rude and unskilfully executed; nor can we even assure ourselves whether

Archilochus, Simonides of Amorgus, Kallinus Tyrtaeus, Xanthus, and the other

early elegiac and lyric poets, committed their compositions to writing, or at

what time the practice of doing so became familiar. The first positive ground

which authorizes us to presume the existence of a manuscript of Homer, is in

the famous ordinance of Solon, with regard to the rhapsodies at the

Panathenaea: but for what length of time previously manuscripts had existed, we

are unable to say.


“Those who maintain the Homeric poems to have been written from the

beginning, rest their case, not upon positive proofs, nor yet upon the existing

habits of society with regard to poetry—for they admit generally that the

Iliad and Odyssey were not read, but recited and heard,—but upon the

supposed necessity that there must have been manuscripts to ensure the

preservation of the poems—the unassisted memory of reciters being neither

sufficient nor trustworthy. But here we only escape a smaller difficulty by

running into a greater; for the existence of trained bards, gifted with

extraordinary memory, is far less astonishing than that of long manuscripts, in

an age essentially non-reading and non-writing, and when even suitable

instruments and materials for the process are not obvious. Moreover, there is a

strong positive reason for believing that the bard was under no necessity of

refreshing his memory by consulting a manuscript; for if such had been the

fact, blindness would have been a disqualification for the profession, which we

know that it was not, as well from the example of Demodokus, in the Odyssey, as

from that of the blind bard of Chios, in the Hymn to the Delian Apollo, whom

Thucydides, as well as the general tenor of Grecian legend, identifies with

Homer himself. The author of that hymn, be he who he may, could never have