It would be presumptuous and unjust to treat the remarkable performance of Mr. Payne Knight as one of what may be called--to borrow a phrase from the commercial world--the Homeric bubble-schemes. It was anticipated with eagerness by Heyne. It was hailed by the calm judgment and refined taste of Lord Aberdeen. Yet this was not enough.
ἁμέραι δ’ ἐπίλοιποι μάρτυρες σοφώτατοι[45].
The ordeal of time has not destroyed the value of Mr. Payne Knight’s Prolegomena, but it has been decidedly unfavourable to his text as a practical attempt at reconstruction. With the old text in the right hand, and Mr. Knight’s in the left, who would doubt in which to look for the nearest likeness to Homer? Or who will ever again venture to publish an abridged or re-modelled Iliad?
Apart, however, from the unsatisfactoriness of the results of attempts at reconstruction, have we reason to believe that the text of Homer has, as a whole, been seriously vitiated by interpolation or corruption? The difficulties attending its transmission from the time of the poet are not to be denied. But I think we have scarcely enough considered the amount of means which were available, and which were actually employed, in order to neutralize those difficulties, and achieve the task. Although writing of some description appears to have existed at the epoch of the Poems, it can be probably proved, and may at any rate be fully admitted, that Homer did not write, but recited only. This is the first step: now for the second. I pass by the argument with those, who deny that poems of this length could be transmitted orally at all, as one already disposed of by the general verdict of the world. So, likewise, I leave behind me, at the point where Mure has placed them, all the reasonings of the _piecers_, who say that there were originally a number of Iliadic and Odyssean songs, afterwards made up into the poems such as we now have them: of the _amplifiers_, who look upon them as expanded respectively by gradual interpolations and additions from an original of small dimensions; of the _separators_, who will have just two Homers and no more, one for the Iliad, and one for the Odyssey. I assume for the present purpose the contrary of all these three propositions: and simply invite those who disbelieve them, but who also conceive that the text is generally unsafe and untrustworthy in its detail, to some consideration of that subject.