Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/67

45 LITERATURE OP ANCIENT GREECE. 45 erfully to stimulate the mental energies of the people, and to develop the traditionary accounts of former times, as well as to create and modify the epic dialect; yet it would be satisfactory if we could advance a step farther, and determine to which race Homer himself belonged. There does not appear to be sufficient reason, either in the name or the accounts of Homer, to dissolve him into a mere fabulous and ideal being- : we see Hesiod, with all his minutest family relations, standing before our eyes; and if Homer was by an admiring posterity represented as the son of a nymph, on the other hand, Hesiod relates how he was visited by the Muses. Now, the tradition which called Homer a Smyrnaean, evidently (against the opinion of Antimachus) placed him in the yEolic time; and the Homeric epigram*, in which Smyrna is called the JEolian, although considerably later than Homer himself, in whose mouth it is placed, is yet of much importance, as being the testimony of a Homerid who lived before the conquest of Smyrna by the Colophonians. Another argu- ment to the same effect is, that Melauopus, an ancient Cymsean com- poser of hymns, who, among the early bards, has the best claim to his- torical reality, the supposed author of a hymn referring to the Uelian worship f, in various genealogies collected by the logographers and other mythologists is called the grandfather of Homer J; whence it appears, that when these genealogies were fabricated, the Smyrnaean p et was connected with the Cymaean colony. The critics of antiquity have also remarked some traits of manners and usages described in Homer, which were borrowed from the iEolians : the most remarkable is that Bubrostis^, mentioned by Homer as a personification of unap- peased hunger, had a temple in Smyrna which was referred to the iEolian time ||. Notwithstanding these indications, every one who carefully notes in the Homeric poems all the svmptoms of national feelings and recollec- tions of home, will find himself drawn to the other side, and will, with Aristarchus, recognize the beat of an Ionic heart in the breast of Homer. One proof of this is the reverence which the poet shows for the chief gods of the Ionians, and, moreover, in their character of Ionic deities. For Fallas Atheiraa is described by him as the Athenian goddess, who loves to dwell in the temple on the Acropolis of Athens, and also hastens from the land of the Plueacians to Marathon and Athens ^[ : Poseidon likewise is known to Homer as peculiarly the Heliconian god, that is the deity of the Ionian league, to whom the Ionians celebrated national festivals both t Pausan. v. 7, 4, according to Bekker's edition. From this it appears that Pau- sanias makes iKlinopiis later than Olen, ami earlier than AristeaS. J See H'-llanicus and others in Proclus Vita Homeri, and Pseudo-Herod, c. 1. § II. xxiv. 532; and compare the Venetian Scholia. Eustathius, on the other hand, ascrihes the worship to the Ionians. % Od. vii. 80. Compare II. xi. 547.
 * ^P'o 1, Homer, 4. in Pseiido-IIorod. 14.
 * According to the Innica of Metrodoms in Plutarch Quaest. Symp. vi. 8. 1.