Long was the time which elapsed before any one dreamt of questioning the unity

of the authorship of the Homeric poems. The grave and cautious Thucydides

quoted without hesitation the Hymn to Apollo, the authenticity of which has

been already disclaimed by modern critics. Longinus, in an oft-quoted passage,

merely expressed an opinion touching the comparative inferiority of the Odyssey

to the Iliad; and, among a mass of ancient authors, whose very names it would

be tedious to detail, no suspicion of the personal non-existence of Homer ever

arose. So far, the voice of antiquity seems to be in favour of 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.”


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:—


“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