would have been much more likely to have emanated from an Athenian synod of

compilers of ancient song, than an Achilleid or an Odysseid. Could France have

given birth to a Tasso, Tancred would have been the hero of the Jerusalem. If,

however, the Homeric ballads, as they are sometimes called, which related the

wrath of Achilles, with all its direful consequences, were so far superior to

the rest of the poetic cycle, as to admit no rivalry,—it is still

surprising, that throughout the whole poem the callida junctura should

never betray the workmanship of an Athenian hand; and that the national spirit

of a race, who have at a later period not inaptly been compared to our

self-admiring neighbours, the French, should submit with lofty self-denial to

the almost total exclusion of their own ancestors—or, at least, to the

questionable dignity of only having produced a leader tolerably skilled in the

military tactics of his age.”


To return to the Wolfian theory. While it is to be confessed, that Wolf’s

objections to the primitive integrity of the Iliad and Odyssey have never been

wholly got over, we cannot help discovering that they have failed to enlighten

us as to any substantial point, and that the difficulties with which the whole

subject is beset, are rather augmented than otherwise, if we admit his

hypothesis. Nor is Lachmann’s modification of his theory any better. He

divides the first twenty-two books of the Iliad into sixteen different songs,

and treats as ridiculous the belief that their amalgamation into one regular

poem belongs to a period earlier than the age of Peisistratus. This as Grote

observes, “ex-plains the gaps and contradictions in the narrative, but it

explains nothing else.” Moreover, we find no contradictions warranting

this belief, and the so-called sixteen poets concur in getting rid of the

following leading men in the first battle after the secession of Achilles: