Having once practised deceit, it is to be feared that Onomacritus
acquired a liking for the art of literary forgery, which, as will be
seen in the case of Ireland, grows on a man like dram-drinking.
Onomacritus is generally charged with the authorship of the poems
which the ancients usually attributed to Orpheus, the companion of
Jason. Perhaps the most interesting of the poems of Orpheus to us
would have been his 'Inferno,' or [Greek text], in which the poet
gave his own account of his descent to Hades in search of Eurydice.
But only a dubious reference to one adventure in the journey is
quoted by Plutarch. Whatever the exact truth about the Orphic poems
may be (the reader may pursue the hard and fruitless quest in
Lobeck's 'Aglaophamus' {14}), it seems certain that the period
between Pisistratus and Pericles, like the Alexandrian time, was a
great age for literary forgeries. But of all these frauds the
greatest (according to the most "advanced" theory on the subject) is
the "Forgery of the Iliad and Odyssey!" The opinions of the
scholars who hold that the Iliad and Odyssey, which we know and
which Plato knew, are not the epics known to Herodotus, but later
compositions, are not very clear nor consistent. But it seems to be
vaguely held that about the time of Pericles there arose a kind of
Greek Macpherson. This ingenious impostor worked on old epic
materials, but added many new ideas of his own about the gods,
converting the Iliad (the poem which we now possess) into a kind of
mocking romance, a Greek Don Quixote. He also forged a number of
pseudo-archaic words, tenses, and expressions, and added the
numerous references to iron, a metal practically unknown, it is
asserted, to Greece before the sixth century. If we are to believe,
with Professor Paley, that the chief incidents of the Iliad and
Odyssey were unknown to Sophocles, AEschylus, and the contemporary
vase painters, we must also suppose that the Greek Macpherson