The Problem of the Homeric Poems (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1878 Excerpt: ...in the palaeozoic and the neozoic sections of Homer, but through all Greek literature without specialisation to the oak. It is remarkable that the passages where the simple word Spvi seems to retain the pristine Indo-Germanic sense, generic not specific, are Achillean (N 390, n 483; cp. Aristarchus in Schol. in A 86, = ira- Sivtpav), whereas in V 328 of the Ulyssean area it has become specific. The emergence of the neozoic ior6ot only in the Ulyssean area, just as SpSs begins to be specialised, shows the balance of archaism in favour of the Achilleid. (-) In regard to the arts of SEWING, SPINNING, WEAVING, and EMBROIDERY, it is not possible to establish any criterion of 'before' and 'after, ' inasmuch as these arts, in something like regular hand-fabrics, seem familiar in the oldest cantos. The Achilleid knows of sewing or stitching, (pdimiv M 296), and so familiar is the operation that it has passed into a metaphorical sense and become applicable to plotting, as in 2 367. Compare KaicoppaQir) as early as O 16. This latter usage, begun in the Achilleid, is extended in the Odyssey. In the end of M (433), mention is made, in a simile, of a yw xfP vfJTts, who earns a living for her children painfully by 'woolworking.' The antiquity of the simile has been doubted as suggesting rather the wool-manufactures of Miletus in an after time (Bergk, H. of Gr. Lit. p. 412, and cp. Weissenborn in Buchholz, p. 302). The presence, however, of aivat and other woollen fabrics in the chest of Achilles in II, a part which has all the marks of hoary antiquity, is sufficient voucher for a tolerably advanced condition of such arts, and Hesiod (Op. 600) keeps the Achilleid in countenance, when he recommends his model farmer to employ as a servant a female epiOos that has n..