Our own sense of probability leads us to the conclusion that, in an age when people could write, people wrote down the Epic. If they applied their art to literature, then the preservation of the Epic is explained. Written first in a prae-Phoenician script, it continued to be written in the Greek adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet. There was not yet, probably, a reading public, but there were a few clerkly men.
That the Cretans, at least, could write long before the age of Homer, Mr. Arthur Evans has demonstrated by his discoveries. Prom my remote undergraduate days I was of the opinion which he has proved to be correct, starting, like him, from what I knew about savage pictographs. [Footnote: Cretan _Pictographs_ and _Prae-Phoenician_ Script. London, 1905. Annual of British _School_ of Athens, 1900-1901, p. 10. Journal of _Hellenic Studies,_ 1897, pp. 327-395.]
M. Reinach and Mr. Evans have pointed out that in this matter tradition joins hands with discovery. Diodorus Siculus, speaking of the Cretan Zeus and probably on Cretan authority, says: "As to those who hold that the Syrians invented letters, from whom the Phoenicians received them and handed them on to the Greeks, ... and that for this reason the Greeks call letters 'Phoenician,' some reply that the Phoenicians did not [blank space] letters, but merely modified (transposed 3) the forms of the letters, and that most men use this form of script, and thus letters came to be styled 'Phoenician.'" [Footnote: Diodorus Siculus, v. 74. _L'Anthropologie,_ vol. xi. pp. 497-502.] In fact, the alphabet is a collection of signs of palaeolithic antiquity and of vast diffusion. [Footnote: Origins of the Alphabet. A. L. Fortnightly Review, 1904, pp. 634-645]
Thus the use of writing for the conservation of the Epic cannot seem to me to be unlikely, but rather probable; and here one must leave the question, as the subjective element plays so great a part in every man's sense of what is likely or unlikely. That writing cannot have been used for this literary purpose, that the thing is impossible, nobody will now assert.
My supposition is, then, that the text of the Epic existed in AEgean script till Greece adapted to her own tongue the "Phoenician letters," which I think she did not later than the ninth to eighth centuries; "at the beginning of the ninth century," says Professor Bury. [Footnote: _History of Greece_, vol. i. p. 78. 1902.] This may seem an audaciously early date, but when we find vases of the eighth to seventh centuries bearing inscriptions, we may infer that a knowledge of reading and writing was reasonably common. When such a humble class of hirelings or slaves as the pot-painters can sign their work, expecting their signatures to be read, reading and writing must be very common accomplishments among the more fortunate classes.