Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/147

 TALES ABOUT HOMER. 131 the date of his reputed existence ai-e no less worthy of remark ; for out of the eight different epochs assigned to him, the oldest differs from the most recent by a period of four hundred and sixty years. Thus conflicting would have been the answers returned in dif- ferent portions of the Grecian world to any questions respecting the person of Homer. But there were a poetical gens (fraternity or guild) in the Ionic island of Chios, who, if the question had been put to them, wculd have answered in another manner. To them, Homer was not a mere antecedent man, of kindred nature with themselves, but a divine or semi-divine eponymus and pro- genitor, whom they worshipped in their gentile sacrifices, and in whose ascendent name and glory the individuality of every mem- ber of the gens was merged. The compositions of each separate Homerid, or the combined efforts of many of them in conjunc- tion, were the works of Homer : the name of the individual bard perishes and his authorship is forgotten, but the common gentile Odyssey (Thucyd. iii. 104) : Simonides of Keos also calls Homer a. Chian (Frag. 69, Schneidewin). There were also talcs which represented Homer as the contemporary, the cousin, and the rival in recited composition, of Hesiod, who (it was pretend- Ed) had vanquished him. See the Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi, annexed lo the works of the latter (p. 314, ed. Gottling ; and Plutarch, Conviv. Sept. Sapient, c. 10), in which also various stories respecting the Life of Homer are scattered. The emperor Hadrian consulted the Delphian oracle to know who Homer was : the answer of the priestess reported him to be a native of Ithaca, the son of Telemachus and Epikaste, daughter of Nestor (Certamen Horn, et Hes. p. 314). The author of this Certamen tells us that the author- ity of the Delphian oracle deserves implicit confluence. Hellanikus, Damastes, and Pherekydes traced both Homer and Hesiod up to Orpheus, through a pedigree of ten generations (see Sturz, Fragment. Hellanic. fr. 75-144; compare also Lobeck's remarks Aglaophamus, p. 322 on the subject of these genealogies). The computations of these authors sarlier than Herodotus are of value, because they illustrate the habits of Kind in which Grecian chronology began: the genealogy might be easily continued backward to any length in the past. To trace Homer np to Orpheus, however, would not have been consonar t to the belief of the Homerids. The contentions of the different cities which disputed for the birth of Homer, and, indeed, all the legendary anecdotes circulated in antiquity re ipecting the poet, are copiously discussed in Welcker, Der Epische Kyklos (pp. 194-199).