It has been shown in the text that in 1892 Mr. Leaf thought the story about the making of the Iliad under Pisistratus, a legend without authority, while he regarded the traditions concerning an Homeric school as sufficient basis for an hypothesis, “which we are bound to make in order to explain the possibility of any theory.” In 1900 he entirely reversed his position, the school was abandoned, and the story of Pisistratus was accepted. One objection to accepting any of the various legends about the composing and writing out, for the first time, of the Iliad, in the sixth century, the age of Pisistratus, was the silence of Aristarchus on the subject. He discussed the authenticity of lines in the Iliad which, according to the legend, were interpolated for a political purpose by Solon or Pisistratus, but, as far as his comments have reached us in the scholia, he never said a word about the tradition of Athenian interpolation. Now Aristarchus must, at least, have known the tradition of the political use of a disputed line, for Aristotle writes (Rhetoric, i. 15) that the Athenians, early in the sixth century, quoted Iliad, II. 558, to prove their right to Salamis. Aristarchus also discussed Iliad, II. 553, 555, to which the Spartans appealed on the question of supreme command against Persia (Herodotus, vii. 159). Again Aristarchus said nothing, or nothing that has reached us, about Athenian interpolation. Once more, Odyssey, II. 631, was said by Hereas, a Megarian writer, to have been interpolated by Pisistratus (Plutarch.) But “the scholia that represent the teaching of Aristarchus” never make any reference to the alleged dealings of Pisistratus with the Iliad. The silence of Aristarchus, however, affords no safe ground of argument to believers or disbelievers in the original edition written out by order of Pisistratus.
It can never be proved that the scholiasts did not omit what Aristarchus said, though we do not know why they should have done so; and it can never be proved that Aristarchus was ignorant of the traditions about Pisistratus, or that he thought them unworthy of notice. All is matter of conjecture on these points. Mr. Leaf’s conversion to belief in the story that our Iliad was practically edited and first committed to writing under Pisistratus appears to be due to the probability that Aristarchus must have known the tradition. But if he did, there is no proof that he accepted it as historically authentic. There is not, in fact, any proof even that Aristarchus must have known the tradition. He had probably read Dieuchidas of Megara, for “Wilamowitz has shown that Dieuchidas wrote in the fourth century.” 40 But, unluckily, we do not know that Dieuchidas stated that the Iliad was made and first committed to writing in the sixth century B.C. No mortal knows what Dieuchidas said: and, again, what Dieuchidas said is not evidence. He wrote as a partisan in a historical dispute.
The story about Pisistratus and his editor, the practical maker of the Iliad, is interwoven with a legend about an early appeal, in the beginning of the sixth century B.C., to Homer as an historical authority. The Athenians and Megarians, contending for the possession of the island of Salamis, the home of the hero Aias, are said to have laid their differences before the Spartans (cir. 600–580 B.C.). Each party quoted Homer as evidence. Aristotle, who, as we saw, mentions the tale (Rhetoric, i. 15), merely says that the Athenians cited Iliad, II. 558: “Aias led and stationed his men where the phalanxes of the Athenians were posted.” Aristarchus condemned this line, not (as far as evidence goes) because there was a tradition that the Athenians had interpolated it to prove their point, but because he thought it inconsistent with Iliad, III. 230; IV. 251, which, if I may differ from so great a critic, it is not; these two passages deal, not with the position of the camps, but of the men in the field on a certain occasion. But if Aristarchus had thought the tradition of Athenian interpolation of II. 558 worthy of notice, he might have mentioned it in support of his opinion. Perhaps he did. No reference to his notice has reached us. However this may be, Mr. Leaf mainly bases his faith in the Pisistratean editor (apparently, we shall see, an Asiatic Greek, residing in Athens), on a fragmentary passage of Diogenes Laertius (third century A.D.), concerned with the tale of Homer’s being cited about 600–580 B.C. as an authority for the early ownership of Salamis. In this text Diogenes quotes Dieuchidas as saying something about Pisistratus in relation to the Homeric poems, but what Dieuchidas really said is unknown, for a part has dropped out of the text.
The text of Diogenes Laertius runs thus (Solon, i. 57): “He (Solon) decreed that the Homeric poems should be recited by rhapsodists [Greek text: ex hypobolaes]” (words of disputed sense), so that where the first reciter left off thence should begin his successor. It was rather Solon, then, than Pisistratus who brought Homer to light ([Greek text: ephotisen]), as Diogenes says in the Fifth Book of his Megarica. And the lines were especially these: “They who held Athens,” &c. (Iliad, II. 546–558), the passage on which the Athenians rested in their dispute with the Megarians.
And what “lines were especially these”? Mr. Leaf fills up the gap in the sense, after “Pisistratus” thus, “for it was he” (Solon) “who interpolated lines in the Catalogue, and not Pisistratus.” He says: “The natural sense of the passage as it stands” (in Diogenes Laertius) “is this: It was not Peisistratos, as is generally supposed, but Solon who collected the scattered Homer of his day, for he it was who interpolated the lines in the Catalogue of the Ships”. . . . But Diogenes neither says for himself nor quotes from Dieuchidas anything about “collecting the scattered Homer of his day.” That Pisistratus did so is Mr. Leafs theory, but there is not a hint about anybody collecting anything in the Greek. Ritschl, indeed, conjecturally supplying the gap in the text of Diogenes, invented the words, “Who collected the Homeric poems, and inserted some things to please the Athenians.” But Mr. Leaf rejects that conjecture as “clearly wrong.” Then why does he adopt, as “the natural sense of the passage,” “it was not Peisistratos but Solon who collected the scattered Homer of his day?” 41 The testimony of Dieuchidas, as far as we can see in the state of the text, “refers,” as Mr. Monro says, “to the interpolation that has just been mentioned, and need not extend further back.” “Interpolation is a process that postulates a text in which the additional verses can be inserted,” whereas, if I understand Mr. Leaf, the very first text, in his opinion, was that compiled by the editor for Pisistratus. 42 Mr. Leaf himself dismisses the story of the Athenian appeal to Homer for proof of their claim as “a fiction.” If, so, it does not appear that ancient commentaries on a fiction are of any value as proof that Pisistratus produced the earliest edition of the Iliad. 43
The lines disputed by the Megarians occur in the Catalogue, and, as to the date and original purpose of the Catalogue, the most various opinions prevail. In Mr. Leaf’s earlier edition of the Iliad (vol. i. p. 37), he says that “nothing convincing has been urged to show” that the Catalogue is “of late origin.” We know, from the story of Solon and the Megarians, that the Catalogue “was considered a classical work — the Domesday Book of Greece, at a very early date”— say 600–580 B.C. “It agrees with the poems in being preDorian” (except in lines 653–670).
“There seems therefore to be no valid reason for doubting that it, like the bulk of the Iliad and Odyssey, was composed in Achaean times, and carried with the emigrants to the coast of Asia Minor. . . . ”
In his new edition (vol. ii. p. 86), Mr. Leaf concludes that the Catalogue “originally formed an introduction to the whole Cycle,” the compiling of “the whole Cycle” being of uncertain date, but very late indeed, on any theory. The author “studiously preserves an ante-Dorian standpoint. It is admitted that there can be little doubt that some of the material, at least, is old.”
These opinions are very different from those expressed by Mr. Leaf in 1886. He cannot now give “even an approximate date for the composition of the Catalogue” which, we conceive, must be the latest thing in Homer, if it was composed “for that portion of the whole Cycle which, as worked up in a separate poem, was called the Kypria” for the Kypria is obviously a very late performance, done as a prelude to the Iliad.
I am unable to imagine how this mutilated passage of Diogenes, even if rightly restored, proves that Dieuchidas, a writer of the fourth century B.C., alleged that Pisistratus made a collection of scattered Homeric poems — in fact, made “a standard text.”
The Pisistratean hypothesis “was not so long ago unfashionable, but in the last few years a clear reaction has set in,” says Mr. Leaf. 44
The reaction has not affected that celebrated scholar, Dr. Blass, who, with Teutonic frankness, calls the Pisistratean edition “an absurd legend.” 45 Meyer says that the Alexandrians rejected the Pisistratean story “as a worthless fable,” differing here from Mr. Leaf and Wilamowitz; and he spurns the legend, saying that it is incredible that the whole Greek world would allow the tyrants of Athens to palm off a Homer on them. 46
Mr. T. W. Allen, an eminent textual scholar, treats the Pisistratean editor with no higher respect. In an Egyptian papyrus containing a fragment of Julius Africanus, a Christian chronologer, Mr. Allen finds him talking confidently of the Pisistratidae. They “stitched together the rest of the epic,” but excised some magical formulae which Julius Africanus preserves. Mr. Allen remarks: “The statements about Pisistratus belong to a well-established category, that of Homeric mythology. . . . The anecdotes about Pisistratus and the poet himself are on a par with Dares, who ‘wrote the Iliad before Homer.’” 47
The editor of Pisistratus is hardly in fashion, though that is of no importance. Of importance is the want of evidence for the editor, and, as we have shown, the impossible character of the task allotted to him by the theory.
As I suppose Mr. Leaf to insinuate, “fashion” has really nothing to do with the question. People who disbelieve in written texts must, and do, oscillate between the theory of an Homeric “school” and the Wolfian theory that Pisistratus, or Solon, or somebody procured the making of the first written text at Athens in the sixth century — a theory which fails to account for the harmony of the picture of life in the poems, and, as Mr. Monro, Grote, Nutzhorn, and many others argue, lacks evidence.
As Mr. Monro reasons, and as Blass states the case bluntly, “Solon, or Pisistratus, or whoever it was, put a stop, at least as far as Athens was concerned, to the mangling of Homer” by the rhapsodists or reciters, each anxious to choose a pet passage, and not going through the whole Iliad in due sequence. “But the unity existed before the mangling. That this has been so long and so stubbornly misunderstood is no credit to German scholarship: blind uncritical credulity on one side, limitless and arbitrary theorising on the other!” We are not solitary sceptics when we decline to accept the theory of Mr. Leaf. It is neither bottomed on evidence nor does it account for the facts in the case. That is to say, the evidence appeals to Mr. Leaf as valid, but is thought worse than inadequate by other great scholars, such as Monro and Blass; while the fact of the harmony of the picture of life, preserved through four or five centuries, appears to be left without explanation.
Mr. Leaf holds that, in order to organise recitations in due sequence, the making of a text, presenting, for the first time, a due sequence, was necessary. His opponents hold that the sequence already existed, but was endangered by the desultory habits of the rhapsodists. We must here judge each for himself; there is no court of final appeal.
I confess to feeling some uncertainty about the correctness of my statement of Mr. Leaf’s opinions. He and I both think an early Attic “recension” probable, or almost certain. But (see’ “Conclusion”) I regard such recension as distinct from the traditional “edition” of Pisistratus. Mr. Leaf, I learn, does not regard the “edition” as having “made” the Iliad; yet his descriptions of the processes and methods of his Pisistratean editor correspond to my idea of the “making” of our Iliad as it stands. See, for example, Mr. Leaf’s Introduction to Iliad, Book II. He will not even insist on the early Attic as the first written text; if it was not, its general acceptance seems to remain a puzzle. He discards the idea of one Homeric “school” of paramount authority, but presumes that, as recitation was a profession, there must have been schools. We do not hear of them or know the nature of their teaching. The Beauvais “school” of jongleurs in Lent (fourteenth century A.D.) seems to have been a holiday conference of strollers.