Note 293 — Chapter XXI · GRECIAN EPIC.—HOMERIC POEMS. (continued 2)

O. Müller, (History of Greek Literature, ch. v. § 8,) doubts whether the beginning of the second book was written “by the ancient Homer, or by one of the later Homerids:” he thinks the speech of Agamemnôn, wherein he plays off the deceit upon his army, is “a copious parody (of the same words used in the ninth book) composed by a later Homerid, and inserted in the room of an originally shorter account of the arming of the Greeks.” He treats the scene in the Grecian agora as “an entire mythical comedy, full of fine irony and with an amusing plot, in which the deceiving and deceived Agamemnôn is the chief character.”

The comic or ironical character which is here ascribed to the second book appears to me fanciful and incorrect; but Müller evidently felt the awkwardness of the opening incident, though his way of accounting for it is not successful. The second book seems to my judgment just as serious as any part of the poem.

I think also that the words alluded to by O. Müller in the ninth book are a transcript of those in the second, instead of the reverse, as he believes,—because it seems probable that the ninth book is an addition made to the poem after the books between the first and the eighth had been already inserted,—it is certainly introduced after the account of the fortification, contained in the seventh book, had become a part of the poem: see ix. 349. The author of the Embassy to Achilles fancied that that hero had been too long out of sight, and out of mind,—a supposition for which there was no room in the original Achillêis, when the eighth and eleventh books followed in immediate succession to the first, but which offers itself naturally to any one on reading our present Iliad.