The Sunday Scholars' Annual (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE HOMERIC EPIC There seems no reason to discard the tradition which makes the two bodies of poetry passing under the names of Homer and Hesiod about contemporary. Whatever amount of recasting took place from time to time in the manual known as the Works and Days, or, as the title might be more aptly translated, the Farmer's Calendar, the life it sets before us is substantially that of the time in which the Homeric poems were produced. The world dealt with in the epic is going on somewhere overhead, unintelligibly, only felt by common people through the added pressure of misery that it brings upon them. " The son of Cronus now and then," says the rustic poet, " destroys a broad army or a wall, or takes vengeance on their ships in the sea "? aXXore 8' Outs q Tutvye irrparov evpvv uiriaXecrev ij oye reioy r) j/e'ay ev irovrtp K.povlSri: uvorlwrai auriav.1 This is to him, and to the people from whom he sprang and to whom he belongs, the whole upshot of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Hesiod's picture of life, vivid and detailed as it is, has no beauty. The life he 1 W. and D., 245-7. knows is " hidden," obscure and laborious: yap '-ova-i Qeoi /3iov avdpunroiiriv.1 It is the wrong side of the pattern of the round world portrayed on the shield of Achilles, the subterranean crypt of that splendid church with its soaring columns and traceried vaultings, its organ-music and window-fires. The difference of subject and treatment is sharply given in two phrases: Homer sings of the Kea avSpoav, the feats of heroes, Hesiod of the epya avOpdnrtov, the industries of men. If the Iliad is the Morte d' Arthur, the Works and Days is the Biblia Pauperum of early Hellas. In the rare passages where Hesiod rises into the epic tone, it is with a difference of accent and intention that ma...