—has been of incalculable value to the historical theorists of

the last and present centuries. To question the existence of Alexander the

Great, would be a more excusable act, than to believe in that of Romulus. To

deny a fact related in Herodotus, because it is inconsistent with a theory

developed from an Assyrian inscription which no two scholars read in the same

way, is more pardonable, than to believe in the good-natured old king whom the

elegant pen of Florian has idealized—Numa Pompilius.


Scepticism has attained its culminating point with respect to Homer, and the

state of our Homeric knowledge may be described as a free permission to believe

any theory, provided we throw overboard all written tradition, concerning the

author or authors of the Iliad and Odyssey. What few authorities exist on the

subject, are summarily dismissed, although the arguments appear to run in a

circle. “This cannot be true, because it is not true; and that is not

true, because it cannot be true.” Such seems to be the style, in which

testimony upon testimony, statement upon statement, is consigned to denial and

oblivion.


It is, however, unfortunate that the professed biographies of Homer are partly

forgeries, partly freaks of ingenuity and imagination, in which truth is the

requisite most wanting. Before taking a brief review of the Homeric theory in