Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/30

6 'Homêros,' but still leaves 'Homêridæ' unexplained. It may be what it professes to be, a patronymic ('Homer-sons'). It is easy to imagine a state of society in which the Sons of the Hostages, not trusted to fight, would be used as bards. But it may equally well be some compound (—) meaning 'fitters together,' with the termination modified into patronymic form when the minstrels began to be a guild and to feel the need of a common ancestor.

It is true that we have many traditional 'lives' of the prehistoric poets, and an account of a 'contest'between Homer and Hesiod, our version being copied from one composed about 400 by the sophist Alkidamas, who, in his turn, was adapting some already existing romance. And in the poems themselves we have what purport to be personal reminiscences. Hesiod mentions his own name in the preface to the Theogony. In the Erga (I. 633 ff.), he tells how his father emigrated from Kymê to Ascra. The Homeric Hymn to Apollo ends in an appeal from the poet to the maidens who form his audience, to remember him, and when any stranger asks who is the sweetest of singers and who delights them most, to answer with one voice: 'Tis a blind man; he dwells in craggy Chios; his songs shall be the fairest for evermore." Unfortunately, these are only cases of personation. The rhapsode who recited those verses first did not mean that he was a blind Chian, and his songs the fairest for evermore; he only meant that the poem he recited was the work of that blind Homer whose songs were as a matter of fact the best. Indeed, both this passage and the preface to the Theogony are demonstrably later additions, and the reminiscence in the Erga'' must stand or fall with them. The real bards of