Nevertheless, the striking fact about our Homeric poems is not that they show some marks of the rhapsode's treatment, but that they do not show more. They are, as they stand, not suited for the rhapsode. They are too long to recite as wholes, except on some grand and unique occasion like that which the law specially contemplated; too highly organised to split up easily into detachable lengths. It is not likely that the law reduced them to their present state at one blow. All it insisted on was to have the 'true history' in its proper sequence. If it permitted rhapsodes at all, it had to allow them a certain freedom in their choice of ornament. It did not insist on adherence to a fixed wording.
The whole history of the text in the fourth century illustrates this arrangement, and the fact essentially is, that the poems as we have them, organic and indivisible, are adapted to the demands of a reading public. There was no reading public either in Athens or in Ionia by 470. Anaximander wrote his words of wisdom for a few laborious students to learn by heart; Xenophanes appealed simply to the ear; it was not till forty years later that Herodotus turned his recitations into book form for educated persons to read to themselves, and Euripides began to collect a library.
This helps us to some idea of the Ionian epos as it lived and grew before its transplanting. It was recited, not read; the incidents of the Iliad and the Odyssey were mostly in their present order, and doubtless the poems roughly of their present compass, though we may be sure there were Iliads without K, and Odysseys ending, where Aristarchus ended his, at ψ 296, omitting the last book and a half. Much more important, the Iliad did not necessarily stop at the mere funeral of Hector. We know of a version which ran on from our last line -- "So dealt they with the burying of Hector; but there came the Amazon, daughter of Ares, greathearted slayer of men" -- and which told of the love of Achilles for the Amazon princess, and his slaying of her, and probably also of his well-earned death. The death of Achilles is, as Goethe felt it to be, the real finish that our Iliad wants. When the enchanted steed, Xanthus, and the dying Hector prophesy it, we feel that their words must come true or the story lose its meaning. And if it was any of the finer 'Sons of Homer' who told of that last death-grapple where it was no longer Kebrionês nor Patroclus, but Achilles himself, who lay "under the blind dust-storm, the mighty limbs flung mightily, and the riding of war forgotten," the world must owe a grudge to those patriotic organisers who could not bear to leave the Trojan dogs with the best of it.
Of course in this Ionic Homer there were no 'Athenian interpolations,' no passages like the praise of Menestheus, the claim to Salamis, the mentions of Theseus, Procris, Phzedra, Ariadne, or the account of the Athenians in N, under the name of 'long-robed Ionians,' acting as a regiment of heavy infantry. Above all, the language, though far from pure, was at least very different from our vulgate text; it was free from Atticisms.
THE EPIC LANGUAGE
We must analyse this language and see the historical processes implied in its growth.
An old and much-scoffed-at division of Greek dialects spoke of Ionic, Æolic, Doric, and 'Epic.' The first three denote, or mean to denote, real national distinctions; the last is, of course, an artificial name. But the thing it denotes is artificial too -- a language that no Ionians, Dorians, or Æolians ever spoke; a 'large utterance,' rhythmic and emotional, like a complicated instrument for the expression of the heroic saga. As has already been remarked, it is a dialect conditioned at every turn by the Epic metre; its fixed epithets, its formulæ, its turns of sentence-connection, run into hexameters of themselves. Artificial as it is in one sense, it makes the impression of Nature herself speaking. Common and random phrases -- the torrents coming "down from the hills on their head;" the "high West wind shouting over a wine-faced sea;""the eastern isle where dwells Eôs the Dawn-child, amid her palaces and her dancing-grounds, and the rising places of the Sun" -- these words in Epic Greek seem alive; they call up not precisely the look or sound, but the exact emotional impression of morning and wind and sea. The expressions for human feeling are almost more magical: the anger of "what though his hands be as fire, and his spirit as burning iron"; or the steadfastness of "Bear, O my heart, thou hast borne yet a harder thing."
There is thus no disparagement to the Epic dialect in saying that, as it stands, it is no language, but a mixture of linguistically-incongruous forms, late, early, and primæval.
There are first the Atticisms. Forms like Tηδη ἕως, ντκὠντες, can only have come into the poems on Attic soil, and scarcely much before the year 500 B.C. At least, the fragments of Solon's Laws have, on the whole, a more archaic look. But for the purposes of history we must distinguish. There are first the removable Atticisms. A number of lines which begin with ἕως will not scan until we restore the Ionic form ηος. That is, they are good Ionic lines, and the Attic form is only a mistake of the Attic copyist. But there are also fixed Atticisms -- lines which scan as they stand, and refuse to scan if turned into Ionic; these are in the strict sense late lines; they were composed on Attic soil after Athens had taken possession of the epos.
Again, there are 'false forms' by the hundred -attempts at a compromise made by an Athenian reciter or scribe between a strange Ionic form and his own natural Attic, when the latter would not suit the metre. The Ionic for 'seeing' was óρέοντες, the Attic óρωντες -three syllables instead of four; our texts give the false óροωντες -- i.e. they have tortured the Attic form into four syllables by a quaver on the ω. Similarly σπεíονς is an attempt to make the Attic σπεους fill the place of the uncontracted σπέεος, and εὺχετάαι is an elongated ενχετâσθαὶ. Spelling, of course, followed pronunciation; the scribe wrote what the reciter chanted.
The historical process which these forms imply, can only have taken place when Athens looked nowhere outside herself for literary information, when there were no Ionic-speaking bards to correct the Attic bookseller. Some of them, indeed, can only have ceased to be absurd when the Koinê, the common literary language, had begun to blur the characters of the real dialects and to derive everything from the Attic standard. That is, they would date from late in the fourth century.
But to eliminate the Attic forms takes us a very little way; there is another non-Ionic element in ' Homer's' language which has been always recognised, though variously estimated, from antiquity onwards, and which seems to belong to the group of dialects spoken in Thessaly, Lesbos, and the Æolian coast of Asia including the Troad. Forms like 'Aτρεíδαο, Mονσάων for άν πíσνρες for τέσσαρες, intensitives in ἐρφ, adjectives in -εννος, and masses of verbal flexions are proved to be Æolic, as well as many particular words like πολνπάµµοννς, Θερíτµς ἄµνδις.
There is also another earlier set of 'false forms,' neither Æolic nor Ionic, but explicable only as a mixture of the two. κεκλµγοτες is no form; it is an original Æolic κεκλἠγοτες twisted as close as metre will allow it to the Ionic κεκλµγóτε; ἤπντα τέττΙξ, for 'singing cicada,' is the Æolic ἄΠντα brought as near as metre permits to the Ionic ὴπύτµς. Most significant of all is the case of the Digamma or Vau, a W-sound, which disappeared in Ionic and Attic Greek, both medially (as in our Norwich, Berwick) and initially (as in who, and the Lancashire 'ooman). It survived, however, in Doric inscriptions, and in such of the Æolic as were not under Ionian influence, till the fifth and sometimes the fourth century. It is called in antiquity the Æolic letter.' Now there are 3354 places in the poems which insist on the restoration of this Vau -- i.e. the lines will not scan without it; 617 places, on the other hand, where in ancient Æolic it ought to stand, but is metrically inadmissible. That is, through the great mass of the poems the habit and tradition of the Æolic pronunciation is preserved; in a small part the Ionic asserts itself.
These facts have been the subject of hot controversy; but the only effective way to minimise their importance is to argue that we have no remains of Æolic of the seventh century, and that the apparent Æolisms may be merely 'old Greek' forms dating from a period before the scattered townships