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The Iliad of Homer - Get a Free Blog

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the discoveries to which more modern investigations<br />

lay claim.<br />

At the end <strong>of</strong> the seventeenth century,<br />

doubts had begun to awaken on the subject,<br />

and we find Bentley remarking that<br />

"<strong>Homer</strong> wrote a sequel <strong>of</strong> songs and<br />

rhapsodies, to be sung by himself, for<br />

small comings and good cheer, at festivals<br />

and other days <strong>of</strong> merriment. <strong>The</strong>se<br />

loose songs were not collected together,<br />

in the form <strong>of</strong> an epic poem, till about<br />

Peisistratus' time, about five hundred<br />

years after." 23<br />

Two French writers—Hedelin and Perrault—avowed<br />

a similar scepticism on<br />

the subject; but it is in the "Scienza<br />

Nuova" <strong>of</strong> Battista Vico, that we first<br />

meet with the germ <strong>of</strong> the theory, subsequently<br />

defended by Wolf with so much<br />

learning and acuteness. Indeed, it is with<br />

the Wolfian theory that we have chiefly

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