Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/121

109 HOMER 109 colony that founded Smyrna, that she there brought forth Homer on the banks ot the Meles, whence he was called Melesigeues, in this form of the story it is easy to recog nize the hand of the critic. There is an evident desire to get rid of the primitive supernatural element, and also to reconcile the claims of two cities, Cyme and Smyrna, to the envied distinction of giving birth to Homer. There are other incidents in the Herodotean life which seem de vised merely to fit certain of the minor characters in the Homeric poems. Phemius, we are told, was a schoolmaster of Smyrna, who was kind to the young Melesigenes, and was accordingly immortalized as the singer in the Odyssey ; the original of Mentor was a man of Ithaca, who entertained Homer and tended him in illness ; and so on. The chief value of these Lives,&quot; and especially of the Herodotean life, lies in the curious short poems which they have preserve.l. These poems are the Epigrams which used to be printed at the end of Homer, but are banished by the somewhat inconvenient purism of modern editors. One of them (Epigr. iv.) is put in the mouth of a native of &quot; /E jlian Smyrna,&quot; whose poetical aid has been spurned by the people of Cyme, and who is accordingly departing to som.3 other city. Epiyr. vi. is a prayer to Poseidon for safe arrival at Erythrae ; Epigr. vii. describes the rocky soil of that place. There is also an Epigram addressed to the people of Xeonteichos (Epigr. i.), and another which brings in the pine woods of Mount Ida and the iron-mines wf that district (Epigr. x.). Besides these pieces, the interest of which is topographical, there is an interesting little poem addressed to potters, beginning &quot; If you give me Lire I will sing, potters,&quot; and another called Ei peo-um/??, which, according to the author of the life, was sung by the children in Samos when they went round begging at the festival of Apollo; also certain verses addressed to sailors (viii., ix.), to a goat-herd (xi.), &c. All these short poems have a common character. They are &quot; rhymes &quot; such as every country possesses in greater or less number, treasured by the people as a kind of proverbs. Some of them may be fragments of longer poems, but they are certainly not the work of any one poet. The circumstance that they are ascribed to Homer merely shows that his name had gained such a hold on the imagination of the Ionian and ^Eolian Greeks as to draw to itself all ancient and popular verse. Such being the true character of the Epigrams, it follows that, so far from being &quot; occasional verses,&quot; suggested by moments in Homer s life, they are really the original docu ments, to which the narrative was afterwards adjusted. Even the leading incident of the Herodotean life the birth of Homer at Smyrna may have been originally derived from Epigr. iv. The epithet &quot;./Eolian&quot; indicates high antiquity ; for Smyrna (according to Herodotus) was lost by the vEolians about 688 B.C. Similarly, the claim of Cyme was doubtless supported (not quite so logically) by the mention of that place in Epigr. iv. and i. The same line of argument may be extended to the Hymns, and even to some of the lost works of the &quot; Cyclic &quot; poets ; with the result of making it probable that most of the traditions about Homer rest ultimately on poems com monly ascribed to him. Thus 1. The hymn to the Delian Apollo ends with an address of the poet to his audience. When any stranger comes and asks who is the sweetest singer, they are to answer with one voice, the &quot; blind man that dwells in rocky Chios ; his songs deserve the prize for all time to come.&quot; Thucydides, who quotss this passage to show the ancient character of the Delian festival, seems to have no doubt of the Homeric authorship of the hymn. Hence we may most naturally account for the belief that Homer was a Chian. That it was a general belief is shown by a passage (interesting as the earliest express quotation from Homer) in which Simonides calls him simply the &quot; man of Chios&quot; (fr. 85): Oi rj -n-fp &amp;lt;t&amp;gt;vcai&amp;gt; 7ei/e?7, TOITJ Se Kal avSpcav. It was also supported by the Chian family or gens of Homeridaj, of whom more will be said hereafter. 2. The Margites a humorous poem which kept its ground as the reputed work of Homer down to the time of Aristotle began with the words, &quot;There came to Colophon an old man, a divine singer, servant of the Muses and Apollo.&quot; Hence doubtless the claim of Colophon to be the native city of Homer a claim supported in the early times of Homeric learning by the Colophonian poet and grammarian Antimachus. 3. The poem called the Cypria was said to have been given by Homer to Stasinus of Cyprus as a daughter s dowry. The connexion with Cyprus appears further in the predominance given in the poem to Aphrodite. From the argument preserved by Proclus it is evident that Aphrodite held the same place in the Cypria which Athene has in the Odyssey. 4. The Little Iliad and the Phocais, according to the Herodotean life, were composed by Homer when he lived at Phocsea with a certain Thestorides, who carried them off to Chios and there gained fame by reciting them as his own. The name Thestorides occurs in Epiyr. v. These indications make it probable that the stories con necting Homer with different cities and islands do not rest upon any better foundation than supposed allusions in poems, none of which, to all appearance, can make good the claim to Homeric authorship. And this result is con firmed by the want of positive authority in favour of any i most of them are supported by relatively ancient testimony. It is plain that the contention for Homer began at a time when his real history had been lost. And since the inevitable legend found no clue in the Iliad and Odyssey, it was driven to seek for one in poems of secondary value. A singular exception is formed by Miletus, one of the greatest of Ionian cities, for which no legend claims even a visit from Homer. Yet Arctinus of Miletus is said to have been a &quot;disciple of Homer,&quot; and his jEthiopis was a continuation of the Iliad. Another equally exceptional fact is that no poem of Arctinus is ever ascribed to Homer. Are we to suppose that the authorship of the poems of Arctinus never fell into doubt 1 If so, it is a confirmation, from the negative side, of the theory advanced above, viz., that the stories of Homer s connexion with different places are suggested for the most part by the poems which came to be assigned to him in popular belief. Recitation of the Poems. The recitation of epic poetry was called in historical times &quot; rhapsody &quot; (pa^oiSta). The word pai/fa&amp;gt;Sos is post-Homeric, but occurs in Pindar, who gives two different explanations of it &quot;singer of stitched verse&quot; (paTrrtov e-n-eW uotSoi), and &quot;singer with the wand&quot; (pa/JSos). Of these the first is etymologically correct (except that it should rather be &quot; stitcher of verse&quot;); the second agrees with the fact, for which there is early evi dence, that the reciter was accustomed to hold a wand in his hand perhaps, like the sceptre in the Homeric assembly, as a symbol of the right to a hearing. 1 The first notice of rhapsody meets us at Sicyon, in the reign of Clisthenes (600-560 B.C.), who, as Herodotus tells us (v. 67), &quot;put down the rhapsodists on account of the poems of Homer, because they are all about Argos and the Argives.&quot; This description applies very well to the Iliad, in which Argos and Argives occur on almost every page. It may have suited the Tkebaid still better, but there is no 1 Compare, the branch of myrtle at an Athenian feast (Aristoph., Xub., 1364).
 * Ei/ 5e rb KataTov X?os (dirfv avrip,
 * one version. The number of opinions is proverbial, and