Excerpt from The Truth About Homer: With Some Remarks on Prof. Jebb"s Introduction to Homer
Professor Jebb, with the applause of admiring Reviewers, has come forward, not for the first time, in his "Introduction to Homer," as an advocate of that view respecting the very early date of our two great Epics which appears to he accepted generally in this country, as well as by a numerous school in Germany. They agree in believing that the Iliad and the Odyssey have come down to us (more or less nearly in their integrity) from B.C. 800 or 850, if not even from yet earlier times. Of course they rely, generally, (1) on the archaic character of the poems, (2) the ancient forms of the inflexions, (3) the notices of domestic life and customs, (4) the statement of Herodotus, recording perhaps the tradition of his age, that "Homer" lived four centuries before his own time. And that the matter of the poems is very old, - as is the matter of the Argonautics of Apollonius and of the "Post-homerica" of Q. Smyrnaeus, - none will care to deny. The form, date, and authorship of the Epics as we now have them is the only question in dispute.
Professor Jebb takes no notice of the fact, so often indicated in my writings on this subject, that we cannot trace the existence of these poems, beyond the occasional, but rare, reference to some few episodes contained in them, in the writings of Pindar and the Tragic Poets; while we can show quite conclusively, that they uniformly followed that very different version of the "Tale of Troy" which we now call "Cyclic." Again and again I have pointed out that this is a fatal flaw in the claim to the descent of "our Homer" from so remote an antiquity! Professor Jebb observes a judicious silence on this difficulty; he is too good a scholar, I believe, to have recourse to the very absurd theory, that the great poets of the Periclean age, and indeed up to Plato"s time, or about B.C. 400, knowingly and deliberately took their themes from later, inferior, and supplementary epics (i.e. believed by themselves to be such), because they hesitated to trespass on the genuine works of the "Divine Homer."
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