WERE THE GREEKS A DULL PEOPLE?

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nicia; tradition declares that a certain Phoenician, Cadmus by name, long before the Trojan war introduced into Greece the use of letters; the letters of the Greek alphabet are substantially the same with those of the Semitic languages, Alpha being only Aleph, and Beta being only Beth in disguise; and yet, merely upon the ground that no Greek writing remains to us of demonstrably earlier date than B. c. 650, we are asked to believe that at 850 B. C. the composer of the Homeric poems could not possibly have put them into writing. This, as it seems to us, is to attribute to the Greeks a physical inertia, as well as a mental incapacity to apprehend and to appropriate, which are the precise opposites of all we know of that eager, curious, colonizing race.

We find it difficult to believe that it took two thousand years for letters to come around the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea from Egypt to Greece. We prefer to think that there was some foundation for the belief of the Greeks themselves that letters among them belonged to the ante-Homeric age. Before the dawn of history the Egyptian Cecrops came, it was said, to Athens, and the Egyptian Danaus to Argos. The time of the driving out of the shepherd kings from Egypt corresponds quite well with these Greek traditions. And how can we explain the universal knowledge of reading and writing among the Greeks two hundred years after Homer's time, unless a very long period of instruction had gone before? In the days of Solon, six hundred years before Christ, there were laws forbidding the erasure of public inscriptions, and the practice of ostracism prevailed-the marking of a "yes" or a "no" upon a pebble of stone.

At the very time of Peisistratus, there were in existence actual commentaries upon the Homeric poems. Who ever heard of written commentaries upon an unwritten poem? The idea that Peisistratus, three centuries after Homer, first committed these poems to writing seems to us amazingly improbable. Grant that writing in Homer's time was a mystery known only to the few; that it was in possession, not of a reading public, but of a poetical and literary guild; that it was used as a private help to the bard in composing and memorizing, rather than as a means of communication to others; still the argument in favor of Homer's use of letters seems to us far to outweigh the argument against it. If the patchwork theory of the Homeric authorship takes it for granted that writing was unknown or unused among the Greeks of Homer's time, it rests upon an utterly unproved and an extremely improbable assumption.

We do not stop here, however. Even if it could be proved that Peisistratus first secured the writing out of the Homeric poems, we should not surrender the doctrine of their unity. Our adversaries declare that poems so long as these could never without writing be composed in the first place, nor afterward be transmitted intact to future generations. Here again we are compelled to meet each part in the declaration with a stout demurrer. The epic, as its very name intimates, is a poem narrated or recited, while the lyric is one sung to the accompaniment of the lyre. As the epic is intended for public recitation, so in manifold instances it has been composed without writing, preserved only in the mind, recited from memory, and, to mix metaphors, orally handed down to posterity.

COMPOSITION POSSIBLE WITHOUT WRITING

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The Old German epic entitled "Parsifal," is a poem of twenty-four thousand eight hundred and ten lines, very much longer than the "Iliad "-for the "Iliad" has only fifteen thousand six hundred and ninety-three -yet "Parsifal" was composed by Eschenbach, who could neither read nor write. The weird poems of the Icelandic Skalds were for two centuries transmitted without writing. The Greek festivals have to this day their blind singers who depend on memory alone to keep the thread of their story. Composition is quite possible without writing, as every public speaker can witness. Homer, even if he were blind when he composed his poems, might still have been quite equal to his task. And what was once mentally put into form could also have been mentally preserved.

To us, who in these later days depend upon books to keep our treasures for us and use our memories so little, the retention of a whole "Iliad" or a whole "Odyssey without break or error, seems to savor of the miraculous. Memory does little for us because we give memory so little to do. We have come to cherish a sort of mild contempt for the memorizer, and we doubt the mental grasp of the man of facts and dates. Not so in the early days. Mnemosyne was then one of the Muses. Memory was cultivated, cherished, trusted, honored. Of Alexander and of Cæsar it was said that they knew all their soldiers by name; the story at any rate proves that they thought such ability no disgrace to them. There were educated men in Athens who knew the whole "Iliad" and "Odyssey" by heart and could recite them straight on from any point where they were asked to begin.

And such power is not entirely wanting in recent

times. Macaulay could repeat, at fifty, long poems which he had never glanced at since he read them. for the first and only time at fifteen. And Scaliger, that modern wonder of learning and scholarship, committed the whole of Homer to memory in twelve days, and all the extant Greek poets in three months. If we only now consider that in prehistoric times this composing and reciting of epic poetry was a regular trade, so richly rewarding with gifts and honors those who were its masters that memory was stimulated to put forth its highest powers, we shall rid ourselves of the last vestige of doubt whether poems as long as Homer's could have been composed without writing and then handed down substantially intact for several centuries.

We ought not to miss here the incidental advantage of our present study in furnishing a parallel to the oral transmission of the Gospel narratives. All competent investigators now agree that from twenty-five to thirtyfive years intervened between the death of our Lord and the putting into its present written form of each of the Synoptics. And there are not wanting those who declare that even in that brief time the stories of Christ's life might become so altered as to be untrustworthy.

But these critics are strangely forgetful of some very common facts. A sacred narrative, which has assumed stereotyped form and which passes from lip to lip, may be submitted to a constant process of verification. Just as many an aged saint who knows her Bible mentally corrects the slips in a young preacher's quotations, so the first disciples, we may believe, were evermore conning and correcting the oral narratives which they heard, purging them of excrescences when such appeared, and

THE EVOLUTIONARY THEORY

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bringing them back to the standard form. A narrative upon which the church was founded and for which Christians had to answer with their lives might conceivably have been handed down, not simply for twentyfive or thirty-five years, but for a century, without serious loss or change. The Gospel problem seems an easy one when we have once granted that the Homeric poems could have been transmitted intact for more than three

hundred years.

And yet we are not quite through with the objections of Paley. To all that have been mentioned he adds this last of all: Homer, he says, could not have composed poems so long as the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," for the reason that there was no reading or hearing public to be addressed by such poems. It is the old evolutionary theory in a new guise. The simple must come before the complex. Early times have patience and attention only for poems that are brief and fragmentary. The complicated epic whole must be the result of the constructive and combining genius of later times.

Unfortunately for this theory the facts are all against it. There was just such a public as the full-fledged "Iliad" or "Odyssey" requires. It was found in the halls of the petty kings or chieftains of early Greece. There every comer was welcome and there were many guests. The numerous retainers of the household constituted of themselves a sufficient audience, and the songs of the bard were the chief amusement of the evening, as athletic games and sports were the amusement of the day.

Minstrelsy was a recognized and honored profession. In the simple days when society has emerged from bar