Gilbert Murray - The Rise of the Greek Epic

THESE lectures were written in response to an invitation from Harvard University to deliver the Gardiner Lane Course for 1907s. Only some half of them were actually so delivered. The subject had been so long forming itself in my mind, and I was also so anxious not to allow any mere lack of pains to prove me unworthy of the honour thus offered me, that I soon found my material completely outrunning the bounds of the proposed course. I print the whole book; but I must confess that those parts of it which were spoken at Harvard have, if it is not egotistical to say so, a special place in my affections, through their association with the constant and most considerate kindness of Mr. and Mrs. Lane and of many others who became in varying degrees my xenoi in America.

The book touches on some subjects where, feeling more than usually conscious of the insecurity of my own knowledge, I have not scrupled to take advantage of the learning of my friends. On several points of archaeology and primitive history I have sought counsel from Prof. J. L. Myres; on points of Old French from Miss Pope of Somerville College; on Semitic matters, from my colleague Prof. D. S. Margoliouth, whose vast stores have stood always most generously open to me. In a more general way I am conscious of help received from Mr. J. W. Mackail and Mr. T. C. Snow, and above all from Miss J. E. Harrison, who read the Lectures in MS. and called my attention to much recent foreign literature which I should otherwise

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have neglected. The debt which I owe to her Prolegomena, also, will be visible on many of the ensuing pages.

In subjects such as these the conclusions reached by any writer can often be neither certain nor precise. Yet they may none the less be interesting and even valuable. If our evidence is incomplete, that is no reason for not using it as far as it goes. I have tried throughout the book never to think about making a debating case, or taking up the positions most easy to defend; but always to set out honestly and with much reflection what really seems to me to be most like the truth. I feel, indeed, that I ought perhaps to have stated my evidence much more fully and systematically. My excuse is that the lectures were originally written almost without books of reference, and that when I went over them to verify my statements and cite my authorities, I hesitated to load the book with references which might be unnecessary, and which in any case were rather in the nature of afterthoughts.

As regards the Homeric Question, which forms in one way or another an important element in my subject, I have long felt that the recent reaction against advanced views has been largely due, not indeed to lack of knowledge, but to inadequate understanding of what the 'advanced' critics really mean. A good part of my present work has therefore lain in thinking out with rather more imaginative effort many of the common phrases and hypotheses of Homeric criticism. My own views are not, of course, identical with those of any other writer. Among English scholars I agree most closely with Dr. Leaf, and may almost say that I accept his work as a basis. For the rest, I follow generally in the main tradition of Wolff, Lachmann, Kirchhoff, Wilamowitz. But the more I read, the more conscious I am of good work being done on all sides in the investigation of Greek religion and early

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history, and of the astonishing advance which those subjects have made within my own memory. The advance still continues. Archaeologists are throwing shafts of light even across that Dark Age of which I speak so much in Lectures II and III. My own little book, heaven knows! indulges in no dream of making a final statement of the truth on any part of its field. It is only an attempt to puzzle out a little more of the meaning of a certain remote age of the world, whose beauty and whose power of inspiration seem to shine the more wonderful the more resolutely we set ourselves to understand it.

GILBERT MURRAY

NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD, Sept. 1907.

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