Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/148

 132 HISTORY OF GREECE. father lives and grows in renown, from generation to genera tion, by the genius of his self-renewing sons. Such was the conception entertained of Homer by the poetical gens called Homeridae, or Homerids ; and in the general ob- ecurity of the whole case, 1 lean towards it as the most plausible conception. Homer is not only the reputed author of the various compositions emanating from the gentile members, but also the recipient of the many different legends and of the divine gene- alogy, which it pleases their imagination to confer upon him. Such manufacture of fictitious personality, and such perfect incorporation of the entities of religion and fancy with the real world, is a process familiar, and even habitual, in the retrospec- tive vision of the Greeks. 1 It is to be remarked, that the poetical gens here brought to view, the Homerids, are of indisputable authenticity. Their ex- istence and their considerations were maintained down to the historical times in the island of Chios. 2 If the Homerids were still conspicuous, even in the days of Akusilaus, Pindar, Hellani- kus, and Plato, when their productive invention had ceased, and when they had become only guardians and distributors, in com- mon with others, of the treasures bequeathed by their predeces- sors, far more exalted must their position have been three centuries before, while they were still the inspired creators of epic novelty, and when the absence of writing assured to them the undisputed monopoly of their own compositions. 3 1 Even Aristotle ascribed to Homer a divine parentage : a damsel of the isle of los, pregnant by some god, was carried off by pirates to Smyrna, at the time qf the Ionic emigration, and there gave birth to the poet (Aristotel. ap. Plutarch. Vit Homer, p. 1059). Plato seems to have considered Homer as having been an itinerant rhap- sode, poor and almost friendless (Kepubl. p. 600). kration, v. 'O^pidai ; Hellanic. Fr. 55, Didot ; Strabo, xiv. p. 645. It seems by a passage of Plato (Phsedrus, p. 252), that tho Honieridja professed to possess unpublished verses of their ancestral poet ex?} uTrodsTa. Compare Plato, Republic, p. 599, and Isocrat. Helen, p. 218. Ulrici (Geschichte dcr Episch. Poesie, vol. i. pp. 240-381) question the anti- quity of the Homerid gens, and limit their functions to simple reciters, deny- ing that they ever composed songi or poems of their own. Yet these <jente*
 * Pindar, Nem. ii. 1, and Scholia; Akusilaus, Fragm. 31,Didot; Harpo-
 * Nitzsch (De Historia Homeri, Fascic. 1, p. 128, Fascic. 2, p. 71), and