HESIOD AND HOMER

AMONG the facts of early Greek history the rise of the Greek Epic, and in particular of the Iliad, has a place of evident importance. But to the historian's question ‘how exactly did it happen?’ no quite confident answer has yet been given. We can speak with reasonable confidence about the rise of Greek sculpture, painting, architecture, and of other techniques, peaceful and warlike: much of our understanding of an exceptionally creative phase of human history depends on such knowledge. The technique of literature is historically no less important. Here too we can speak with reasonable confidence from the seventh century onwards, from Archilochos;—in spite of the fact that of Archilochos and his successors for a hundred and fifty years we have little but the most casual fragments. Why then do we feel so relatively helpless in face of the poems, which have survived whole, of Hesiod and Homer?

There are reasons for this, some accidental, some intrinsic. It is relatively accidental, in Hesiod's case, that his contemporary Amphidamas of Chalkis, whom he names, is a less famous person and therefore less datable than for example Gyges of Lydia (whom Archilochos names). But, to my thinking at least, Hesiod's place in history is not too hard a problem: he lived about 700 B.C., a generation or so before Archilochos: intensely concerned with his own experiences, he is the man who made literature personal. Both of his two great poems are ‘occasional’, circumstantiated: they rose out of occasions in his private life, a vision on Helikon, a quarrel with his brother. As a social phenomenon his importance is, I believe, cardinal. In the Iliad and Odyssey the problem is more intrinsically difficult because they belong to no personal occasions; they tell of a distant past and are themselves timeless.

This has led during the past century to that enormous variety of hypothesis which makes the Homeric Question notorious. I do not suppose the end is really in sight: the signs which I seem to detect of a growing communis opinion are no doubt due to my selecting what I like. However that may be, in these lectures I must make some very large assumptions.