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Homer and the Iliad [tr. in verse, with notes] by J.S. Blackie
Homer and the Iliad by JS Blackie - tr. in verse, with notes Author:Homerus Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: DISSERTATION III. ON THE PERSONALITY AND PERSONAL HISTORY OF HOMER. " We Germans," says G. W. Nitzsch, " have before other European nations this evil prefe... more »rence, that we have thoroughly darkened to our mental eye the genius of Homer, and so blotted his image, that scarcely a shadow of his personality remains."1 A remarkable confession this, and about a phenomenon certainly not less remarkable. But more remarkable than both perhaps it may seem, that this obscuration on a great point of literary history, proceeding from Germany, should have travelled across the German Ocean to sober, practical England, and manifested itself there in some notable cases, as a total eclipse of the historical faculty in reference to the early fortunes of Greece. In reference to Homer more especially, the distinguished author of a history of Greece, whose high merits are universally recognised, gives us the following utterance :—" Homer is no individual man, but the divine or heroic father of the gentle Homerids ;" and this fatherhood is the mere unsubstantial product of the " ideas of worship and ancestry which constantly coalesced in the Grecian mind."2 Now, with regard to these Homerids, or minstrel brotherhoods of early Greece, who are here sup- 1 Sngeupoesie der Grirchfn. 1852. 2 The Historg of Greece. By Gaorgu Grote, edit 1862, vol. i. p. 517. HISTORIC PERSONALITY OF HOMElt. .Sl posed to be the real sons of a fantastic father, we shall have something to say by and bye ; meanwhile, the course of our previous inquiries leads us to presume that Homer is a real character, as much as Agamemnon, unless we are to suppose that the Hellenic memory had a peculiar retentiveness in preserving the personality of the famous old lord of the gate of lions at Mycenae, while it allowed the authors...« less