HOMERIC UNITY. 165 contradictions, though they be even gross and numerous ; but the preponderance of these proofs of mere unpiepared coalescence over the other proofs of designed adaptation scattered throughout the whole poem. For the poet (or the cooperating poets, if more than one) may have intended to compose an harmonious whole, but may have realized their intention incompletely, and left partial faults ; or, perhaps, the contradictory lines may have crept in through a corrupt text. A survey of the whole poem is necessary to determine the question ; and this necessity, too, has not always been attended to. If it had happened that the Odyssey had been preserved to us alone, without the Iliad, I think the dispute respecting Homeric unity would never have been raised. For the former is, in my judgment, pervaded almost from beginning to end by marks of designed adaptation ; and the special faults which Wolf, W. Miiller, and B. Thiersch, 1 have singled out for the purpose of disproving such unity of intention, are so few, and of so little importance, that they would have been universally regarded as mere instances of haste or unskilfulness on the part of the poet, had they not been seconded by the far more powerful battery opened against the Iliad. These critics, having laid down their general presumptions against the antiquity of the long epopee, illustrate their principles by exposing the many flaws and fissures in the Iliad, and then think it sufficient if they can show a few similar defects in the Odyssey, as if the breaking up of Homeric unity in the former naturally entailed a similar necessity with regard to the latter ; and their method of proceeding, contrary to the rule above laid down, puts the more difficult problem in the foreground, as a means of solution for the easier. We can hardly wonder, however, that they have applied their observa tions in the first instance to the Iliad, because it is in every man's* esteem the more marked, striking, and impressive poem of the two, and the character of Homer is more intimately identified with it than with the Odyssey. This may serve as an explana- tion of the course pursued; but be the case as it may in respect to comparative poetical merit, it is not the less true, that, as an 1 Bcrnhard Thiersch, Ucber das' Zeitelter nnd ViUerland des Homei (Halberstadt, 1832), Einleitung, pp. 4-18.
