Note 256 — Chapter XXI · GRECIAN EPIC.—HOMERIC POEMS.

See this argument strongly maintained in Giese (Ueber den Æolischen Dialekt, sect. 14. p. 160, seqq.). He notices several other particulars in the Homeric language,—the plenitude and variety of interchangeable grammatical forms,—the numerous metrical licenses, set right by appropriate oral intonations,—which indicate a language as yet not constrained by the fixity of written authority.

The same line of argument is taken by O. Müller (History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, ch. iv. s. 5).

Giese has shown also, in the same chapter, that all the manuscripts of Homer mentioned in the Scholia, were written in the Ionic alphabet (with Η and Ω as marks for the long vowels, and no special mark for the rough breathing), in so far as the special citations out of them enable us to verify.