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The poets who did not introduce the new small bucklers with which they were familiar, did stuff the Iliad full of corslets unknown, by the theory, to the original poet, but familiar to rhapsodists living centuries later.
Leaf, who has not edited the Odyssey, may now, in deference to his belief in the Pisistratean editor, have changed his opinion of the merits of the poem. If the Odyssey, like the Iliad, was, till about 540 B.C., a chaos of lays of all ages, variously known in various repertoires of the rhapsodists, and patched up by the Pisistratean editor, then of two things one either Mr.
That poetic nation knew well how to invest with the tints of fable the antique traditions of their history. At the voice of their rhapsodists together with their poets and romancers, kings became gods and their adventures of gallantry were transformed into immortal allegories.
Particularly is this true of his more impassioned writings, which are a faithful rescript of his all-impassioned life. Hierophant we have called him, the prince of hierophants, having reference to the matter of his revelations; but in his manner, in his style of composition, he is something more than this: here he stands the monarch amongst rhapsodists.
Many scholars have believed that all the early literature of Greece, including the Iliad, the Odyssey, and all other “poems of the Cycle,” was preserved in this way by the Rhapsodists for centuries, down to the time of Peisistratus, and then for the first time reduced to writing. This shows at least what they have believed was possible.
Many names of these ancient poets are recorded, but of their poetry, previous to Homer, not even a fragment remains. The bards or chanters of epic poetry were called Rhapsodists, from the manner in which they delivered their compositions; this name was applied equally to the minstrel who recited his own poems, and to him who declaimed anew songs that had been heard a thousand times before.
We cannot imagine late Ionian rhapsodists listening to the Iliad, and saying, "These poets of the Iliad are all wrong: at the date of the Mycenaean prime, as every educated man knows, corslets were not yet in fashion. So we must have no corslets in the Odyssey?"
Although this evidence had been pawed over by so many hands since the fifteenth century, by the phlegmatic and the fiery, by rhapsodists and cynics, he felt sure that Wheeler would not dismiss the case lightly. Indeed, Claude put a great deal of time and thought upon the matter, and for the time being it seemed quite the most important thing in his life.
A modern critic, who thinks this possible, is bringing the practice of archaising poets of the late nineteenth century into the minds of rhapsodists of the eighth century before Christ. Artists of the middle of the sixteenth century always depict Jeanne d'Arc in the armour and costume of their own time, wholly unlike those of 1430. This is the regular rule.
Thucydides, in the Periclean age, regards Homer as the blind Chian minstrel who composed the Hymn to the Delian Apollo: a good proof of the relative antiquity of that piece, but not evidence, of course, that our whole collection was then regarded as Homeric. Baumeister agrees with Wolf that the brief Hymns were recited by rhapsodists as preludes to the recitation of Homeric or other cantos.
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