It is said that the art of writing, and the use of manageable writing
materials, were entirely, or all but entirely, unknown in Greece and
the islands at the supposed date of the composition of the Iliad; and
that if so, this poem could not have been committed to writing during
the time of such its composition; that in a question of comparative
probabilities like this, it is a much grosser improbability that even
the single Iliad, amounting, after all curtailments and expungings,
to upwards of 15,000 lines, should have been actually conceived and
perfected in the brain of one man, with no other help but his own or
others' memory, than that it should, in fact, be the result of the
labours of several distinct authors; that if the Odyssey be counted,
the improbability is doubled; that if we add, upon the authority of
Thucydides and Aristotle, the Hymns and Margites, not to say the
Batrachomuiomachia, that which was improbable becomes absolutely
impossible; that all that has been so often said as to the fact of as
many lines, or more, having been committed to memory, is beside the
point in question, which is not whether 15,000 or 30,000 lines may
be learnt by art from a book or manuscript, but whether one man can
_compose_ a poem of that length, which, rightly or not, shall
be thought to be a perfect model of symmetry or consistency of parts,
without the aid of writing materials; that, admitting the superior
probability of such a thing in a primitive age, we know nothing
analogous to such a case; and that it so transcends the common limits
of intellectual power, as, at the least, to merit, with as much justice
as the opposite opinion, the character of improbability.--_H.N.
Coleridge._

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