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lection accompanying it, that in this ocean are buried many of the brightest monuments of ancient genius.

It appears that, at the time Terence was writing, Rome was in possession of two thousand Greek comedies: all of which ve barbaris! not one hath descended to us, except what are found in our scanty volume of Aristophanes, and these are partly of the old personal class. The gleanings of a few fragments from the grammarians and scholiasts, with the translations of the Roman stage, are now the only samples of the Greek comedy in its last purity and perfection. It is true, that writers of the lower ages, and even the fathers of the Christian church have quoted liberally from the new comedy of the Greeks; these fragments are as respectable for their moral cast, as for their elegant turn of expression; but what a poignancy do they give to our regret, when we compute the loss posterity has suffered by the scale of these remains!

On the part of tragedy, although very many noble works have perished, yet, as some specimens of the great masters have come down to us entire, we have more to console us in this than in the comic department. Happily for the epic muse, the rage of ignorance could not reach the immortal poems of Homer: what other compositions of that great bard may have been lost to the world, is but a dark inquiry at the best; many poems of an antecedent, and some of a contemporary date, have undoubtedly been destroyed; but I am inclined to think, that from the time when those wonderful productions of the Iliad and Odyssey were collected and made public at Athens, till the Augustan æra, little was attempted in the epic branch.

NUMBER CXX.

By revising what history has delivered of the first poets of Greece we shall be able to form a very tolerable conjecture of the authors, whose works Pisistratus collected at the time he instituted his library in Athens; but before I undertake this, it is proper to remark that some authorities, ancient as well as modern, have ascribed the honour of compiling Homer's rhapsodies to Hipparchus the son of Pisistratus, and not to Pisistratus himself: I am not willing, therefore, to pass over the question without some explanation of it.

The ancient authorities I allude to are those of Plato in his Hipparchus, and Ælian in the second article of his eighth book: the first is a naked assertion; the second sets forth more circumstantiallyThat Hipparchus the son of Pisistratus, was the first who brought Homer's poems to Athens, and made the rhapsodists rehearse them in the general assembly of the Grecian states'-But this author, who is generally a faithful though a minute collector of anecdotes, expressly contradicts himself in the fourteenth article of the thirteenth book, and tells us that Pisistratus compiled the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer: Cicero, in the quotation from his Orator, mentioned in a preceding paper, gives the credit of the work to Pisistratus; Suidas, under the article of Homer, says That various persons were at the pains of collecting and arranging these books in succeeding times, but of these Pisistratus of Athens was

the first. Eustathius in his commentary on the Iliad concurs in the same testimony; he saysThat the grammarians, who compiled the Iliad, did it, as it is said, by command of Pisistratus; that they corrected it at discretion, and that the principal of these was Aristarchus, and next to him Zenodotus.' Comm. ad Iliad. lib. i. In this latter particular the learned commentator has fallen into an error; for it is well known that the celebrated critic Aristarchus, as well as Zenodotus, lived many years after the time of Pisistratus: I shall mention only one authority more on the same side of the question, which I take to be more decisive than any of the foregoing, and this is an ancient epigrammatist, who, in a distich upon a statue of Pisistratus, celebrates him on this very account, and gives a very probable conjecture, that this statue was erected in commemoration of the great work of the abovementioned compilation. Anthol. lib. iv. cap. iv.

From these authorities, as well as from strength of circumstance, it seems highly probable that the founder of the first public library should be studious to enrich his collection with the poems of the Iliad and Odyssey.

This important work was both extremely difficult to execute, and attended with very considerable expense in the progress of it. The rhapsodies of Homer were scattered up and down amongst the cities of Greece, which the itinerant poet had visited, and were necessarily in a very mutilated state, or recorded in men's memories after an imperfect manner, and by piecemeal only: in some places these inestimable relicks had been consumed by fire; and in the lapse of time it is natural to suppose they had suffered many injuries by accident and not a few by interpolation. Solon himself is accused of having made insertions in favour of the Athenians for poli

tical purposes. Nothing but the most timely exertions could have rescued them from oblivion, and Pisistratus, by restoring Homer, has justly made his own name the companion of the poet's in immortality: to his ardour we are indebted for their present existence. Understanding that there were rhapsodists, who went about the several Grecian states reciting, some an hundred, some a thousand, lines in detached passages of the Iliad and Odyssey, he caused public proclamation to be made of his design to collect those famous poems, offering a reward to every man who should bring him any fragment to assist his intended compilation, and appointing proper persons to receive their respective contributions. The resort on this occasion soon became prodigious; Pisistratus, however, still intent upon the work, adhered to his conditions, and let no man go away without his reward, though the same passages had been furnished ever so often by others before him: the inspectors of the work, by these means, had an opportunity of collating one with the other, and rejecting what appeared spurious upon collation: this was an office of great delicacy, and the ablest men of the time were selected for that purpose, with liberal allowances for their trouble; they were many in number, and when each had made his separate collection, and the rhapsodists ceased to come in, Pisistratus caused them all to assemble and produce their several copies for general review: the whole was now arranged according to the natural order of the poems, and in that order submitted to the final supervision of two persons, who were judged most competent: the poem, thus com, piled and corrected according to their judgement and discretion, was fairly transcribed, and the copy with great solemnity deposited in the library: had the like care been extended to the Margites and the

rest of Homer's poems, the world would probably have now been in possession of them also; and it is fair to conclude, from the circumstance of their extinction, that both the Iliad and Odyssey would have shared the same fate, had not this event so happily taken place under the patronage of Pisistratus. Let us mark this era, therefore, as the most important in the annals of literature, and let every man, who admires the genius of Homer, revere the memory of Pisistratus.

Lycurgus we know brought Homer's poems out of Asia, and dispersed them amongst his country. men at Lacedæmon; but Lycurgus considered these poems as a collection of maxims moral and political; he knew the influence which poetry has over rude uncivilized tempers, and the same reasons, that engaged him to employ the songs of Thales the Cretan in his first preludes towards a constitution of government, led him to adopt and import the epic poems of the Iliad and Odyssey: he saw they were of a sublime and animating cast, inspiring principles of religion, love of our country, contempt of death, and every heroic virtue that can dignify man's nature; that they manifested to Greece what misfortunes attended the disunion of her powers, and what those powers were capable of performing, when united; he wished to see an indissoluble alliance and compact of all the states of Greece for their common glory and defence, but he wished to see the state of Sparta, like the sons of Atreus, at the head of the league: in all these particulars the poems of Homer fully met his wishes and fell in with his views, and, as he had made his observations on the manners and characters of the Asiatics during his travels amongst them, he persuaded himself the time might come, when the united arms of Greece would again prevail over the nations

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