قراءة كتاب Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica

In order to make this file more accessible to the average computer user, the preparer has found it necessary to re-arrange some of the material. The preparer takes full responsibility for his choice of arrangement.

A few endnotes have been added by the preparer, and some additions have been supplied to the original endnotes of Mr. Evelyn-White's. Where this occurs I have noted the addition with my initials "DBK". Some endnotes, particularly those concerning textual variations in the ancient Greek text, are here omitted.

PREFACE

This volume contains practically all that remains of the post-Homeric and pre-academic epic poetry.

I have for the most part formed my own text. In the case of Hesiod I have been able to use independent collations of several MSS. by Dr. W.H.D. Rouse; otherwise I have depended on the apparatus criticus of the several editions, especially that of Rzach (1902). The arrangement adopted in this edition, by which the complete and fragmentary poems are restored to the order in which they would probably have appeared had the Hesiodic corpus survived intact, is unusual, but should not need apology; the true place for the "Catalogues" (for example), fragmentary as they are, is certainly after the "Theogony".

In preparing the text of the "Homeric Hymns" my chief debt—and it is a heavy one—is to the edition of Allen and Sikes (1904) and to the series of articles in the "Journal of Hellenic Studies" (vols. xv.sqq.) by T.W. Allen. To the same scholar and to the Delegates of the Clarendon Press I am greatly indebted for permission to use the restorations of the "Hymn to Demeter", lines 387-401 and 462-470, printed in the Oxford Text of 1912.

Of the fragments of the Epic Cycle I have given only such as seemed to possess distinct importance or interest, and in doing so have relied mostly upon Kinkel's collection and on the fifth volume of the Oxford Homer (1912).

The texts of the "Batrachomyomachia" and of the "Contest of Homer and Hesiod" are those of Baumeister and Flach respectively: where I have diverged from these, the fact has been noted.

Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Rampton, NR. Cambridge. Sept. 9th, 1914.

INTRODUCTION

General

The early Greek epic—that is, poetry as a natural and popular, and not (as it became later) an artificial and academic literary form—passed through the usual three phases, of development, of maturity, and of decline.

No fragments which can be identified as belonging to the first period survive to give us even a general idea of the history of the earliest epic, and we are therefore thrown back upon the evidence of analogy from other forms of literature and of inference from the two great epics which have come down to us. So reconstructed, the earliest period appears to us as a time of slow development in which the characteristic epic metre, diction, and structure grew up slowly from crude elements and were improved until the verge of maturity was reached.

The second period, which produced the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey", needs no description here: but it is very important to observe the effect of these poems on the course of post-Homeric epic. As the supreme perfection and universality of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" cast into oblivion whatever pre-Homeric poets had essayed, so these same qualities exercised a paralysing influence over the successors of Homer. If they continued to sing like their great predecessor of romantic themes, they were drawn as by a kind of magnetic attraction into the Homeric style and manner of treatment, and became mere echoes of the Homeric voice: in a word, Homer had so completely exhausted the epic genre, that after him further efforts were doomed to be merely conventional. Only the rare and exceptional genius of Vergil and Milton could use the Homeric medium without loss of individuality: and this quality none of the later epic poets seem to have possessed. Freedom from the domination of the great tradition could only be found by seeking new subjects, and such freedom was really only illusionary, since romantic subjects alone are suitable for epic treatment.

In its third period, therefore, epic poetry shows two divergent tendencies. In Ionia and the islands the epic poets followed the Homeric tradition, singing of romantic subjects in the now stereotyped heroic style, and showing originality only in their choice of legends hitherto neglected or summarily and imperfectly treated. In continental Greece 1101, on the other hand, but especially in Boeotia, a new form of epic sprang up, which for the romance and PATHOS of the Ionian School substituted the practical and matter-of-fact. It dealt in moral and practical maxims, in information on technical subjects which are of service in daily life—agriculture, astronomy, augury, and the calendar—in matters of religion and in tracing the genealogies of men. Its attitude is summed up in the words of the Muses to the writer of the "Theogony": `We can tell many a feigned tale to look like truth, but we can, when we will, utter the truth' ("Theogony" 26-27). Such a poetry could not be permanently successful, because the subjects of which it treats—if susceptible of poetic treatment at all—were certainly not suited for epic treatment, where unity of action which will sustain interest, and to which each part