Since literary history first ceased to be a mere collection of names, people have attempted to grasp and formulate the individualities of the poets.  A certain mechanism forms part of the method:  it must be explained—­i.e., it must be deduced from principles—­why this or that individuality appears in this way and not in that.  People now study biographical details, environment, acquaintances, contemporary events, and believe that by mixing all these ingredients together they will be able to manufacture the wished-for individuality.  But they forget that the punctum saliens, the indefinable individual characteristics, can never be obtained from a compound of this nature.  The less there is known about the life and times of the poet, the less applicable is this mechanism.  When, however, we have merely the works and the name of the writer, it is almost impossible to detect the individuality, at all events, for those who put their faith in the mechanism in question; and particularly when the works are perfect, when they are pieces of popular poetry.  For the best way for these mechanicians to grasp individual characteristics is by perceiving deviations from the genius of the people; the aberrations and hidden allusions:  and the fewer discrepancies to be found in a poem the fainter will be the traces of the individual poet who composed it.

All those deviations, everything dull and below the ordinary standard which scholars think they perceive in the Homeric poems, were attributed to tradition, which thus became the scapegoat.  What was left of Homer’s own individual work?  Nothing but a series of beautiful and prominent passages chosen in accordance with subjective taste.  The sum total of aesthetic singularity which every individual scholar perceived with his own artistic gifts, he now called Homer.

This is the central point of the Homeric errors.  The name of Homer, from the very beginning, has no connection either with the conception of aesthetic perfection or yet with the Iliad and the Odyssey.  Homer as the composer of the Iliad and the Odyssey is not a historical tradition, but an aesthetic judgment.

The only path which leads back beyond the time of Pisistratus and helps us to elucidate the meaning of the name Homer, takes its way on the one hand through the reports which have reached us concerning Homer’s birthplace:  from which we see that, although his name is always associated with heroic epic poems, he is on the other hand no more referred to as the composer of the Iliad and the Odyssey than as the author of the Thebais or any other cyclical epic.  On the other hand, again, an old tradition tells of the contest between Homer and Hesiod, which proves that when these two names were mentioned people instinctively thought of two epic tendencies, the heroic and the didactic; and that the signification of the name “Homer” was included in the material category and not in the formal.  This