Elphenor, chief of the Euboeans; Tlepolemus, of the Rhodians; Pandarus, of the

Lycians; Odins, of the Halizonians: Pirous and Acamas, of the Thracians. None

of these heroes again make their appearance, and we can but agree with Colonel

Mure, that “it seems strange that any number of independent poets should

have so harmoniously dispensed with the services of all six in the

sequel.” The discrepancy, by which Pylaemenes, who is represented as dead

in the fifth book, weeps at his son’s funeral in the thirteenth, can only

be regarded as the result of an interpolation.


Grote, although not very distinct in stating his own opinions on the subject,

has done much to clearly show the incongruity of the Wolfian theory, and of

Lachmann’s modifications, with the character of Peisistratus. But he has

also shown, and we think with equal success, that the two questions relative to

the primitive unity of these poems, or, supposing that impossible, the unison

of these parts by Peisistratus, and not before his time, are essentially

distinct. In short, “a man may believe the Iliad to have been put

together out of pre-existing songs, without recognising the age of Peisistratus

as the period of its first compilation.” The friends or literary

employés of Peisistratus must have found an Iliad that was already

ancient, and the silence of the Alexandrine critics respecting the Peisistratic

“recension,” goes far to prove, that, among the numerous

manuscripts they examined, this was either wanting, or thought unworthy of

attention.


“Moreover,” he continues, “the whole tenor of the poems

themselves confirms what is here remarked. There is nothing, either in the

Iliad or Odyssey, which savours of modernism, applying that term to the age of

Peisistratus—nothing which brings to our view the alterations brought

about by two centuries, in the Greek language, the coined money, the habits of