150 HISTORY OF GRKHCE. thirst for new poetical effect ; and the men who stood forward in it may well be considered as desirous to study, and competent to criticize, from their own individual point of view, the written words of the Homeric rhapsodes, just as we are told that Kallinug both noticed and eulogized the Thebai's as the production of Ho- mer. There seems, therefore, ground for conjecturing, that (for the use of this newly-formed and important, but very narrow class) manuscripts of the Homeric poems and other old epics the Thebai's and the Cypria as well as the Iliad and the Odyssey began to be compiled towards the middle of the seventh cen- tury B. c. :' and the opening of Egypt to Grecian commerce, which took place about the same period, would furnish increased facilities for obtaining the requisite papyrus to write upon. A reading class, when once formed, would doubtless slowly increase, and the number of manuscripts along with it ; so that before the time of Solon, fifty years afterwards, both readers and manu- scripts, though still comparatively few, might have attained a certain recognized authority, and formed a tribunal of reference, against the carelessness of individual rhapsodes. We may, I think, consider the Iliad and Odyssey to have been preserved without the aid of writing, for a period near upon two centuries. 2 But is it true, as Wolf imagined, and as other able 1 Mr. Fynes Clinton (Fasti Hellenic!, vol. i. pp. 368-37.3) treats it as a matter of certainty that Archilochus and Alkman wrote their poems. I am not aware of any evidence for announcing this as positively known, ex- cept, indeed, an admission of Wolf, which is, doubtless, good as an argumen- tum ad hominem, but is not to be received as proof ( Wolf, Prolog, p. 50). The evidences mentioned by Mr. Clinton (p. 368) certainly cannot bi regarded as proving anything to the point. Giese (Ueber den JEolischen Dialekt, p. 172) places the first writing of the separate rhapsodies composing the Iliad in the seventh century B. c. 2 The songs of the Icelandic Skalds were preserved orally for a period longer than two centuries, P. A. Mailer thinks very much longer, before they were collected, or embodied in written story by Snorro and Siemund (Lange, Untersuchungen Ober die Gesch. der Nordischen Helden- sagc, p. 98 ; also, Introduct. pp. xx-xxviii). He confounds, however, often, the preservation of the songs from old time, with the question, whether they have or have not an historical basis. And there were, doubtless, many old bards and rhapsodes in ancient Greece, of wham the same might be said which Saxo Grammaticus affirm* of an Englishman named Lucas, that lie was " literis quidem tcnuitcr in
