Note 245 — Chapter XXI · GRECIAN EPIC.—HOMERIC POEMS.

Xenoph. Memorab. iv. 2, 10; and Sympos. iii. 6. Οἶσθά τι οὖν ἔθνος ἠλιθιώτερον ῥαψῴδων; ... Δῆλον γὰρ ὅτι τὰς ὑπονοίας οὐκ ἐπίστανται. Σὺ δὲ Στησιμβρότῳ τε καὶ Ἀναξιμάνδρῳ καὶ ἄλλοις πολλοῖς πολὺ δέδωκας ἀργύριον, ὥστε οὐδέν σε τῶν πολλοῦ ἀξίων λέληθε.

These ὑπονοῖαι are the hidden meanings, or allegories, which a certain set of philosophers undertook to discover in Homer, and which the rhapsodes were no way called upon to study.

The Platonic dialogue, called Iôn, ascribes to Iôn the double function of a rhapsode, or impressive reciter, and a critical expositor of the poet (Isokratês also indicates the same double character, in the rhapsodes of his time,—Panathenaic, p. 240); but it conveys no solid grounds for a mean estimate of the class of rhapsodes, while it attests remarkably the striking effect produced by their recitation (c. 6, p. 535). That this class of men came to combine the habit of expository comment on the poet with their original profession of reciting, proves the tendencies of the age; probably, it also brought them into rivalry with the philosophers.

The grounds taken by Aristotle (Problem. xxx. 10; compare Aul. Gellius, xx. 14) against the actors, singers, musicians, etc. of his time, are more serious, and have more the air of truth.

If it be correct in Lehrs (de Studiis Aristarchi, Diss. ii. p. 46) to identify those early glossographers of Homer, whose explanations the Alexandrine critics so severely condemned, with the rhapsodes, this only proves that the rhapsodes had come to undertake a double duty, of which their predecessors before Solôn would never have dreamed.