antiquity itself considered as a whole. To explain the different general
impression of the two books on the assumption that _one_ poet composed
them both, scholars sought assistance by referring to the seasons of the
poet's life, and compared the poet of the _Odyssey_ to the setting sun.
The eyes of those critics were tirelessly on the lookout for
discrepancies in the language and thoughts of the two poems; but at this
time also a history of the Homeric poem and its tradition was prepared,
according to which these discrepancies were not due to Homer, but
to those who committed his words to writing and those who sang them. It
was believed that Homer's poem was passed from one generation to another
_viva voce_, and faults were attributed to the improvising and at times
forgetful bards. At a certain given date, about the time of Pisistratus,
the poems which had been repeated orally were said to have been
collected in manuscript form; but the scribes, it is added, allowed
themselves to take some liberties with the text by transposing some
lines and adding extraneous matter here and there. This entire
hypothesis is the most important in the domain of literary studies that
antiquity has exhibited; and the acknowledgment of the dissemination of
the Homeric poems by word of mouth, as opposed to the habits of a
book-learned age, shows in particular a depth of ancient sagacity worthy
of our admiration. From those times until the generation that produced
Friedrich August Wolf we must take a jump over a long historical vacuum;
but in our own age we find the argument left just as it was at the time
when the power of controversy departed from antiquity, and it is a
matter of indifference to us that Wolf accepted as certain tradition
what antiquity itself had set up only as a hypothesis. It may be
remarked as most characteristic of this hypothesis that, in the
strictest sense, the personality of Homer is treated seriously; that a
certain standard of inner harmony is everywhere presupposed in the
manifestations of the personality; and that, with these two excellent