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Updated: June 13, 2025
But Helbig does not ask how it happened that, if poets of these centuries had lost touch with the Epic tradition, and had wandered into a new region of thought, as they had, examples of their notions do not occur in the Iliad and Odyssey.
The reader who desires full information must turn to the elaborate works of Mau and Helbig, of Gell and Overbeck, to say nothing of the descriptive pages, full of condensed knowledge, contained in Murray’s and Baedeker’s guide-books in order to obtain a clear impression of all he wishes to inspect.
We must remember that, according to Helbig, the Ionians, colonists in a new country, "had no use for ghosts." A fresh colony does not produce ghosts. This is a hasty generalisation! This colonial theory is one of Helbig's too venturous generalisations. He studies the ghost, or rather dream-apparition, of Patroclus after examining the funeral of Hector; but we shall begin with Patroclus.
Helbig's explanation, therefore, explains nothing, and, unless a better explanation is offered, we return to the theory, rejected by Dr. Helbig, that implements and tools were often, not always, of iron, while weapons were of bronze in the age of the poet. Dr. Helbig rejects this opinion.
If Helbig and other critics of his way of thinking mean that in the Iliad there are parts of genuine antiquity; other parts by poets who, with stern accuracy, copied the old modes; other parts by poets who tried to copy but failed; with passages by poets who deliberately innovated; and passages by poets who drew fanciful pictures of the past "from their inner consciousness," while, finally , some poets made minute antiquarian researches; and if the argument be that the critics can detect these six elements, then we are asked to repose unlimited confidence in critical powers of discrimination.
Experience teaches us that the poets of an uncritical age Shakespeare, for example introduce the weapons of their own period into works dealing with remote ages. Hamlet uses the Elizabethan rapier. In his argument on bronze and iron, unluckily, Dr. Helbig deserts the judicious opinions of his note for the opposite theory of his text. Though Dr.
Helbig in his text is of the opposite opinion, I must agree entirely with the view which he states so clearly in his note. It follows that if a poet speaks invariably of weapons of bronze, he is living in an age when weapons are made of no other material. In his text, however, Dr.
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.
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