Homer and His Age

The same explanation is offered for the long story of the Birth of {blank space} which Agamemnon tells in his speech of apology and reconciliation. {Footnote:Ibid., XIX. 136.} There is an invocation to Heracles (Hymns, XV.), and the author may have added this speech to his rhapsody of the Reconciliation, recited at a feast of Heracles. Perhaps the remark of Mr. Leaf offers the real explanation of the presence of this long story in the speech of Agamemnon: "Many speakers with a bad case take refuge in telling stories." Agamemnon shows, says Mr. Leaf, "the peevish nervousness of a man who feels that he has been in the wrong," and who follows a frank speaker like Achilles, only eager for Agamemnon to give the word to form and charge. So Agamemnon takes refuge in a long story, throwing the blame of his conduct on Destiny.

We do not need, then, the theory of a rhapsodist's interpolation, but it is quite plausible in itself.

Local heroes, as well as gods, had their feasts in post-Homeric times, and a reciter at a feast of AEneas, or of his mother, Aphrodite, may have foisted in the very futile discourse of Achilles and AEneas, {Footnote:Ibid., XX. 213-250.} with its reference to Erichthonius, an Athenian hero.

In other cases the rhapsodist rounded off his selected passage by a few lines, as in Iliad, XIII. 656-659, where a hero is brought to follow his son's dead body to the grave, though the father had been killed in V. 576. "It is really such a slip as is often made by authors who write," says Mr. Leaf; and, in Esmond, Thackeray makes similar errors. The passage in XVI. 69-80, about which so much is said, as if it contradicted Book IX. (The Embassy to Achilles), is also, Mr. Jevons thinks, to be explained as "inserted by a rhapsodist wishing to make his extract complete in itself." Another example – the confusion in the beginning of Book II. – we have already discussed (see Chapter IV.), and do not think that any explanation is needed, when we understand that Agamemnon, once wide-awake, had no confidence in his dream. However, Mr. Jevons thinks that rhapsodists, anxious to recite straight on from the dream to the battle, added II. 35-41, "the only lines which represent Agamemnon as believing confidently in his dream." We have argued that he only believed till he awoke, and then, as always, wavered.

Thus, in our way of looking at these things, interpolations by rhapsodists are not often needed as explanations of difficulties. Still, granted that the rhapsodists, like the jongleurs, had texts, and that these were studied by the makers of the Vulgate, interpolations and errors might creep in by this way. As to changes in language, "a poetical dialect… is liable to be gradually modified by the influence of the ever-changing colloquial speech. And, in the early times, when writing was little used, this influence would be especially operative." {Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 461.}

To conclude, the hypothesis of a school of mnemonic teaching of the Iliad would account for the preservation of so long a poem in an age destitute of writing, when memory would be well cultivated. There may have been such schools. We only lack evidence for their existence. But against the hypothesis of the existence of early texts, there is nothing except the feeling of some critics that it is not likely. "They are dangerous guides, the feelings."

In any case the opinion that the Iliad was a whole, centuries before Pisistratus, is the hypothesis which is by far the least fertile in difficulties, and, consequently, in inconsistent solutions of the problems which the theory of expansion first raises, and then, like an unskilled magician, fails to lay.