Note 65 — Lecture III. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN EXEGESIS.

It was a natural result of the estimation in which he was held that he should sometimes have been regarded as being not only inspired, but divine: the passages which refer to this are collected in G. Cuper, Apotheosis vel consecratio Homeri (in vol. ii. of Polenus’s Supplement to Gronovius’s Thesaurus), which is primarily a commentary on the bas-relief by Archelaus of Priene, now in the British Museum (figured, e.g. in Overbeck, Geschichte der griechischen Plastik, ii. 333). The idea has existed in much more recent times, not indeed that he was divine, but that so much truth and wisdom could not have existed outside Judæa. There is, for example, a treatise by G. Croesus, entitled, ομηρος εβραιος sive historia Hebræorum ab Homero Hebraicis nominibus ac sententiis conscripta in Odyssea et Iliade, Dordraci, 1704, which endeavours to prove both that the name Homer is a Hebrew word, that the Iliad is an account of the conquest of Canaan, and that the Odyssey is a narrative of the wanderings of the children of Israel up to the death of Moses.