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Updated: May 19, 2025
Monro, Grote, Nutzhorn, and many others argue, lacks evidence. As Mr. Monro reasons, and as Blass states the case bluntly, "Solon, or Pisistratus, or whoever it was, put a stop, at least as far as Athens was concerned, to the mangling of Homer" by the rhapsodists or reciters, each anxious to choose a pet passage, and not going through the whole Iliad in due sequence.
"The ignorance of the Neapolitans, from the highest to the lowest, is very eminent; and excites the admiration of all the rest of Italy. This is intended to gain alms for Masses. The same populace sit for hours on the Mole, listening to rhapsodists who recite Ariosto. I have seen I think five of them all within a hundred yards of each other, and some sets of fiddlers to boot.
But, according to the prevalent critical theory, we read in the Iliad not only large "expansions" of many dates, but also briefer interpolations inserted by the strolling reciters or rhapsodists. "Until the final literary redaction had come," says Mr. Here we are far from Mr.
Folk-lore and sagas, ancient jokes and tragedies, the whole stock in trade of rhapsodists and minstrels are made an edifying and interesting branch of scripture by simply identifying the principal characters with the Buddha, his friends and his enemies in their previous births . But in Hinayanist Buddhism legend and mythology are ornamental, and edifying, nothing more.
Indeed, he seems in general to have looked with indifference, if not with dislike, upon the professed athletes. He often appointed prizes, for which not only tragedians and musicians, pipers and harpers, but rhapsodists also, strove to outvie one another; and delighted in all manner of hunting and cudgel-playing, but never gave any encouragement to contests either of boxing or of the pancratium.
Behind them marched the musicians and singers of the city, crowned with roses, clad in flowing white vestments. They swept the lyre, and played the flutes, and some Greeks from Sónnica's pottery, who had been wandering rhapsodists, sang fragments from the epic of the Trojan war before the barbarian throngs, who scarcely understood them, but admired the harmonious cadence of Homer's verses.
These are the élite of Athens. Then there are the Sophists and their young disciples, and the vast crowd of the Athenian people. Some of the oldest among them may have seen and heard the "Prometheus Vinctus"; certainly very many of them have seen "Antigone," and "Oedipus," and "Electra"; and all of them have heard the Rhapsodists.
If the descriptions in Homer vary from these relics, to what extent do they vary? and do the differences arise from the fact that the poet describes consistently what he sees in his own age, or are the variations caused by late rhapsodists in the Iron Age, who keep the great obsolete shields and bronze weapons, yet introduce the other military gear of their day, say 800-600 B.C. gear unknown to the early singers?
But now such harmony in the picture of life as exists in the poems is left without any explanation. We have now, by the theory, a crowd of rhapsodists, many generations of uncontrolled wandering men, who, for several centuries, "Rave, recite, and madden through the land," with no written texts, and with no "fixed body to maintain a standard."
Mute as any bullock led into the slaughtering-house, with something of a bullock's dulled and helpless fear in his eyes, he passed down and away between his jailers. And at once the professional noises rose, and the professional rhapsodists, hunching their gowns, swept that little lot of papers into their pink tape, and, turning to their neighbors, smiled, and talked, and jerked their eyebrows.
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