Vico. 641 to be poor and blind, because such was really the condition of the f)al/(joSoi. The Iliad was produced in the youthful age of Greece, when pride, passion and vengeance were its characteristics, as exhibited in Achilles; the Odyssey, when reflexion had cooled the passions, and the calm sagacity of Ulysses was an object of admiration. Notwithstanding the coincidence between the opinions of Vico and Wolf, respecting the mixed authorship and late arrangement of the Homeric poems, it is evident that they were led in very different ways to their conclusion. The germ of Wolf's speculations was no doubt the passage in which Bentley declares his opinion, that the Iliad and Odyssey were not reduced into an epic poem, till 500 years after their first composition^^. To emulate the fame of the author of the Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris, and be deemed, in the higher criticism, the Bentley of his own age, was the great object of Wolffs ambition. Vico, regarding the time of the monarchy at Rome as answering nearly to the heroic age of Greece, was naturally led to place the lower limit of the Homeric school as late as possible ; while, having adopted the common date of the war of Troy, he was compelled to extend it upwards four centuries and a half. By making Homer not an individual, but the representative of the genius of the heroic age, he extricates himself from this difficulty. Vico's most startling paradoxes will usually be found to arise from the obscure perception of some great truth. According to the common opinion of the learned in his time, all that was not pure history in the Iliad was the fiction of one individual, who had invented heroic poetry and brought it to perfection. There is however another way in which the absurdity of this opinion may be avoided, without contra- dicting Grecian belief and tradition so violently as Vico does. If the theme of the Trojan war had been long treated by the heroic poets of Greece, who had fixed its outlines, created a poetic vocabulary, and a system of harmonious versification, " the blind old man of Scio, who entered into the inheritance of their forgotten labours, may be allowed to retain his per- ^^ See the passage from Phileleutherus Lipsiensis, quoted in Wolf. Proleg. ad Horn. p. cxv.
