Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/31

Rh early Greece were all nameless and impersonal; and we know definitely the point at which the individual author begins to dare to obtrude himself—the age of the lyrists and the Ionian researchers. These passages are not evidence of what Hesiod and Homer said of themselves; they are evidence of what the tradition of the sixth century fabled about them.

Can we see the origin of this tradition? Only dimly. There is certainly some historical truth in it. The lives and references, while varying in all else, approach unanimity in making Homer a native of Ionia. They concentrate themselves on two places, Smyrna and Chios; in each of these an Æolian population had been overlaid by an Ionian, and in Chios there was a special clan called 'Homeridæ.' We shall see that if by the 'birth of Homer' we mean the growth of the Homeric poems, the tradition here is true. It is true also when it brings Hesiod and his father over from Asiatic Kymê to Bœotia, in the sense that the Hesiodic poetry is essentially the Homeric form brought to bear on native Bœotian material.

Thus Homer is a Chian or Smyrnæan for historical reasons; but why is he blind? Partly, perhaps, we have here some vague memory of a primitive time when the able-bodied men were all warriors; the lame but strong men, smiths and weapon-makers; and the blind men, good for nothing else, mere singers. More essentially, it is the Saga herself at work. She loved to make her great poets and prophets blind, and then she was haunted by their blindness. Homer was her Demodocus, "whom the Muse greatly loved, and gave him both good and evil; she took away his eyes and gave him sweet minstrelsy." (, 63, 4). It is pure romance—the