Χ.

Κωμάζω χρύσειον ἐς ἑσπερίων χορὸν ἄστρων λεύσσων, οὐδ ̓ ἄλλων λὰξ ἐβάρυνα χορούς

στέψας δ ̓ ἀνθόβολον κρατὸς τρίχα τὴν κελαδεινὴν

πηκτίδα μουσοπόλοις χερσὶν ἐπηρέθισα.

καὶ τάδε δρῶν εὔκοσμον ἔχω βίον· οὐδὲ γὰρ αὐτὸς κόσμος ἄνευθε λύρης ἔπλετο καὶ στεφάνου.

Marcus Argentarius.

xi.

Ἠράσθην· τίς δ ̓ οὐχί; κεκώμακα· τίς δ ̓ ἀμύητος κώμων; ἀλλ ̓ ἐμάνην. ἐκ τίνος; οὐχὶ θεοῦ; ἐρρίφθω πολιὴ γὰρ ἐπείγεται ἀντὶ μελαίνης

θρὶξ ἤδη, συνετῆς ἄγγελος ἡλικίης.

καὶ παίζειν ὅτε καιρὸς, ἐπαίξαμεν· ἡνίκα καὶ νῦν

οὐκέτι, λωϊτέρης φροντίδος αψόμεθα.

Philodemus.

NOTES.

THE Commentators principally laid under contribution for the following notes are-for Homer; Heyne, Döderlein, Nitzsch, Faesi, Ameis, and Baumeister: for the poets of the lyrical period; Bergk, Schneidewin, and Dissen: for schylus; Klausen, Schütz, Linwood (Lexicon), Conington, and Paley: for Sophocles; Elmsley, Hermann, Ellendt (Lexicon), Linwood, Wunder, Dindorf, Meineke, and Lobeck: for Euripides; Paley: for the comic poets; Bekker, Bothe, Mitchell, A. Müller, and Meineke: for the fourth part; Wüstemann and Jacobs.

I.

EPIC POETS.

For the later Greeks, as for us, the Homeric poetry was the beginning of Greek literature; and they were not less ignorant than ourselves of its date, the mode of its composition, and its history. The short sum of what ancient testimony has handed down and modern criticism has inferred as probable with regard to these questions is as follows:

At some period, probably between 900 and 700 B. C., before historical events began to be contemporaneously recorded in Greece, a number of poems were composed in hexameters, chiefly on the great national subject of the war of Troy and the heroes who bore a part in its conduct. These poems were of three species; one kind truly epic, treating of some portion of the war or its consequences as a connected series of events leading up to a single issue, another

A a

biographical, treating of the adventures of particular chiefs from birth to death, and a third genealogical, treating of lists of successive personages, heroic or divine, without any chronological or poetical unity. Of the first kind were the Iliad and Odyssey; of the third Hesiod's Theogony and Eoix or Catalogue of female characters: of the second no example remains to us. Many of the compositions of the first and third kinds seem to have been long regarded as equally Homeric, but the Iliad and Odyssey were the most popular, and at some time after Herodotus came to be considered as in a peculiar sense the works of Homer as distinguished from the authors of the rest. Of the two poems so distinguished by ancient taste the Odyssey was almost certainly composed as one work, with perhaps the exception of some portions, such as the eleventh and twenty-fourth books, and part of the twenty-third and some scattered passages of less importance, which were not always accepted as genuine by antiquity, and bear marks in themselves of being additions to the original substance. The bulk of the Iliad also was probably composed as one poem, on the subject of the wrath of Achilles, but books 2 to 7 inclusive and books 9, 10, 22 and 24 do not perfectly harmonise with the remainder, and may perhaps be a somewhat later enlargement of the original design into one comprehending not merely the consequences of Achilles' wrath, but also a general account of the chief events which led to the fall of Troy. Whether or not this theory of original bases and subsequent additions be well founded, it cannot be doubted that substantially the whole of each poem was composed in an age in which the epic faculty remained still fresh and unimpaired. But it does not follow either that the two poems or that the whole of either was the work of one mind. Even ancient critics questioned the identity of authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey; and it is quite uncertain whether either of them was as a whole the production of a single author or was the joint composition of a guild of hereditary bards.

What seems certain is that the Iliad and Odyssey had reached nearly their present form before the time of Solon's laws. Cicero and Pausanias gave currency to a fable, apparently unsupported by

any evidence, that Peisistratus first collected and pieced together scattered epic lays into these consistent wholes. But the probability is that they were committed to writing in almost their present state about 650 B. C., and thenceforth at least underwent no material change. Their preservation down to that time without fatal loss is to be attributed to the practised memory and Homerised taste of the professional reciters or rhapsodists, Homer's curators and heirs.

By the seventh century the epic impulse seems to have died away as the form of society changed in Greece, and not only were no new epics of importance produced, but the Iliad and Odyssey gradually began to pass from the public places into schools and homes. But at the same time copies began to be multiplied and the text to be carefully guarded from corruption. As the substance of a liberal education, as a treasury of rhetoric, as an inexhaustible mine of philosophical and political problems, as acknowledged authorities on matters of history, genealogy, and morality, and the source whence poets drew their inspiration, as well as through the reverent admiration which they never ceased to command, they passed down in generally good preservation to the Alexandrian grammarians.

These critics exerted great powers, with the advantage of having to deal with a yet living language, to purify and correct the great mass of epics which had been preserved to them. They included the two Homeric works in a general edition or cycle, which consisted of an arrangement of all the principal epic poems according to the relative chronology of their subjects, so as to form a complete course of heroic narrative, but bestowed their chief pains on the Iliad and Odyssey. Zenodotus cleared the text of all that seemed to him contradictory or unworthy; Aristophanes restored much that seemed to have fallen out or to have been unjustly rejected; and Aristarchus, chief of the three, combining the results of their labours with his own, produced a text and commentary which are the basis of our readings and interpretation of Homer. The text as we now find it is in the main as it was fixed by him; for though the extant manuscripts, with the exception of a portion of the Iliad which is found in a very ancient uncial manuscript, are not older than the eighth or ninth century