Homeric Question - Controversy Over Homer's Identity

Controversy Over Homer's Identity

Wolf's speculations were in harmony with the ideas and sentiment of the time, and his historical arguments, especially his long array of testimonies to the work of Peisistratus, were hardly challenged. The effect of Wolf's Prolegomena was so overwhelming, and its determination so decisive, that, although a few protests were made at the time, the true Homeric controversy did not begin until after his death in 1824.

The first considerable antagonist of the Wolfian school was Gregor Wilhelm Nitzsch, whose writings cover the years between 1828 and 1862, and deal with every side of the controversy. In the earlier part of his Metetemata (1830), Nitzsch took up the question of written or unwritten literature, on which Wolf's entire argument turned, and showed that the art of writing must be anterior to Peisistratus. In the later part of the same series of discussions (1837), and in his chief work (Die Sagenpoesie der Griechen, 1852), he investigated the structure of the Homeric poems, and their relation to the other epics of the Trojan cycle.

These epics had in the meantime been made the subject of a work which, for exhaustive learning and delicacy of artistic perception, has few rivals in the history of philology, the Epic cycle of Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker. The confusion which previous scholars had made between the ancient post-Homeric poets (such as Arctinus of Miletus and Lesches) and the learned mythological writers (like the scriptor cyclicus of Horace) was first cleared up by Welcker. Wolf had argued that, had the cyclic writers known the Iliad and Odyssey which we possess, they would have imitated the unity of structure which distinguishes these two poems. The aim of Welcker's labours was to show that the Homeric poems had influenced both the form and the substance of epic poetry.

Thus arose a conservative school who admitted more or less freely the absorption of pre-existing lays in the formation of the Iliad and Odyssey, and also the existence of considerable interpolations, but assigned the main work of formation to prehistoric times and the genius of a great poet. Whether the two epics were by the same author remained an open question; the tendency of this group of scholars was towards separation. Regarding the use of writing, too, they were not unanimous. Karl Otfried Müller, for instance, maintained the view of Wolf on this point, while strenuously combating the inference which Wolf drew from it.

The Prolegomena bore on the title-page the words "Volumen I", but no second volume ever appeared; nor was any attempt made by Wolf himself to compose it or carry his theory further. The first important steps in that direction were taken by Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann, chiefly in two dissertations, De interpolationibus Homeri (Leipzig, 1832), and De iteratis apud Homerum (Leipzig, 1840), called forth by the writings of Nitzsch. As the word "interpolation" implies, Hermann did not maintain the hypothesis of a conflation of independent lays. Feeling the difficulty of supposing that all ancient minstrels sang of the wrath of Achilles or the return of Odysseus (leaving out even the capture of Troy itself), he was led to assume that two poems of no great compass, dealing with these two themes, became so famous at an early period as to throw other parts of the Trojan story into the background and were then enlarged by successive generations of rhapsodists. Some parts of the Iliad, moreover, seemed to him to be older than the poem on the wrath of Achilles; and thus, in addition to the Homeric and post-Homeric matter, he distinguished a pre-Homeric element.

The conjectures of Hermann, in which the Wolfian theory found a modified and tentative application, were presently thrown into the shade by the inure trenchant method of Karl Lachmann, who (in two papers read to the Berlin Academy in 1837 and 1841) sought to show that the Iliad was made up of sixteen independent lays, with various enlargements and interpolations, all finally reduced to order by Peisistratus. The first book, for instance, consists of a lay on the anger of Achilles (1–347), and two continuations, the return of Chryseis (430–492) and the scenes in Olympus (348–429, 493–611). The second book forms a second lay, but several passages, among them the speech of Odysseus (278–332), are interpolated. In the third book, the scenes in which Helen and Priam take part (including the making of the truce) are pronounced to be interpolations; and so on.

New methods try also to elucidate the question. Combining information technologies and statistics, the stylometry allows to scan various linguistic units: words, parts of speech, sounds... Based on the frequencies of Greek letters, a first study of Dietmar Najock particularly shows the intern cohesion of the Iliad and the Odysssey. Taking into account the repartition of the letters, a recent study of Stephan Vonfelt highlights the unity of the works of Homer compared to Hesiod. The thesis of modern Analysts being questioned, the debate remains open.