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Kirchhoff and Wilamowitz Mollendorff see a late bad patchwork, where Mr. Leaf, Sir Richard Jebb, Blass, Wolf, and the verdict of all mankind see a masterpiece of excellent construction. The world has judged: the Odyssey is a marvel of construction: therefore is not the work of a late botcher of disparate materials, but of a great early poet. It is, of course, possible that Mr.
By carefully observing the earliest lays the late poets, in times of changed manners, "could avoid anachronisms by the aid of tradition, which gave them a very exact idea of the epic heroes." Such is the opinion of Wilamowitz Moellendorff. He appears to regard the tradition as keeping the later poets in the old way automatically, not consciously, but this, we also learn from Helbig, did not occur.
"Culture," in the German idea, is the justification of a nation's existence. Nationality has no other claim. Goethe, Luther, Kant, and Beethoven are Germany's title-deeds. A nation without a culture has no right to a "place in the sun." "History," says Wilamowitz in a lecture delivered in 1898, "knows nothing of any right to exist on the part of a people or a language without a culture.
She loved both Menelaus and Paris; and, according to some versions, hated Dêiphobus, the Trojan prince who seized her after Paris' death. There is a reference to Dêiphobus in the MSS. of the play here, but I follow Wilamowitz in thinking it spurious.
Leaf abides by his enthusiastic belief in the excellency of the composition, or he does not. If he does still believe that the composition of the Odyssey is a masterpiece, then the Pisistratean editor was a great master of construction. If he now, on the other hand, agrees with Wilamowitz Mollendorff that the Odyssey is cobbler's work, then his literary opinions are unstable.
Even if we take refuge with Wilamowitz in the idea that the Cyclic and Homeric poems were at first mere protoplasm of lays of many ages, and that they were all compiled, say in the sixth century, into so many narratives, we come no nearer to explaining why the tone, taste, and ideas of two such narratives Illiad and Odyssey are confessedly distinct from the tone, taste, and ideas of all the others.
What is true, and what is far more serious, both for Great Britain and for Europe, is that men like Harnack, Eucken, and Wilamowitz, who would repudiate all intellectual kinship with Macchiavelli and Nietzsche men who are leaders of European thought, and with whom and whose ideas we shall have to go on living in Europe publicly support and encourage the policy and standpoint of a Government which, according to British ideas, has acted with criminal wickedness and folly, and so totally misunderstood the conduct and attitude of Great Britain as honestly to regard us as hypocritically treacherous to the highest interests of civilisation.
Leaf calls it "a model of skilful construction," Wilamowitz Mollendorff denounces it as the work of "a slenderly-gifted botcher," of about 650 B.C., a century previous to Mr. Leaf's Athenian editor. Thus we come, after all, to a crisis in which mere literary appreciation is the only test of the truth about a work of literature.
Homer usually ignores them: Hesiod and the authors of the Hymns are less noble in their selections. For this reason and for many others, we regard the Hymns, on the whole, as post-Homeric, while their collector, by inserting the Hymn to Ares, shows little proof of discrimination. Only the methods of modern German scholars, such as Wilamowitz Mollendorf, and of Englishmen like Mr.
She is better, and more advanced. At the close of a wonderful address on "the glory of the Athenian Empire," in which he has employed all the resources of his wide learning to paint a picture of Ancient Greece at her best, Wilamowitz breaks into this impassioned peroration: "But one element in life, the best of all, ye lacked, noble burghers of Athens.
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