Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/72

50 HISTORY OP THE absorbed with the subject, makes it the most beautiful and powerful charm of the Iliad. § 6. To remove from this collection of various actions, conditions, and feelings any substantial part, as not necessarily belonging to it, would in fact be to dismember a living whole, the parts of which would neces- sarily lose their vitality. As in an organic body life does not dwell in one single point, but requires a union of certain systems and members, so the internal connexion of the Iliad rests on the union of certain parts; and neither the interesting introduction describing the defeat of the Greeks up to the burning of the ship of Protesilaus, nor the turn of affairs brought about by the death of Patroclus, nor the final pacifi- cation of the anger of Achilles, could be spared from the Iliad, when the fruitful seed of such a poem had once been sown in the soul of Homer, and had begun to develop its growth. But the plan of the Iliad is certainly very much extended beyond what was actually necessary; and, in particular, the preparatory part consisting of the attempts of the other heroes to compensate the Greeks for the absence of Achilles, has, it must be said, been drawn out to a disproportionate length; so that the suspicion that there were later insertions of import- ant passages, on the whole applies with far more probability to the first than to the last books, in which, however, modern critics have found most traces of interpolation. For this extension there were two principal motives, which (if we may carry our conjectures so far) exercised an influence even on the mind of Homer himself, but had still more pow- erful effects upon his successors, the later Homerids. In the first place, it is clear that a design manifested itself at an early period to make this poem complete in itself, so that all the subjects, descriptions, and actions, which could alone give an interest to a poem on the entire war, might find a place within the limits of this composition. For this purpose it is not improbable that many lays of earlier bards, who had sung single adventures of the Trojan war, were laid under contribution, and that the finest parts of them were adopted into the new poem; it being the natu- ral course of popular poetry propagated by oral tradition, to treat the best thoughts of previous poets as common property, and to give them a new life by working them up in a different context. If in this manner much extraneous matter has been introduced into the poem, which, in common probability, does not agree with the defi- nite event which forms the subject of it, but would more pro- perly find its place at an earlier stage of the Trojan war; and if, by this means, from a poem on the Anger of Achilles, it grew into an Iliad, as it is significantly called, yet the poet had his justification, in the manner in which he conceived the situation of the contending nations, and their mode of warfare, until the separation of Achilles from the rest of the army, in which he, doubtless, mainly followed the prevalent legends of his time. According to the accounts of the cyclic and later poets (in