CHAPTER XXI - Grecian Epic.—Homeric Poems

Summary

At the head of those once abundant epical cotnpositions, most of them unfortunately lost, stand the Iliad and Odyssey, with the immortal name of Homer attached to each of them, embracing separate portions of the comprehensive legend of Troy. They form the type of what may be called the heroic epic of the Greeks, as distinguished from the genealogical, in which latter species some of Hesiodic poems—the Catalogue of Women, the Ecese, and the Naupactia—stood conspicuous. Poems of the Homeric character (if so it may be called, though the expression is very indefinite) were confined to one of the great events or great personages of Grecian legendary antiquity, comprised a limited number of characters all contemporaneous, and made some approach, more or less successful, to a certain poetical unity; while the Hesiodic poems, tamer in their spirit and unconfined both as to time and as to persons, strung together distinct events without any obvious view to concentration of interest—without legitimate beginning or end. Between these two extremes there were many gradations: biographical poems, such as the Herakleids and Theseids, recounting all the principal exploits performed by one single hero, present a character intermediate between the two, but bordering more closely on the Hesiodic. Even the hymns to the gods, which pass under the name of Homer, are epical fragments, narrating particular exploits or adventures of the god commemorated.

Both the didactic and the mystico-religious poetry of Greece, began in Hexameter verse—the characteristic and consecrated measure of the epic: but they belong to a different species, and burst out from a different vein in the Grecian mind.