The Iliad of Homer - Get a Free Blog

the mutual frequentation of religious
festivals, the Oriental and Egyptian veins
of religion, &c., familiar to the latter
epoch. These alterations Onomakritus,
and the other literary friends of Peisistratus,
could hardly have failed to notice,
even without design, had they then, for
the first time, undertaken the task of
piecing together many self existent epics
into one large aggregate. Everything in
the two great Homeric poems, both in
substance and in language, belongs to an
age two or three centuries earlier than
Peisistratus. Indeed, even the interpolations
(or those passages which, on the
best grounds, are pronounced to be such)
betray no trace of the sixth century before
Christ, and may well have been
heard by Archilochus and Kallinus—in
some cases even by Arktinus and Hesiod—as
genuine Homeric matter 29 As far
as the evidences on the case, as well in-