The
zenith of the historico-literary studies of the Greeks, and hence also
of their point of greatest importance--the Homeric question--was reached
in the age of the Alexandrian grammarians. Up to this time the Homeric
question had run through the long chain of a uniform process of
development, of which the standpoint of those grammarians seemed to be
the last link, the last, indeed, which was attainable by antiquity. They
conceived the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ as the creations of _one single_
Homer; they declared it to be psychologically possible for two such
different works to have sprung from the brain of _one_ genius, in
contradiction to the Chorizontes, who represented the extreme limit of
the scepticism of a few detached individuals of antiquity rather than
antiquity itself considered as a whole. To explain the different general
impression of the two books on the assumption that _one_ poet composed
them both, scholars sought assistance by referring to the seasons of the
poet's life, and compared the poet of the _Odyssey_ to the setting sun.
The eyes of those critics were tirelessly on the lookout for
discrepancies in the language and thoughts of the two poems; but at this
time also a history of the Homeric poem and its tradition was prepared,
according to which these discrepancies were not due to Homer, but
to those who committed his words to writing and those who sang them.
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