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and although the question how the Iliad was composed, is far too controverted to support further results of weight, it seems to be admitted by those who plead most strongly for the integrity of the poem, that various passages are of later origin, which deal in mythes afterwards popular.

We cannot here enter into the indecent and sometimes positively disgusting details which meddling philosophy and prurient imagination appended to the Homeric stories; but passing to the heroic legends, we shall concisely allude, following in the steps of Mr. Grote, to some of the remarkable enlargements which the Homeric tales underwent to please the popular love of the horrible, or, in other cases undoubtedly, to effect an artificial reconciliation of their contradictions; which was an incipient historical striving. Likewise, after the Greeks had begun to derive somewhat of religion and philosophy, (to say nothing of art,) from Egypt, they became easily credulous that their ancestors had done the same; and many heroes, who in Homer appear as indigenous, were afterwards regarded as leaders of colonies into Greece from Asia or Egypt. The foremost of these is Pelops, who, in the Iliad, may seem to be represented as a son of Mercury, from whom at least he is said to have received his sceptre. The statement may admit of being analyzed into another or earlier form, viz., that he was indebted to good luck for his kingdom. In Homer, no connexion of Pelops with Phrygia can be traced, nor with the town of Pisa in Peloponnesus; nor is the southern peninsula of Greece named Peloponnesus in either poem. In a suspected passage of the eleventh book of the Odyssey, the torments of Tantalus are detailed, but nothing is said of his being a Phrygian, or father to Pelops. Homer betrays no consciousness of any feud between Atreus and Thyestes, sons of Pelos, and is ignorant of the sacrifice of Iphigenia. In the Odyssey, Ægisthus indeed murders Aga. memnon, and Orestes 'gains the purest glory' by avenging his father's death on the murderer; but Orestes does not slay his mother, and is not persecuted by his mother's furies. Tyndareus is named in two passages of the Odyssey only, which make him father of the Dioscuri and of Clytemnestra. The Iliad makes Helen sister of the Dioscuri; but from neither poem separately can it be made out that Helen is sister to Clytemnestra; and this has every appearance of having been invented when the wickedness of the two women' had become a familiar sentiment. Thus, nearly the whole of the tissue of horrors in the house of the Pelopida, which the overruling demon (aλάorwg) accordingly to later writers inflicted, is a growth posterior to Homer, who knows nothing but the crime and punishment of Ægisthus. Nearly the same is true con

cerning the house of Cadmus and Labdacus. We cannot here lay equal stress on the silence of the Homeric poems, since the Theban family did not lie immediately across their way. Yet it is observable, that while the name Cadmeians is familiar, and Cadmus is referred to as a well-known character, no one of all the miraculous and dreadful tales connected with this house is alluded to. Cadmus is not named as a Phoenician, nor as the founder of Thebes; but Amphion and Zethus are stated in the Odyssey to have been the first builders of its walls,' though without miracle. As for Cadmus's daughters, one of them, Ino, is said to have been made a sea-goddess, and another, Semele, to have borne Bacchus to Jupiter; but without a hint of her tragical combustion before the divine child saw the light. The miserable end of Pantheus is strange to Homer; but the horrid fortunes of Edipus appear in an advanced form in a book of the Odyssey, which abounds with interpolations. Even there, he continues to reign over the Cadmeans after his mother's death, and does not put out his own eyes; but in the Iliad, (book 23), a single line informs us that he fell in battle, and that games were celebrated around his tomb. We might pursue the comparison of the earlier and later heroic stories in other houses also. Suffice it to say, that by the time of the Tragedians, the fortunes of the old heroic families may seem to have been invented anew. We have scarcely alluded to one cause of new fictions, viz., a desire to reconcile discrepancies; and, among others, chronological oppositions, out of which have risen many interpolations of names, as that of Pleisthenes in the family of Pelops.

Before passing to the application made by Mr. Grote, of the result of these investigations, viz.,—the total untrustworthiness of poetical legends unchecked by contemporaneous witnesses,-we must briefly note, that he holds nothing peculiar or new, so as either to be lauded for originality of genius, or suspected of loving eccentricity. His scepticism concerning the historical truth of the heroic tales probably does not exceed (if anything can exceed) that of Niebuhr and his immediate school; and certainly in the particular question of the Trojan war and its connected romances, the learned and cautious Kenrick appears to go fully as far as Grote. As for Bishop Thirlwall, he so far differs, as in many cases to betray a desire to elicit, by delicate criticism, some fragment of history out of legends manifestly as incredible in details as they are totally unvouched for. Mr. Grote believes this to be as hopeless a problem, as to extract history out of Shakspere's tragedy of King Lear. When poems are set before us, which bring forward personages and events of a distant time,-distant to the poet himself, and concerning which

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he pretends to no other source of information than the inspiration of the muse,'- while we have absolutely no witness but the poet; in such circumstances, all historical criticism is (in Mr. Grote's belief) utterly thrown away. Some poems are founded on fact, like Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered;' others have much plausibility of truth, without being true, as Scott's Marmion.' If these poems floated down the stream of time to remote posterity, and all prose literature of the past, and of three centuries to come, were first utterly wrecked; future critics would be quite unable to judge whether the Crusades ever had historical existence, or to divine that the battle of Flodden Field was true, but all the other events of the poem of Marmion imaginary, with the hero himself. This is the grand principle, to establish and to enforce which, Mr. Grote labours through a large part of these two volumes.

In nations where poetry and prose coexist, and where contemporary history-writing is practised, the fictitiousness of poetry is so notorious, that no one would dream of quoting a poet's authority in proof of historical fact. If then we might appeal to modern analogy in setting up our standard of evidence, the argument would be finished and the battle won by Mr. Grote, in half a page. But in the present instance we have a special phenomenon,-viz., that the Greeks themselves, not excluding Thucydides and Aristotle, believed in a substantial kernel of truth at the bottom of the poetical and popular legends: a consequence has been, that modern European scholars have inherited the same belief, and it is now hard to shake ourselves entirely free from it. Habit and old associations influence nearly all of us.-Nor is this all: but it may seem that a twofold defence is possible for the adherent to the old faith. First, it is said, that in days in which no writing existed, the minstrel united the double functions of poet and historian; consequently it is fair to assume, that a Homer is often historically veracious, while we expect nothing of the kind from a Byron. Next, it is still more strongly alleged, that if the Trojan war was fundamentally fictitious, the Greeks could not have been so universally persuaded of its truth: and that to believe them deceived, indicates far greater credulity than to receive the substance of the facts. Such are the strong holds of the adverse view, which it is Mr. Grote's business to demolish.

The former argument has more sound than weight; and may seem to indicate confusion of thought. The old minstrel, or bard, it is said, combined the offices of historian and poet; therefore, we may yield to him more credit than to a modern epicwriter. It is evident, that unless some clue can be found to teach us when he officiates in one character and when in the

other, the inference ought to have been :-'therefore, it is perfectly uncertain what we ought or ought not to believe on his testimony.' Such a clue, however, all the rationalizing school, from Thucydides down to Clinton, imagine they have discovered in the intrinsic credibility of statements: that is, if we disbelieve all that is miraculous or otherwise opposed to the known principles of human history, all that remains may be received as historical. As it has been a thousand times repeated: 'strip off whatever is romantic and portentous, and the residue, being credible, deserves to be credited.' This is the fundamentally false assumption, (for, with Mr. Grote, we do not hesitate to pronounce it such,) which pervades all the reasonings on that side, and has occasioned an enormous waste of labour and ingenuity. As if plausible fiction made no part of poetry! as if it did not form beyond comparison the largest and most important part! Instead of saying that the ancient bard discharged the functions of historian, we ought to say with Mr. Grote, that the age had not yet conceived the idea of history at all. Until contemporaneous history begins, search after truth is impossible; the art of searching, and the sources which can be trusted, are unknown. Genius may prompt a poet to adorn a strictly traditional tale, which has fact at the bottom; but it may also prompt him to sing what is fundamentally fictitious: and in a given case, which of the two methods may have been adopted, we are totally in the dark. He will probably give to his chief characters names that are well known to his hearers; but that does not guarantee a single fact concerning them.

Most decisive illustrations of this are drawn from the middle ages of Europe, which give us valuable insight into the intellec. tual tendencies of half-barbarous nations. At that time the mass of the people was quite uninfluenced by historical literature; yet annals and dry chronicles were preserved by monkish writers, who retained from an earlier civilization the element of a historical spirit; and by help of these unpretending authentic and contemporary documents, we are enabled to test the truth of various poems and romances. An eminent illustration of this is, the (so called) Chronicle of Turpin,' a compilation of poetical legends concerning Charlemagne, which ascribe to him an expedition to the Holy Land, and a conquest of Jerusalem from the Saracens, whence he brought to Rome many valuable relics, as the sacred crown of thorns. The Emir Balan, however, invaded Italy with a great army, and having possessed himself of these relics, carried them to Spain: out of which grew a great expedition of Charlemagne into Spain to recover them. Now if this were so criticised, as the Trojan war by Thucydides and indeed by Herodotus, it would be argued: 'Mere sacred relics are evi

dently romantic and unreal grounds of the war;'-(as it is said, To recover Helen cannot have been the real cause of the war of Troy ;) but drop this, and other secondary points, and the residue will be historical.' Yet, in the present instance, we have the means of knowing that all is fiction. So little similarity is there between the Charlemagne of romance, and the Charlemagne of history, that it is hard to identify them; and it is pretty clear that traditions of Charles Martel and of Charles the Bald have been fused into the mingled mass.-So also, the legends of the Saints are by the best historians regarded as pure fictions, without a nucleus of truth; yet they are written with the simplest and most direct protestations of narrating real unvarnished facts. The stories of king Arthur's Knights of the Round Table,' are another case of unmingled fiction: nor can this be set aside, by urging that the case of these is not parallel; inasmuch as the manners of these knights belong to the days of feudal chivalry, while Homer has no such anachronisms.' But whether Homer rightly paints the heroes of past days, we know not, because we have no collateral witnesses: no one has yet imagined that he sang in the spirit of an antiquarian, carefully discriminating ancient from present manners: if then he has been in this respect correct, it is through the accident that no change of manners had taken place for some centuries. Even so, until some fixed chronology is ascribed, it is not clear what correctness' of this sort would mean.

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To go to the centre of Asia; in the middle age of Persia, there rose the great epic of Firdusi, the Shah-namah, or Book of Kings. This has ostensibly more pretensions to be regarded as historical than the poems of Homer; yet by comparing it with the authentic and contemporaneous records of Greeks and Romans, we find it to be a tissue of fiction, with a few old national names of kings indeed, but nothing whatever in their fortunes to identify them with real characters. Alexander the Great is hardly an exception: for he is made to be a younger son of the king of Persia, who was brought up in Greece as a Christian, and when he became a man, reconquered his father's throne from his brother. On the whole, we have an overwhelming mass of analogy in proof that compositions intended to delight the imagination, whether in prose or verse, are utterly worthless as historical informants. They may possess some portion of truth; but unless we have an independent test, we cannot extricate it and if we have this, we no longer need to depend on the romancer or poet.

The second and more plausible argument is derived from the belief of the Greeks themselves; which it is asserted, we cannot, without credulity, imagine to have arisen without a basis of fact.

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