ABSTRACT
I t must not, of course, be supposed that, while new methods and materials were being contributed by the archaeologists, historians and geographers, literary criticism was out of action. Wilamowitz’s Homerische Untersuchungen, with its analysis of the Odyssey and its brilliant review of the literary history of the poems, came out in 1884, while Schliemann was at Tiryns, and Paul Cauer’s Grundfragen der Homerkritik in 1895, while the British School was excavat ing Phylakopi. The general histories of Greek literature1 adopted moderate and rather eclectic compromises between radical and con servative views, which fairly represent the general trend of opinion, but do not advance the solution of any of the main problems or make serious contributions to method. The first professed historian since Grote to review the Homeric Question in the light of his own special studies was Louis Erhardt.2 He deserves mention for an early attempt to ascertain, by comparison with other examples of early epic, the social conditions in which this class of literature usually arises; but, like almost all German scholars since Wolf and Lach mann, he appreciated only very imperfectly the differences between folk-poetry, such as had been by this time collected in a number of regions, and the far more composite and consciously artificial struc ture of poems like the Iliad and Odyssey. Indeed, in Germany
1 A. and M. Croiset, Histoire de la Litterature grecque, 1887; Wm. Christ, Geschichte der griechische Literatur, 2nd ed., 1890.
