HOMER AND HIS INFLUENCE I. HOMERIC POETRY AND ITS T PRESERVATION HE history of Greek literature begins with a double mystery, the mystery of the creation and the mystery of the preservation of the Homeric poems. Homer is the sole literary representative of the heroic age, not a verse from earlier or from contemporary poets has survived. The names of these early poets have shared in the fate of their poetry, and there is little doubt that the songs of Musaeus, Linus, and Orpheus were never sung and that these names represent nothing more than fabulous poets. Wonderful as is the fact that the Iliad and the Odyssey, with a combined length of almost twenty-eight thousand verses, should have survived the dark centuries which lay between Homer and the period of Athenian supremacy, it is hardly more wonderful than the second fact that the Homeric poetry is the only poetry which survived essentially intact those other dark centuries which lay between Aristotle and the modern revival of learning. Such famous names as Archilochus, Sappho, Alcaeus, and Simonides are hardly more than names, since they are known merely by the happy accident of chance quotation or torn papyri, while many of the successful dramatic competitors in the great days of the Athenian theater are hardly as much as names. Even Sophocles, the favorite in that great era, although he wrote more than one hundred plays, survives with but seven; the rest are lost or in fragments. The Homer known to Plato, Aristotle, and the illustrious scholars of Alexandria is practically the same Homer which is known to us; a thing which is true of no other poet of early or of classical Greece. All of the Greek poets whose poetry has escaped oblivion owe that escape to isolated passages or to fortuitous references in late writers, or to few and incomplete manuscripts, all except Homer. The complete manuscripts of Homer are almost without number, so many are they that the Oxford Edition of Homer is based on nearly one-hundred-and-fifty manuscripts, most of which are good, so good that almost any two or three would suffice to establish the Homeric text.1 All these manuscripts are reinforced by constantly increasing masses of papyri and by a practically unlimited number of quotations in the works of Greek and Latin authors. Homer is sometimes referred to as the poet of other early epic poems as well as of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but he is never definitely thus mentioned by writers of the best period. Aristotle and the scholars of Alexandria always drew a distinction between the poetry of Homer and the other poems of the early epic cycle. Late writers frequently quote as from Homer verses and phrases which are not to be found in the Iliad and the Odyssey, hence has grown up the assumption that these verses belonged to Homeric poems which are now lost. Homer by his very eminence became an easy source for all kinds of poetic quotations, some of which are luckily to be found in other early poems of known authors: Macrobius, Saturnalia, V. 16.6 says that Homer stuffed his poetry with proverbs, then he quotes six ex |