The Iliad of Homer - Get a Free Blog

their composition is referred; and that
without writing, neither the perfect symmetry
of so complicated a work could
have been originally conceived by any
poet, nor, if realized by him, transmitted
with assurance to posterity. The absence
of easy and convenient writing, such as
must be indispensably supposed for long
manuscripts, among the early Greeks,
was thus one of the points in Wolf's case
against the primitive integrity of the Iliad
and Odyssey. By Nitzsch, and other leading
opponents of Wolf, the connection of
the one with the other seems to have been
accepted as he originally put it; and it has
been considered incumbent on those who
defended the ancient aggregate character
of the Iliad and Odyssey, to maintain that
they were written poems from the beginning.
"To me it appears, that the architectonic
functions ascribed by Wolf to Peisistratus