THE COMPLETE LIFE OF HOMER BY F. A. WHITE, B. A. “A beggar blind, an exile lone, None gave the bard relief; He sang for bread, and got a stone, When fie was dead of grief ; An outcast’s womb, a beggar’s tomb, His life began and closed in gloom.” (One legend tells us he fell blind through weeping.) Disappointed Aspirations , 1865. BOSTON COLLEGE LIBRARr CHESTNUT HILL, MASS, LONDON: GEORGE BELL & SONS, 4, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN iS8q. Pah o37. x, 5 wsr PREFACE. -:o:- The curious reader will here see, for the first time, 2,842 years after his death,— veluti de script a tabella vita senis ,—the complete Life of Lives, the complete Life of the first of poets, containing his place and date of birth, his parentage, his ancestry for ten generations, the various incidents of his boyhood and early manhood, his exile, his voyages, travels, and adventures by sea and land, till his arrival at Chios, his twenty years’ stay there, full particulars of his last journey, sickness, and death at I os, and the inscription on his tombstone as it was originally written, with copious dates. Also an elaborate critical discus¬ sion of his works, whether Surviving, lost, IV Preface. or only contemplated, a vindication of Hermogenes, the editor of the so-called pseudo-Herodotus, a full account of the Younger (so habitually confounded with the Elder) Homer, and a complete proof, not only that Homer wrote, but also of the primeval antiquity of writing. I am told that a complete Life of Homer is a species of anachronism that has no chance of suc¬ cess at this time of day. But surely, with such a multitude of editions in the original Greek, and such a multitude of translations into every European language, from An- dronicus to Morris, there must be many students that would like to see all that can be certainly known or probably conjectured about the first and greatest of uninspired writers. That 2,842 years after his death, not only no complete Life of the Poet should be in existence, but no Life in our language should be even worth reading, is strange indeed. Preface. v But is this indeed “ the Complete Life ” ? Unquestionably I might easily have strengthened my case with a more im¬ posing show of instances. Thus to the list of homonyms, pp. 392-397, I might have added from Diogenes Laertius, six Thaleses, two Pittacuses, two Perianders, six Socrateses, all literary characters ; seven Xenophons, five of them writers ; twenty Theodoruses, all either authors or painters ; five Platos, four of them philosophers ; two Speusippuses, both philosophers; six Xeno- crateses, four of them writers; ten Crateses, four of them philosophers ; four Arcesi- lauses, three of them writers; eleven Bions, all literary except two that were sculptors; two Carneadeses, both writers I eight Aristotles, all writers ; eight Stratos, nearly all literary characters ; four Lycons, two philosophers and two poets ; twenty Demetriuses, all prose writers, besides countless other Demetriuses ; fourteen 5^7 VI Preface. Heracleideses, all but three writers; lour Antistheneses, three of them philosophers; six Diogeneses, three philosophers, and all writers ; six Menippuses, two of them phi¬ losophers ; eight Zenos, four of them phi¬ losophers ; five Chrysippuses, two of them philosophers ; ten Pythagorases, five of them contemporaries ; two Epicharmuses, both writers ; four Archytases, three of them writers ; two Hippasuses, both writers; four Eudoxuses, three of them writers ; five Heraclituses, all writers ; two Xenophaneses, both poets ; two Parmeni¬ deses, both writers ; six Democrituses, four of them writers ; three Protagorases, all philosophers ; and two Timons. And if to all this I had added from Bentley the interminable embroglio upon embroglio of the Logothetas, the Nonnuses, the Pytha¬ gorases, the Clistheneses, the Phryni- chuses, and others, and had further shown from a multitude of authors, from Hesiod Preface. vii and Acusilaus to Boeck and Roehl, that the homonyms in Dr. Smith’s inestimable “ Dictionary,” countless as they are, are not a twentieth part of the entire number of homonyms on record, what reader would deny the extreme probability that there were indeed two distinct Homers ? And the authority of Xenophon, Deme¬ trius, Archilochus, and Proclus; and the books that were written by the ancients to warn their readers against being misled, as pious Hineas was, by such autonomasia ; and the manifold irreconcilable discrepan¬ cies in the multitudinous legends of our poet, arising from confusing him with a pseudo; and especially a comparison of Herodotus’s unadulterated biography of the true Homer with Plutarch’s and Sui- das’s, and the pseudo-Lesches’s biogra¬ phies, where the true and the false Homer are hopelessly confounded ; all this, I say, would surely convert the extreme proba- i Vlll Preface. bility into absolute certainty. Unques¬ tionably, here and elsewhere, my case is utterly understated and underproved. But how few readers would have tolerated a much larger volume ? i CONTENTS. :o: CHAPTER PAGE I. From his Birth to his Falling Blind i II. From his Falling Blind to his Voyage from Samos 3 6 III. His Sickness, Death, and Burial. 89 IV. His own Account ... 123- V. His Date . 187 VI. His Birthplace 212 VII. His Writings 256 VIII. Did he Write? 3°9 *x. The pseudo-Homer ... 39 2 X. Our Authorities 421 XI. Addenda 45 2 ■ 1 1.1 ■ ’ • ' ' i I ' N.B. — Homer’s pedigree is stated incorrectly on p. i, pp. 124-5, an d pp* 128-9. His correct pedigree is on pp. 204- 208, and his correct age at death on p. 466. ADDENDUM I, page 245, after line 10. —And can not 70e fancy him amongst the ruins of the ancient capitol of Mcconia, a nd by the Salt Pool where the gorgeous gardens of Tantalus once bloomed—they are only twelve miles from Smyrna—storing tip the materials for those two striking myths with which every classical reader is familiar 1 * ADDENDUM 2, page 323, after line 19. — The Chaldceans took celestial calculations 2234 B.c. An eclipse of the sun was recorded 2169 b.c. Abraham read lectures on Astronomy in Egypt 1923 B.c. The Greeks subdivided the heavens into constellations 1500 b.c. The Chaldceans formed astronomical tables 1253 B.c. Lastly, Tchang , king of Loyang, China, de¬ termined the obliquity of the ecliptic as 23 0 54' 2". Now, was all this possible without writing, and an immense amount of writing too 'l ADDENDUM 3, page 331, after line 17. — The Arcadians, indeed, are said to have introduced writing into Italy not long after its appearance in Greece, + and to have kept historical records on the sacred tablets from ages the most remote,X ADDENDUM 4. — On page 416, line 10, after “ purse.” This Scindapsus seems to have invented the four-stringed lute, and given his name to it, from whence it appears yet more clearly how superior he was to poor Bucco, —as superior, indeed, as St. Luke was to Tychicus ; and also how many generations Homer the Elder, with his primeval three-stringed cithar, must have preceded Terpander II., with his seven-stringed lyre. On p. 84, l. 22, for “ prophet ” read “poet” ; and on p. 197, /. 2$, for “ Smyrna ” read “ Cyme,” and strike out next sentence. * Pliny, N. H. V. 29. t Dion. Halic., /. 32, § 4. t lb., 1. 73, § 1. THE COMPLETE LIFE OF HOMER The welcome citizen of every clime, He was not of an age, but of all time, And therefore hath impartial time forgot, His date, race, parentage, and native spot.* CHAPTER I. FROM HIS BIRTH TO HIS EXILE FROM SMYRNA, f When ^Eolian Cyme was being founded by Charidemus 1033 b.c., Melanopus (cor¬ rupted from Melanippus, an heroic cog¬ nomen common to Troy and Pylos), the son of Ithagenes, the son of Krethon, the son of Ithagenes, the son of Kretheus, * All the verse in this volume, whether translation or otherwise, is, with a very few trifling or obvious exceptions, my own. t N.B.— The first three chapters are based on his Life by the so-called Pseudo-Herodotus , with numerous ad¬ ditions fro7n other sources. 2 The Complete Life of Homer. the son of Diodes, the son of Orsilochus, the illegitimate son of Kretheus the dEolid, a yeoman of but limited means came thither from Magnesia with the rest of the motley Hellenic crowd, and there he mar¬ ried Clymene, the daughter of Onyras, the son in all probability of Archilochus’s Homer of Smyrna. And a female child was born to him from her bed, to whom he gave the name of Kretheis, daughter of Kretheus, in commemoration of his illustrious ancestor. Just so, Libye, the daughter of Epaphus, the son of Io, gave her children the names of Belus, from her great-uncle, the brother of Io, her god¬ dess-grandmother ; and Agenor, from a great-great-uncle, and also an ancestor, from whom she was fifth in descent, both of that name. So Deucalion, son of Minos by a second wife, an HEolid, kept up the memory of the fact that his mother was a Deucalid. So Hiolion, king of Lesbos, in the time of Homer, kept up the memory of his indefinitely remote ancestor Htolus ; and Dorion, the fabled ancestor of Homer the Younger, or the pseudo-Homer, of whom very much more anon, midway between him and Atlas, kept The Complete Life of Homer . 3 up the memory of his remote ancestor Dorus. The old family names, in short, were kept up for centuries and centuries. And Melanopus and his wife died, but he bequeathed his daughter to the care of an intimate friend, Kleanax the Argive, And, as time went on, it chanced that the girl formed an illicit acquaintance with, and became pregnant by, one Demagoras or Demasagoras, or Dmasagoras * (the name is spelt diversely), a Salaminian, who would seem to have shortly after¬ wards gone out as an adventurer into Egypt f and there died. The poet appears to have retained a loving feeling towards a father I cannot find that he ever saw ; and, therefore, as we naturally wish to think as well as we can of the poet’s father, I am inclined to hope that he was guilty of nothing worse than mere ordinary human frailty. The poet refers over and over again to the matter in this way ; and though at one time inclined to depict him in the blackest colours, him whom the poet himself has blest, I, as the poet’s * Westermann’s “ Lives,” p. 34, 1 . 20. t Ibid., p. 28, 1 . 4. B 2 4 The Complete Life of Homer . biographer, have no right to curse. But be that as it may, whether death or exile prevented him from doing poor Kretheis right, or whether he was a mere heartless adventurer, here one day and gone another, matters very little to our story. His part in the “Life of Homer” is as slight as that of the hero’s father in “Tom Jones.” We know next to nothing about him. His very name even and country and ultimate fate are not matters of absolute certainty. Whether unprincipled or merely unfortunate, how has his sin found him out! Of what a blaze of immortal glory has it not deprived him ! But to return to our author. For a time the matter of poor Kretheis’s pregnancy was kept secret ; but when Kleanax came at last to know of it, he was greatly vexed, good man, and having called her before him apart from any one, he rebuked her severely, pointing out to her the discredit amongst the people of the place that would needs accrue from her misconduct. Therefore he formed the following plan in her behalf. The people of Cyme chanced at that time to be making a settlement in the bay of the river The Complete Life of Homer . 5 Hermus,—“the eddying Hermus,” as the poet himself calls it,—and Theseus wishing to make it of the same name as his wife, as a memorial of her, proposed Smyrna (for that was his wife’s name) to those that were founding the city as a name for it. Now, Theseus was amongst the fore¬ most of the Thessalians that founded Cyme, being descended from Eumelus, the son of Admetus, the son of Pheres, the son of Kretheus and Tyro, and a man of great substance ; and his wife, as we may fairly assume from her name, was an Amazon. So Kleanax consigned Kretheis to Ismenias the Boeotian in charge of the settlers, who chanced to be one of his most intimate associates. I think few of my readers will be dis¬ posed to deny that the conduct of Kleanax towards the poor fatherless and motherless girl about to become a mother was meanly heartless and cruel in the extreme. Homer never makes the most distant allusion to it or him, which alone in one so kindly is sufficient condemnation. He forgives the unutterably base Thestorides, and even gratifies his family by naming his homonym with honour in his immortal poem; he 6 The Complete Life of Homer. seems utterly unconscious of the disgusting unmannerliness and worse than Hottentot gluttony of Creophylus, and immortalises him by bequeathing him the sacred memo¬ rial of his poems; but Kleanax, the “mean betrayer of the blood” of his inti¬ mate friend, in the dark hour of her shame, despair, and agony, he absolutely ignores. But be that as it may, the poet’s mother left her native city, “alone, alone,—all, all alone,”—in the company of absolute strangers, deserted by her lover and with¬ out a friend in the wide world, and arrived at Smyrna. Smyrna, the ever-glorious birthplace of the first and greatest of the poets of anti¬ quity, is charmingly situated on the banks of the little river Meles, at the base of the Gulf of Smyrna and at the entrance of the great and fertile valley of the Hermus, under the rich slopes of Mount Tmolus, originally founded and peopled by Tan¬ talus the Bad, and called Naulochus; but when under the leadership of Androclus, son of Codrus, the Athenians took Ephesus from the Amazons (1072 b.c.) after they had occupied it just a century, viz., ever since 1168 b.c., they proceeded to The Complete Life of Homer . 7 Smyrna, where I should presume there were now but small remains of the Naulo- chus of Tantalus, and, having founded it anew, called it after the greatest of their queens. And the memory of the intimate family connexion between the two cities was perpetuated by the circumstance that just as a part of Smyrna was called Tyche, and just as a part of London is called Marylebone, so a part of Ephesus re¬ tained the name of Smyrna,—no doubt that quarter in which a residue of the old inhabitants still resided. What else is to be said about this city will partly be seen as we proceed, and what is not will be best reserved to the time when, in com¬ pany with our immortal bard, we bid a final adieu to it. Here poor Kretheis dwelt in melan¬ choly plight for some few months till, her time for bringing forth being now fully come, one day, when she had gone out of the city with the other women to a certain festival on the banks of the Meles, she fell into the pangs of labour and brought forth Homer. And she gave him the name of Melesigenes, because he was born on the banks of that river. 8 The Complete Life of Homer . I cannot think this a likely story. It is not likely that a woman would so flaunt her shame, or that a mother would be so cruel to her child as to compel him to carry about with him, wherever he went, a name for all his schoolfellows to jeer at, as it were a placard upon his back with the words “ Riverside base-born beggar’s brat” written large on it. Nor is the improbability diminished, supposing that by Melesigenes the hapless mother meant son of the Meles, but rather augmented. The name in question, if such be its true signification, were most ridiculous, nay, most impious, as applied to the child of such bitter shame and such abject poverty. Most justly, then, does Lucian ridicule the idea of our poet’s name being changed subsequently from Melesigenes to Homer for any of the reasons usually alleged. I do not doubt that he was blind, and con¬ sequently wanted a guide to go with him (Homou), or that as a child there was a pretty story of his saying, “And me too ” (Homou), yet not more was he named Homer for either of these reasons than Achilles was so named because Thetis burnt his lips off in the magic fire The Complete Lije of Homer. 9 (a-cheilos), or the Pythian oracle from the decaying body of the serpent Apollo slew, or the Amazons from their mutilating one breast, or Mycenae from the hilt of Perseus’s sword (myketus). All these are merely specimens of the wretched punning upon names of which the ancient Greeks were never weary, but it were absurd to receive it seriously into this most veracious of biographies. As well, says Lucian, say his father’s name was Tigres or Pigres because a Tigres or Pigres edited his works some six centuries after his death, as say that he took his name from an inci¬ dent which happened some forty years after he was born. True, we are familiar enough with something like it in the modification of Abram’s name to Abraham, but the ancient Greeks had no idea of such a thing, as Lucian’s joke itself proves, which to us seems rather meaningless. Homer, then, was called Homeros from his birth, from various Homers that had gone before him, presumably from his great-great-grand¬ father, born 1104 b.c., i.e., more than a century ago, at Cyme, the scene of his mother’s childhood, but, perchance, not of her birth, if, as some authors say, she was io The Complete Life of Homer. born at Ios. When he acquired the sur- name of Melesigenes we have no means of knowing ; it is simply a striking description of the scene of his birth, and may have been applied to him at any time. But if Melesigenes was not the name given him at the first, still less was Melesianax, a name most ludicrous for a poor sempstress’s ragged half-starved brat. But these names, and others to the same tune, were obviously coined afterwards, when the singular incident of his birth was a stigma no longer, but an aureola. Up to this time her helplessness, as a hapless outcast many months gone with child, had compelled Kretheis to live with the man upon whom her harsh guardian had so indelicately forced her ; but now she began to look about her, and, as soon as she could, she quitted his reluctant hospi¬ tality, and henceforth maintained herself and her boy with the labour of her hands, now working for one employer and now for another. No doubt there were plenty of ill-natured busybodies then as now, ever ready with their miserable gossip to smooth the up¬ ward path of a poor fallen woman with the The Complete Life of Homer. 11 treacherous ice of their sour-eyed charity. Hence her frequent change of em¬ ployer. And with her precarious earnings the forsaken girl-mother paid as well as she could for the schooling of her bright-eyed boy. These were times of bitter hardship for the poor fatherless poet, as he tells us in lines that, when his poems came to be not less studied in the closet than recited at the festive board, were universally understood to refer to the piteously sad days of his early boyhood :— “ But the sweet faces from the cruel day, That makes the boy an orphan, fade away; And still he hangs his head like drooping flower, And floods his cheeks with brine from that sad hour, In his sore need his timid steps he bends, His face all blushes to his father’s friends, His heart too full to tell what orphans feel, Soft clinging to their robes in mute appeal, But scarce his quivering lip hath toucht the cup By shame and pity sister twins fill’d up,* When, rushing in, a rudely blooming boy, His mother’s torment and his father’s joy, Snatches it from his hand and bids him go, With angry taunt and contumelious blow, 4 Be off! ’ he cries, ‘ we want not here a brat At our door begging with a coat like that.’ To widow’d mother, wan with toil and care, Then does-the wretched lad in tears repair.” 12 The Complete Life of Homer. The picture is indeed exact. First, the widowed mother without one friend left in the world ; first her father, then her mother dead, her father in deadly combat against the Amazons and then her mother of lingering disease and heart-break ; and last of all her husband, or he, at least, who the charity of undying love undoubtingly believes would, had fortune been kinder (oh ! fond, un¬ reasoning logic of a true woman’s heart), one happy day have been so ; without, I say, one friend left in the world, and toiling at the loom of a stranger for the support of herself and her little one. And next the child. Can we doubt that antiquity saw in the little Astyanax the idealised double of the poet’s early childhood when it twisted, long doubtless after his death, the Melesigenes of his mother into the Melesianax of the Homerolater, so perfect a compound as it is of the Trojan prince- let’s two names, Scamandrius and Asty¬ anax ? But this is not all or nearly all. I turn to another of the lives and read, “The name of the king of the Lydians at that time was Mseon, and he loved the girl (Kretheis) for her beauty, and married her. And when Homer was born, Kretheis The Complete Life of Homer. 13 dying in childbirth, Maeon reared the infant as his own. /Vnd after no long time had elapsed he himself also died.”* Now, divesting the above passage of all the garish false ornaments of post-Aristotelian Hellenism, and bringing to bear upon it what we know of Maeon from the Latin epigram, and from the following pregnant passage in the life by Suidas, “ Maeon who came with the Amazons to Smyrna,”f we extract the following highly important information. Maeon, a successful Greek adventurer, the leader of the Amazons at that time and descended from the Maeon, being a countryman of Ismenias and one of the “ father’s friends,” spoken of in the above lines, showed a disposition to take the child and his mother under his protection. The child had just touched the cup of dawning prosperity with his lips when it was dashed from them by the grim King of Terrors. And the circumstances of his (Maeon’s) death were as follows :—1 he Lydians being overmastered by the zLolians, and • j ■ 1 v i * Plutarch’s “Life of Homer,” p. 22. j Suidas’s “ Life of Homer,” p. 32. 14 The Complete Life of Homer . having decided to leave Smyrna, and their leaders having proclaimed that he that would follow them should leave the city, Homer, being still a child, said that “he too wished to go with them.” The con¬ fiding child’s “ and me too ” excited a tender smile in all that heard it, and was never forgotten. “His mother kept all these things in her heart,” as we learn on the authority of St. Luke. Homer himself, indeed, tells us more than once that his mother was in the habit of doing so,*' and even to this moment (9.14 p.m., February 15, 1887), we have them in print before us. But just at that delicate crisis the last great leader of the Amazons died, and his Amazonian widow and mongrel brat treated poor little Homer, and his widowed mother, with a wild outbreak of savage insolence that the sensitive boy never forgot. But better days were now at hand. Now there was at Smyrna at this time, one Phemius by name, an Athenian, (according to Timolaus), the son of Prona- pus or Pronopus fi (according to Diodorus * E. g, Odyss., xxii. 57, and Odyss., i. 361. t Tzetzes corrupts the name into Pornapus. The Complete Life of Homer . 15 Siculus), who instructed the boys of Smyrna in literature, and in every other branch of a liberal education. For more about him see Chapter VIII. He, being a bachelor, hires Kretheis to work up for him several batches of wool, which he was in the habit of receiving from his boys as their school fees. What happy days for boys those must have been, when after they had once mastered the difficulties of the horn book and the copy-book (and not even that, according to the Wolhans), they had nothing more to do, but, if little Smyrnian boys, to sing, dance, recite poetry after their venerable master, and play music ; or, if little Persian boys, to shoot the bow and tell the truth,—that is, not shoot the long bow ! But not quite such happy days for the master surely, if, in return for all his instruction, he only received certain instal¬ ments of unwrought hosiery. Speaking as a pedagogue, I do not quite wish I had lived in those days. I prefer cash payment myself. And she worked daily in his house, manifesting much decorum and ever “ keeping her body in temperance, soberness, and chas¬ tity,” to quote the words of our dear 16 The Complete Life of Homer . venerable old Church Catechism; and Phemius was greatly pleased with her, and at last he proposed to her that she should keep house for him ; for he was rather of the mind of Adam than of the mysogynist African potentate whom all- powerful love,— “ His cheek pufft out with elfin laughter,”— garred with an arrow right through his heart, wriggle and cry “ Oh,"no, never ! ” as he would, to marry the beggar girl Cophetua. He thought with the old bachelor of the Greek comic poet, a broken fragment of whom I have presumed conjecturally to fill up and translate as follows :— “ My name is Live-alone, Alas ! ol all men I am most unhappy, Oh ! how I pity cynic Timon’s doom, Alone, unwedded, without wife or child, Without a friend in the wide world, to die.”* So he urged her with many such argu¬ ments as he thought likely to prevail upon * OvOJJiCl C>£ fJLOVCTTL ISloVOTpOTTOQ, EL TLQ fipOTOJy IT avcidXioQ «/a£w ge T ipuovoQ fiiov Ayufiov n^vyov ot,vOvfxov axpocrocov AyeXctarov adiaXEKrov ichoy viofioia. The Complete Life of Homer . 17 her, and, above all, touching her bright- eyed, glorious boy, that if he adopted him as his son (as, of course, he would, if she married him), and brought him up and educated him, he would turn out a shining character; for he perceived that the lad was intelligent, and of very good natural parts. So, ultimately, he persuaded her to do as he desired. Andromache and Astyanax over again. You will ob¬ serve here the mother sacrificing her own sexual instincts to an unpalatable second marriage, for the sake of her little Homer. “ So the fair boy with thorns and acorns crown’d, And holding in his hand a pan of bread, ‘ The worse I have escaped, the better found,’ Sang with his schoolmates round the marriage bed.” (The solemn nuptial bed, with images of Love, Hymen, & Co. inside, heavily curtained from all eyes prior to its being carried up to the bridal chamber.) This exceedingly curious custom, so strongly at variance with the celibatarian views of St. Paul, the reader will find in the learned pages of Suidas. The thorns and acorns, c 18 The Complete Life of Homer. of course, representing the wild savage days, when there was no such thing as marriage, but men lived and begat children moi r e ferarum ; the pan of bread, the manners and customs of civilised life. And he was, as Phemius wisely judged, of a good natural capacity, and with the advantages he now enjoyed of a careful education, speedily shot far ahead of all his schoolfellows. And at this time must have happened the other version of the poet’s celebrated boyish, pseudo-Homer, of whom more by-and-by. For (i) the true Homer could not have married a daughter of the city that had cast him out, and that he had cursed with perpetual intellectual sterility, for then would his curse have fallen on his own head. (2) This Stasinus did not live till very long afterwards. (3) The name Euryphon is the same as that of the pseudo-Homer’s son, in the stemma which traces him to Terpander, and suspiciously like his father Euphron’s also. But the real facts are these. His daughter Arsiphone married Creophylus the Elder, and had by him Terpander, the Phocsean, whose son or brother, I know not which, was Gnotor, of Cyme, and he had a daughter named Arsiphone. I have observed elsewhere that it is a well-known rule for names to recur in alternate gene¬ rations. This Arsiphone the pseudo- Homer, married, and had by her two sons, as Suidas says, Theolaus and Euryphon. Thus, Homer the Younger’s wife was di¬ rectly descended from Homer the Great,, which may have additionally interested him in our poet’s works, and have given him additional facilities for collecting them. 74 The Complete Life of Homer. And in his works he returned the favours he had received, as Ariosto says, in the only coin he had, to Mentor, of Ithaca, his faithful friend, and Mentes, his skipper, and Tychius, the kind-hearted shoemaker, of Neonteichos, and Phemius, his good, indulgent schoolmaster and second father, by conspicuous mentions in his poems. But if Phemius was the son of Pronapus, or Pornapus, why does not our poet call him Pornapides ? Because Parnops, or Pornops, signifies, in Greek, a kind of locust (Ar. Ach., 150), an animal especially hateful to our poet’s tutelary divinity. Since, therefore, to call Phemius the son of a locust would have been, to say the least of it, uncouth, uncanny, and of evil omen, he invents a significant Bun- yanesque patronymic, and calls him the son of Please-all. And now the fame of our poet was noised abroad throughout all Ionia, and reached already over the /Egean to the Mother Country. And many flocking round him daily, those that interviewed him all agreed in strongly advising him to pay a visit to the venerable fatherland of his ancestors ; and he listened eagerly to The Complete Life of Homer. 75 their words, and was very anxious to be gone. But considering that he had said many fine things of Argos, but of Athens nothing, he set to work interpolating a few such verses as might prove acceptable there, e.g. :— “The people ofhigh-sourd Erechtheus, The child of the gaping sod, The daughter of Jove, Athene, Was nurse to the demi-god.” * And, again,— “ Them led the son of Peleus Menestheus to the field, No living mortal was his peer, To marshal horse and shield, f And Ajax led from Salamis Twelve ships, that lined the bay Where the Athenian squadrons Were posted for the fray.” J And, lastly,— “ And then to Marathon she came And Athens’ dances wide, And the palace of Erechtheus, Her presence glorified.” § * Iliad, ii. 547. t Ib -> ib 557 - | Iliad, ii. 352. § Odyss., vii. 80. 7 6 The Complete Life of Homer . And having interpolated the above lines in his two immortal works, he proceeded to make all the necessary preparations for his projected visit to Hellas. He had already, as we have seen, given one of his daughters in marriage to his most intimate friend, Creophylus. The other, I presume, was dead ; but what had become of our Hineas’s Creusa I cannot say. From his anxiety, not merely for a temporary visit to the Mother Country, but for, apparently, a protracted stay, from which he might never return, and also from the lan^ua^e of the other biographers, we naturally infer that Homer was now once more a homeless wanderer. But we know positively nothing. I conjecture, however, that as Homer, when he came to Chios, was, like Ulysses when he came to Ithaca, “prematurely elderly,” he must have been some fifty years old when he married, and as he died at about seventy, it follows that he must have left Chios as soon as possible after he had disposed of his daughter, and left her, and presumably her mother, safely housed with his son-in-law. Lesches informs us, that having com- The Complete Life of Homer. 77 posed his “ Margites,” he went round the Greek cities singing it. This is, of course, impossible. Lesches confounds him here with the pseudo-Homer, even as Suidas does. But the account of the Colophonians that he wrote it as a young man, when he first fell blind, is also 'contradicted by the commencement of the poem,— “ An old man came to Colophon ; ” which shows that it was, at least in its present form, the production of his old age; but of this more when we come to the dis¬ cussion of his works. In sketching the first part of Homer’s last journey from Chios to I os, we have the difficult task of extracting the honey of truth from more than one nettle of error. One author,* quoted by Allatius,f tells us that Homer, on his way from Smyrna chanced to arrive at Chios. Of course this is every way absurd, both the “chanced ” and the “ Chios,” and is in contradiction to the unanimous account of all antiquity. But if we accept Chios, as a hasty copyist’s * Wolfgangus Lazius, “ Greek History/’ bk. ii. | “ De Patria Homeri,” p. 177. -8 The Complete Life of Homer. blunder for Ios, we obtain the interesting fact that Homer now saw, for the last time, his native city, and wrote that beauti¬ ful hymn to Diana, that stands the ninth in the list. In going by land from Chios, to pay a visit to the kindred of his daughter’s newly-married husband at Samos, he would naturally pass through Smyrna, and while grey hairs would soften his resentment (“ Lenit albescens animos capillus ”) for the cruel neglect of bygone years, the coming shadow of his own grave would lead him for the last time to plant dowers on that of his poor, ill-fated mother, and water them with the rain of filial piety. Thence he dragged his aged steps to Colophon. And there, in answer to the impious fools that jeered at the Margites, as they nicknamed him, whose improvi¬ dence had left him so poorly provided for in his old age, like Scott’s minstrel with his— :l Breathes there a man with soul so dead,” he burst forth into that impassioned de¬ fence of his art, of which we have now, alas ! only a few lines left. Singing this last note of triumph, he passed on from city The Complete Life of Homer. 79 to city (and erroneous as Lesches’s “Agon is, there is thus much truth in it), till he arrived at Samos. Now, the people of Samos chanced at that time to be cele¬ brating the Apaturia in honour of Melan- thus, the royal ancestor of the founder of their city. • And one of the Samians, perceiving that Homer had arrived, for he knew him by sight, having seen him before at Chios, went to his fellow-clansmen, and told them, and spoke in high terms of com¬ mendation of the new comer. And his fellow-clansmen bade him introduce our poet; so returning to the porch, where Homer was sitting, “Friend,” he said to him with a smile and a bow, “ the people of our clan invite you to keep the festival with them. And Homer agreed to do so, and went off straightway with his new friend. And on the way he encountered some women who were sacrificing, at the meeting of three roads, to Kourotrophos, —doubtless, the diva triformis , the Diana Trivia of ancient Rome, the Goddess that presides over the births, deaths, and mar¬ riages of a modern newspaper;—and she that acted as priestess, being unable to endure the sightless aspect of our poor 8o The Complete Life of Homer . blind poet, said to him, “ Away from the sacrifice, man ; away, I say ; we cannot pro¬ ceed while you are here.” And when Homer learned who it was that thus drove him from her presence, as a thing of ill- omen, he made an impromptu, playfully ridiculing all such preposterous matrons of Ephesus; and when he arrived at the house where the members of the clan were feasting, he stood outside on the threshold and made another impromptu :— “ Sons are their father’s crown,” &c. And then entering in, he sat down and feasted with the clansmen, and they were filled with awe at the wondrous manifesta¬ tions of his genius with which he favoured them all that evening. And as he went away next day some potters,* as they were lighting their fire, saw him on the road, and having heard what a wonderfully fine poet he was, called out to him, and begged him to sing something for them, and they would give him the earthen vessel they were now going to bake, or whatever else * Samos abounded in potter’s clay, and that of two distinct kinds.—Pliny, H. N., 35-53. The Complete Life of Homer. 81 he preferred that they had by them. Whereupon he sang them the song which goes by the name of “The Furnace.” And being detained by bad weather at Samos, he went on the first of every month to the houses of the well-to-do, and earned a trifle by singing outside their doors. And the boys of the place came with him, two of them holding each a hand, and the rest running on before and behind. The song was much what such songs are, even to this day :— “ Heaven give you plenty, wealth, and joy, Long life, and many a sturdy boy ! But, oh, have pity on the poor, That chirp like swallows at your door. But, if you won’t we will away, For we are not come here to stay And shiver on the step all day.” The song in the original Greek is much longer, and is there called an Eiresione. It is said to have been sung by the lads of Samos for many years after. The Eire¬ sione, from which the song still extant derives its name, was a harvest wreath of olive or laurel wound round with wool, and adorned with all the fruits of the season, borne about by boys at the G 82 The Complete Life of Homer. Pyanepsia, or bean-feast, which, we are told, was originally instituted by Theseus. Then, when each troop of laughing boys had taken its stand before a house, they danced and sang outside, while the people inside made oblations to the sun and “the rosy-bosomed hours.” Then the boys rang the bell and shouted at the top of their sweet young voices, and the people came out and gave them coppers. As regards the fruit, I presume it was disposed of just as it is in the harvest celebrations, so much in vogue at the present day. And hence any begging- song was called an Eiresione. And at the commencement of spring Homer set sail from Samos for Athens. So here ends the present chapter; but first let us take one last glance at Asiatic Greece ere leaving it with our poet for ever; and especially at Smyrna, his un¬ grateful and unnatural mother-city. In the tenth year of Thersippus, Archon of Athens, and the fourth of Doristhus, king of Sparta, or a little later, that is when Homer was about thirty years old, Samos was built and Smyrna enlarged in the manner of a city (“ Samos condita et The Complete Life of Homer. 83 Smyrna in urbis modum ampliata ”) * by the Athenians. Samos had not, therefore, been built much more than forty years, and was at this time most devotedly loyal to the parent state that had so recently founded her. And Homer, by taking the active part he did in the Apaturia and the Pyanepsia, intensely patriotic feasts of colonial loyalists (see Suidas for both), had virtually taken the oaths of allegiance to the city for which he was now bound ; even as by the modifications he had re¬ cently introduced into his poems, he had done all in his power to prove himself a true Ionic Greek. “What !” methinks I hear the venerable author of “ Homeric Studies ” thundering, “ you call yourself an orthodox Homerologist, and yet you dare most blasphemously to insinuate that our great poet was a mean, sneaking, curry-favouring traitor!” Apollo forbid ! But I think that at this time Smyrna was no longer Hiolid. It had been taken by the Amazono-Colophonians. A few years passed on (probably a very few, as Mim- nermus represents the two events as * Eusebius, “ Chronicon,” vol. ii. p. 153. G 2 84 The Complete Life of Horner, one), when the Amazono-Colophonians of Smyrna and the Athenio-Amazonians of Ephesus discovered that they were strictly and precisely one, both on their Pylian and their Amazonian side. So Smyrna, largely augmented by a supply of fresh blood drawn from Attica, became an Ionic city about 980 b.c. And why should Homer object ? His one tie to Smyrna was his mother. And she was a Kretheid ; that is, of the self-same blood, and a far-off cousin of the Codridse of Ephesus. And his father, Demagoras (whose memory he loved with all a woman’s sweet unreasoning piety), was a Kretheid on the dearest side, the mother’s, and his nurse and second mother, Euryclea, was a Kretheid wholly. True, the Thessalian element at Smyrna was dissatisfied, and Homer, beyond all dispute, had Thes¬ salian blood in him ; but with the pro¬ phetic eye of a true prophet he foresaw long beforehand the fatal effects of the disunion of cognate races: so he wrote his immortal “Iliad” with this for the moral of it, having a general application, indeed, to the whole Hellenic race, but an especial one to the Thessalian Smyrniotes. But, please, reader, The Complete Life of Homer. 85 particularly to observe that the Amazonian barbarians who had outraged him in his childhood exiled him in his early man¬ hood, denied him bread in his blindness, and contaminated the pure Hellenic blood of his townsmen with a vile Semitic ele¬ ment, he hated bitterly even to his very last breath. “ But what wretched stuff all this is about the Amazonians! As Betsy Prigg might say, ‘ There never was no such persons.’ ” Excuse me, gentle reader, there were. With a large admix¬ ture of worthless rubbish, what we read in the classics expresses the veritable realisation of a great social truth. A monogamous woman makes a better monarch in every way than a polygamous man; for the woman is a woman, but the man is not a man, but a wretched creature utterly enfeebled in mind and body by the habitual violation of the sacred laws of nature. Hence, because of the utter dis¬ soluteness of life too commonly seen in princes, the splendour that so astonishes the less reflecting of our sex in the reign of a Semiramis, a Zenobia, an Elizabeth, and even a Catharine II. of Russia ; for though immoral for a woman, 1 86 The Complete Life of Horner. do not imagine she was immoral to a debilitating extent, as so many princes are. And hence, too, the Amazons astonished mankind for several genera¬ tions by a brilliant succession of female sovereigns. But to return to Smyrna. Well might Fortune (Tyche) be its principal divinity, for never did city experience such vicis¬ situdes. Three centuries and more after Homer shed his last tears beside his mother’s grave, Sadyattes well nigh de¬ stroyed it, but it revived again, and was once more a beautiful city in the time of Pindar, a century and a half later. But once more it sank into pitiable decay till Antigonus rebuilt it on a different site, in accordance, it would seem, with the ex¬ press wish of Alexander, only prevented from being carried into execution by his premature death. This happened about 320 b.c. Lysimachus * enlarged and beau¬ tified it some years later. Tyche was again propitious. The city became one of the greatest and most prosperous in the world. But some two centuries and three quarters afterwards, Tyche veered * Aristeides. The Complete Life of Homer. 87 * round once more. Dolabella took it and destroyed it in the Civil Wars 43 b.c. However, the fickle goddess soon re¬ covered her temper. The traitorous re¬ negade perished, and Homer's native city recovered its pristine splendour. It was one of the Seven Churches, and the scene of the martyrdom of Poly carp. In the years 171-180 a series of earthquakes, to which the city was always much exposed, reduced it almost to ruins, but it was restored by the Emperor Marcus Anto¬ ninus. In the successive wars under the Eastern Empire it was frequently much injured, but always recovered ; and under the Turks it has survived repeated attacks of earthquake, fire, and plague, and still remains the greatest commercial city of the Levant. It has a population of about 160,000, is by far the most important port of Asiatic Turkey, and exports immense quantities of almonds, figs, raisins, and other dried fruits. P.S.—I am not quite satisfied with my putting of the incident recorded on pp. 59-61. Far fewer events are the result of 88 The Complete Life of Homer . blind chance than we are apt to think, and there is here no chance whatever. The fishermen were in a hurry, foreseeing an approaching squall, and the squall coming on before they had reached “ their desired haven,” they had to put back again. But Herodotus, like a true Greek, in his love of the supernatural, somewhat misrepre¬ sents the incident. i CHAPTER III. IIIS SICKNESS, DEATH, AND BURIAL. And having set sail from Samos with certain natives of the place, he was carried to Ios, and put up for the night, not in the city, but off the shore. His funds were so low that he could not afford the charges of even the dingiest tavern, but slept on board the vessel for nothing, or some merely nominal sum. And here, through poorness of food and anxiety of mind on account of his penniless condition, and the hardships and privations and exposure he had gone through, and advancing years and complete wearing out of the system, our poor blind poet began to be seriously indisposed. So, unable any longer, 1 suppose, to endure the rocking and smell of the vessel, he got out and slept for the \ 90 The Complete Life of Home}'. few remaining nights of his forlorn, suffer¬ ing life on the beach, in a state of the most pitiable, utter helplessness. And the crew anchoring off I os for several days, in con¬ sequence of contrary winds and stress of weather, every day people came down from the city to go and be taught by our dying sage; and as they listened with ear close to catch his fast-failing accents, they were filled with amazement at the stores of thought, fancy, and learning of all sorts that he had amassed. And as the sailors and certain of the people from the city were sitting by Homer, there sailed by the spot certain fisher-lads, who, landing from their boat, came up to them and spoke as follows :—“ Here, strangers, we lads have something to say to you. Come, listen, pray, and see if you can make it out.” And one of those present bade them say on. And the fisher-lads said, “What we caught we have left behind, but what we could not catch we have brought with us.” Bar the riddle of the Sphynx, this is remarkable as being the verv oldest riddle in the world. The * taste of the most self-satisfied of all the centuries, with which wisdom will die The Comp Lete Life of Homer. 91 beyond all doubt, is so absurdly squeamish that I dare not tell the gentle reader the answer, but must leave him or her to guess what the fish were that these merry lads of I os meant. Nothing shows the difference between the days of Homer and the days in which we live. The ancient Greeks in the joyous good-humour of the vivacious boyhood of a nationality destined to the greatest of great things, dwelt upon the earliest historical riddle on record with a keen and natural archaeo¬ logical interest. Not one of t all the Lives of Homer, from Lesches to Tzetzes, omits it. Nay, Homer, the Venerable Homer, went home and put the incident into verse, as follows :— Homer (to fisher-lads). “ Oh, my bold, Arcadian huntsmen, Caught any game or not ? ” Fisher-lad. “ Oh, the game we caught we’ve left behind. But what we miss’d we’ve got, What game may that be, come, sir, say.” Homer. u Nay, (Edipus, the seer, E’en with both eyes could ne’er have told.” 92 The Complete Life of Homer. Boy. (Showing between thumb and finger, being nipped to death, one of the sacred insects, whose name in this queer England of ours it is unlawful for man to utter.) “ Ha, ha, why, then, look here ! ” (Throws the deceased insect’s flattened body on the ground.) Homer. iysp(Dv [jluQos—A nglice (a right old saw), when any very puzzling question was put, “ Even Homer could make nothing of that!' Lastly, it was most idiotically believed to be the cause of our poet’s death. It was really the cause of his last smile (one of his few, alas! very few smiles) in this world. It also formed the theme of the very last stanza he ever penned. But, will it be credited ?—not only do several of the authors of the so-called Lives of Homer tell us that he died of vexation because he could not make out the riddle of these “little vulgar Ian boys,” on whom much handling of stale fish had bred the answer thereto, but actually the oracle of Delphi cooked up an ex post facto prophecy out of an incident that never could have caused the death of our poet, or any one else. But of this further on when we come to discuss the question of the pseudo-Homer. The death of Aristotle, the reader will remem¬ ber, was said to have originated in a parallel way. Unable to make out the cause of the ebb and flow of the Euripus, he is said to have thrown himself into it. The Complete Life of Homer . 95 Perhaps he did—for a bathe. And per¬ haps, when he saw the objectionable insect, “not to be mentioned to ears polite,” being nipped to death, Homer did laugh and cry out, “It is positively kill¬ ing,” or “ Oh, you absurd boys, you will really make me die of laughing,” albeit almost worn out with sickness, old age, insufficient food, want of sleep, and pain, goodnaturedly humouring the fun that was going on around him. It appears, indeed, that, in his real or affected laughter, he slipped over some mud and fell upon his side* against a stone, f which, in his then infirm and utterly prostrate condition, was supposed to have somewhat hastened his end. Even as Sophocles says : “ A small weight brings old bodies to anchor” (or bed, meaning the grave). Tzetzes says that he broke a rib, but this is im¬ probable. The writer in Cramer’s “ Anec- dota ’ (vol. ii. p. 230) makes no mention whatever of an accident, but simply says, “ Homer landed at I os, and died after a short illness.” Which proves that the accident cannot have been very severe # Lesches. f Proclus. g 6 The Complete Life of Homer . anyhow. It appears from another account that he was ill three clays. But how do the weak things of the earth confound the mighty ! The despised little insect that figures alike in the bibliography of Homer and of Shakespeare, how doth it revenge the Almighty upon the blasphemy which disdains to defile its lips by naming what He did not disdain to defile his hands by making ! How has it ere now reduced the beauty of woman to loathsomeness, the glory of majesty to leprous solitude, and the wisdom of the philosopher to delirious ravings ! But to return to the poet’s deathbed. This, however, is perhaps a misnomer. Pious, robin-redbreast-hearted, good Sama¬ ritans may have had compassion < on the blind, strolling beggar at the last, and put something softer under him than “ the ribbed sea sand” to breathe out his last' weary sigh upon. But we are not told so ; we do not know whether he had a bed to die on or not. If he had, that bed was certainly not the spare bed of Creophylus, his son-in-law, who never was at Samo§, much less at I os, as far as we have the slightest grounds for judging. But whether The Complete Life of Horner. 97 he breathed out his last sigh of relief at escaping from a cold, cruel, selfish, sensual, thankless world on “ the ribbed sand ” of the beach, or on straw in the muddy High- street of the town, or on a bed of down in the house of some good Samaritan at I os, the very centre of Ionian Greece, hence its name, at Phoenician Ios, the point where Phoenician sailors first brought the Higher Culture to Hellas, the boundary line, may I say, between European and Asiatic Greece, where Pelasgic eyes first gazed upon the great discovery of Cadmus, and for ever cast aside the semi-barbarous runes of their aboriginal ancestors,—here, I say, most appropriately died the most marvellous combination of paradoxes that ever lived. Never lived, never will live, I might almost go so far as to say never can live, a man whose brief threescore years and ten', 1 or less, of life were so absolutely in contrast with his three thousand years of subsequent immortality. His miserable poverty all through life is the least of these marvels, if only we lay down as the established rule in this evil world, as is the genius and merit so is the neglect and the suffering. England treated her Spenser, 98 The Complete Life of Homer. her Milton, her Butler, her Otway, her Chatterton, and her Clare ; France her great fabulist, La Fontaine; Italy her Dante and her Tasso; Spain her Cervantes; Denmark her Kepler; and Portugal her Camoens, very little better than Greece treated her Homer and her Socrates, Jerusalem is not the only city that first stoned her prophets and then raised monu¬ ments in their honour. Smyrna is not the only city that rejected him that was sent unto it in his lifetime, and after his death semi-deified not him only but his mother before him, and built him an Homerseum and worshipped him for ever after therein with games, and invocations, and sacrifices. It is only the contrast between this picture and that, that is so singular. After his death he found admirers in plenty to carve statues, build temples, and forge oracles in his honour ; but in his lifetime he found no one to give him food, or clothes to wear, or a bed to lie on :— u Worse housed than fox in hole, or bird in nest, Stretch’d on the beach in fluttering tatters dress’d. Life’s chain flung off, he sank at last to rest.” The sublimity of his genius could not The Complete Life of Homer. 99 procure him an asylum in the very town that claimed the honour of his birth :—• “ Seven mighty cities claim great Homer dead. Through which alive the poet begg’d his bread.” They struck money with his likeness and name upon it, but in his lifetime he never had any money; he lived and died in. excessive indigence. The reader will perhaps call to mind one passage in “ The Life ” apparently some¬ what in contradiction of the foregoing : “And having collected sufficient substance he married a wife.” But to this I would reply, that the author is obviously defending the poet against the charge of an imprudent marriage, contracted in direct violation of every precept laid down for the guidance of mankind by St. Malthus. But methinks the defence is somewhat uncalled for. Hard-hearted must have been the Mal¬ thusian of Colophon to whom, I presume, the apology in question was addressed, and hard-hearted must be the Malthusian of the present day that would grudge our poet one gleam of sunshine in a life, the rest of which was so wild and stormy, one green oasis in so howling a desert, a wife 11 2 ioo The Complete Life of Homer. to solace his blindness, and children to hang around his neck and listen enraptured to his lays. But it is a noteworthy fact, one of the thousand-and-one proofs I could adduce, of our authors holy reverence for historical accuracy, that, though to make his way in a strange place and save up money enough to be in a position to marry and to have two daughters (the Malthusian allowance, pray kindly observe to his credit, my dear good Malthusian friends), and to give one of them in marriage to a man of Chios, Homer must have lived at least twenty years at Chios, yet our poet’s life at Chios occupies less than six lines, that is to say, less than the ninetieth part of the entire “ Life ” according to the pseudo- Herodotus. In other words, there is here an all but absolute lacuna of twenty years or more. Instead of six lines we should have at least six pages. How are we to fill up this sad hiatus ? Let us see. We have what Plato tells us about Creophylus. Plato tells us certain highly discreditable things of him in his “ Respublic ” (bk. x. p. 500), where, con¬ trasting him with Pythagoras, who ab¬ stained from all meat, and did not even 7 he Complete Life of Horner, ioi allow his followers all vegetables, he punningly calls him not Creophylus (king of his clan) but Creophilus (fond of meat), and accuses him of gross neglect of the poor blind poet at the dinner-table.* But had this been so Homer would not have given him his daughter in marriage. We know from the “Odyssey” that Homer suffered at the impious table of the Virros of Chios all the coarse insults “That patient merit of the unworthy takes,” but that his friend and fellow-minstrel should take advantage of his blindness to filch the best pieces off his platter is surely quite incredible. Severe as is the language of Asius, two centuries later, in speaking of a Creophzlus in his day :— “ Lame, scab-mark’d, old, in stroller’s tatters came Knisokolax uncall’d, in search of porridge f and that of Lucian in that most interesting piece, “The Lapithae,” we cannot think so of the Creophylus, to whom the poet gave his daughter in his lifetime, and on his * Respublica, bk. x. p. 500. f Athenaeus. 102 The Complete Life of Homer. deathbed of sand, or straw, or down, or whatever it was, bequeathed the venerable treasure of his immortal manuscripts. Still, that his bed was not of roses, his picture of Ulysses, the beggar, at Ithaca, and his Thersites and Melanthius lead us to be¬ lieve. And from Plato we may infer that if not Creophylus, there were plenty of half-starving poetasters at Chios to take advantage of his blindness and snatch the food out of his very fingers. And Martial complains that his own age laughed at him :— “ Et sua riserunt secula Mseonidem.” And Diogenes Laertius tells us that he had a rival in one Sagaris, with whom he shared the popular favour just as Dryden did with one Elkanah Settle. Can this be the same as Syagrus, of whom we read in Chapter VIII. that he was before Homer, but prob¬ ably not much before, as he was after Musaeus ? He also wrote an Iliad which Homer may have supplanted for a time with his. But with the comparatively feeble, languid, and uninteresting conclud¬ ing books of the “ Odyssey,” the popular favour grew cold, and the poet’s lecture- The Complete Life of Homer. 103 room empty, and he had to quit his present quarters for “ pastures new.” Strange to say, while the disputes about the place of his birth are interminable, all agree that he died at I os. Only one authority, already referred to (Lazius, a modern, and, therefore, utterly without weight), tells us that “ in his last voyage to Greece from Smyrna he happened to be carried to Chios.” Now were our authority Herodotus himself, writing with the MS. of Homer’s own personal attendant, countersigned by the^Edile of Chios, before him, we should know that he could not “ happe 7 i to be carried” to the place he had been residing in, still less happen to be carried there “ on his way from Smyrna to Greece.” Of this passage there are two distinct views. First, that Chios is a copyist’s blunder for Ios, as it undoubtedly is in the preface of Stephanus Niger to Plutarch, and in the Solinus of Gyraldus Spondanus. Just so, conversely, Ios is found in some MSS. instead of Chios in the celebrated line :— “ Smyrna, Rhodus, Colophon, Salamis, Chios, Argos, Athenae.” 104 The Complete Life of Homer. In ancient manuscripts Chios and Ios were, it would seem, only too readily inter¬ changeable. Second, that Chios was the name of the port of Ios. There is no actual improbability in this supposition, for (i), as Chios was largely, so must Ios, more or less, have been Pelasgic; (2), Chios was a common name enough for a town. Stephanus Byzantius tells us of four towns of the name of Chios, so this may possibly have been a fifth ; (3), as Ios was probably, and the neighbouring island Paros certainly, inhabited first by Cretans, so Chios, according to Ion of Chios, was colonised by CEnopion of Crete. Or, rather, the town of Ios may originally have been called Chios by Pe¬ lasgic settlers from Chios, just as Smyrna was originally called Naulochus, but in the final Ionic settlement obtained its present name of Ios, the name of Chios, however, still clinging to the insignificant harbour thereto appertaining. This, however, after all, is mere conjecture. But what I wish is to show that no author, of however secondary or tertiary authority, except indeed Tzetzes, with his utterly wild and random blunder- ings, disputes the fact that Homer died at The Complete Life of Horner . 105 Ios. He, it is true, seems to have been seduced into the appalling blunder that Homer died on the coast of Arcadia, partly by Homer’s “ Oh, my bold Arcadian huntsmen,” in the epigram already discussed, and partly by the ambiguous expression of Nazianzenus, “ Orat. in Julianum,” “con¬ cerning the Arcadian question ” (really meaning the question put by the Arcadian fisher-lads). And he is followed, or follows (I am sure I neither know nor care which), by Nonnus Abbas, and by Eudocia in her “ Violarium.” But even if the statement in question were not obviously founded on a truly laughable blunder, the trio are too modern, too merely Byzantine, to carry any weight with them. Still less does Martianus Capella, who, on the warrant of a mere misconception of Pliny, * tells us he died at Naxos. But these wretched blunderings of mediaeval darkness apart, the place of our poet’s rising is still in doubt amongst those unhappily constituted * Ios a Naxo 24, mill. pass. Homeri s epulchro veneranda.—Plin., N. H., lib. iv. cap. 12. io6 The Complete Life of Homer . hyper-sceptics whom nothing short of his baptismal register, duly signed by the parish priest of Smyrna, and attested by the clerk, would comfortably satisfy, but of the place of his setting there is, as I have just said, no doubt at all. Even as Varro says in his epigram :— “ The white goat offered on his tomb at Ios proves that he died there, but seven distinct cities* claim the honour of his birth.” * Or, to adopt the witty imagery of the poet, it is certain that he died amongst violets (pun upon Ios, ion meaning in Greek a violet), but it is uncertain whether he was born amongst myrtles (Smyrna in Greek means myrrh), or roses (pun upon Rhodes, rhodon signifying in Greek a rose). The Ians not only sacrificed a goat yearly on his tomb, they also carved it on his grave¬ stone. And well they might. Nothing could be more significant. It tells us of the Aegean, or Goat Sea, of which Ios was the sacred centre ; of goat-footed goat¬ horned Atgokeros (Pan), his father, and Goat’s Bay (Avgina), from whence his * Leo Allatius, p. 175. The Complete Life of Homer. 107 mother fled—I mean his father and mother, according to the Ian legend adopted by Aristotle. It tells us of Egypt, or Goat- land, that was, if Smyrna was not, his undoubted birthplace ; of the aegis (or shield with a goat upon it) of Jupiter and Minerva ; and the goat’s horns of the altar of Apollo (his three arch-gods) ; and lastly, of his life of utter contumely, and the nick¬ name (JExJEgos, Goat), that he appended to his works. And even so it is easier to arrive, at least approximately, at the date of his death than at that of his birth,— “Humanis rebus excessit in insula Io CLX. ante urbem conditam.” * He departed from human affairs in the island of Ios, 913B.C., according to Solinus, with whom Nepos and Aulus Gellius appear to agree, their “ vixit ” being in all probability equivalent to Solinus’s “hu¬ manis rebus excessit.” And the anony¬ mous writer of the Ecloge Historiarum in Cramer’s “Anecdota Parisiana ”f (query, * Solinus, cap. 17. f Allatius, “ De Patna Homeri,” p. 178 ; Cramer’s “ Anecdota Parisiana.” io8 The Complete Life of Homer. John Tzetzes), tells us, “ at the age of ninety.” This date gives us Homer born 1003 B.C., a date not very wide of the true one —1015 b.c. But surely at ninety, after a life of so much privation and hardship, he was rather too old to recommence his wanderings. Say, then, he died a little over seventy,—that is, according to the true date, about 944 b.c. ; and further say that this date was perfectly well known, as it must have been as long as the record of his tombstone, attested by the Ians, re¬ mained to tell the tale, but that his age at death was not, but was the subject of very natural exaggeration : this may serve to account for Aristotle’s date of 1043 B - c -> if he believed that Homer died at over ninety (whilst he really died at only seventy-one or seventy-two), and allowed something for round numbers, and (adopt¬ ing the erroneous reading Raluptei) something also for the time it took to put the stone up. Thus the difference between the true date and that of Aristotle may be little more than the difference of the age at which we suppose he died. But Solinus unhappily was misled by some record or The Complete Life of Homer . 109 other of the birth of Homer the Younger 913 b.c., which he took to be the record of the death of Homer the Elder, tran¬ slating the unhappily ambiguous Greek word gegone , with Nepos and the rest of the Latin school, by “vixit,” not “natus est.” Dismissing, then, Solinus and Co., and coming to Herodotus and Aristotle, which, we ask, is most likely to be right respect¬ ing the age at which Homer died—Hero¬ dotus or Aristotle ? Philosophers, living calm, tranquil lives, live long, we know; but far, very far different is the case of one like H omer. It is absolutely incredible that the delicate sensitive organisation of the child of genius should have endured the strain of ninety years of continuous and inces¬ sant privation, hardship, exposure, humi¬ liation, coarse insult, and every form of sorrow, as man and poet, and not impro¬ bably also as husband and father, and then elastic as ever started upon an intermin¬ able journey over all the cities of Asia Minor, and then all over Greece, had life been spared. If the reader thinks with me, he will admit, even without the elabo¬ rate arguments adduced farther on, that Homer was born 1015 b.c. But if he no The Complete Life of Homer. thinks the cases of such mild philosophers as Isocrates, Plato, Gorgias, Democritus, Newton, or Fontenelle are ad rent ,—if he can adduce one single poet that, after the rack of ninety such years as Homer’s, was ready, with mental and bodily energies still but little impaired, to travel by sea and land for an indefinite number of years, and blind, too, over the whole civilised world, I have done ,—verbum non amplius addam. I admit with Aristotle that Homer was born, say, 1043 B - c - But ob¬ serve, given 944 B.c., or thereabouts, as the date of our poet’s death, only two dates for his birth are possible,—that of Aristotle 1043 B - c -> an d that of Philostratus and Cyril 1015 B.c. But I think any reader that compares the life according to Aris¬ totle with that according to Herodotus, will admit the latter’s age at death, even if it were not per se so much more probable. Why, even Voltaire, though one of ten thousand, and though his life had been as favourable to longevity as Homer’s was unfavourable, broke down some years under ninety in coming only from Ferney to Paris, though not half-starved upon semi-putrid meat and mouldy biscuits, and The Complete Life of Homer . 111 stifled in the filthy hold of a third or fourth-class merchant vessel, and lying on the hard beach for preference, and worn out with the ceaseless sting of unmerited want as Homer was, but rich, jubilant, f£ted, and honoured. True, Cato the Censor begot the progenitor of Addison’s Cato at eighty ; true, Parr stood in a white sheet, taper in hand, at a hundred and twenty for a bastard ; true, the Poet Lau¬ reate printed his prize poem, “ Timbuctoo,” just sixty years ago; but how different from their tranquil and happy lives was that of this child of want and anguish. And, not a bene , the author of the “ Life of Lives ” never once speaks of our poet as old, though at seventy-one or seventy-two he was certainly a wonderful old man to contemplate so vast a tour. And now we come to the last scene of all—his burial. He was buried on the beach by his shipmates, and by such of the people of the city as had communed with him. And the people of I os carved this elegiac stanza upon his tombstone a long time afterwards, when his poetry had now been made known and had come into vogue, and was admired by every one. 112 The Complete Life of Homer . “For it is not Homer’s.” No, not our Homer’s. But Proclus says : “It is Homer’s.” “Yes,” adds Herodotus, “the pseudo-Homer’s.” The pseudo - Homer wrote it when he came to Ios about 885 b.c. Till then the poet’s grave was that o'* the penniless pauper buried at the expense of the parish—a mound of turf and no more. But now a gravestone of marble from the ad¬ joining island was put up, with the marble figure of a goat (the device of Jupiter and Minerva) and the laurel of Apollo over¬ hanging it (these we know were the poet’s three arch-gods), and underneath this in¬ scription :— “ Here Mother Earth the sacred head did hide, Whence sprang the Iliad—Homer, Greece’s pride. Two hundred and forty years after the Trojan war, Which he illustrated by his poesy, I, Homer, the Son of Eupnron, erected this monument.” The three last lines are not in “ The Life,” by Herodotus ; but they are in the highest degree probable. And why do I say in the highest degree pro¬ bable ? It is a well-known fact that in 884 B.c. Lycurgus and Iphitus insti¬ tuted a special celebration of the Olym- The Complete Life of Homer. 113 plan Games. And why did they do so ? For a most appropriate reason—to com¬ memorate the Grand Tercentenary of the fall of Troy. And could Homer the younger have chosen a more appropriate season for visiting Greece to introduce there the “Trojan Cycle,”—the “ Cypria,” the “Iliad,” the “ Odyssey,” etc., of the great poet of poets ? And what could be more supremely natural under the circum¬ stances, when he put up a tomb in Homers honour, than his mentioning the date of his death. One would think he could hardly have avoided doing so; and he must have known it as it has never since been known. He knew that it was exactly nine generations or three hundred years after the fall of Troy when he landed at Ios, and the Ians on their part must have known how long it was since the poet’s death. So he (and they) had only to do an easv bit of subtraction. * It appears certain to me—absolutely cer¬ tain—that Homer must have dated his venerable namesake’s tombstone, either at the grave or in the archives of Ios. For argument’s sake, however, suppose I yield this point, and only insist that, as long as 1 114 The Complete Life of Homer. the tombstone survived, the date of our poet’s death was well known at I os, if not as being recorded on wood or stone at least traditionally. Proceed we now to discuss the undis¬ puted portion of the inscription. Unhap¬ pily one word became partially obliterated, and manuscripts vary whether we should read “ Here Mother Earth the sacred Head did hide,” or ‘‘Here Mother Earth the sacred Head doth hide.” The more ancient writers, Herodotus amongst them, adopting the correct read¬ ing, did; and consequently holding that the tombstone was erected loner after o Homer : the less ancient, Proclus at their head, adopting the corrupt reading when the curve of the vital sigma had become obliterated, and consequently holding that the tombstone was erected at the time of his death. Unhappily the misjudging parti¬ sanship of the pseudo-Herodotus and the absurd legends spread abroad by the Chians to conceal their shameful neglect of the world’s greatest poet, have given strength to this reading and to the consequent mon- The Complete Life of Homer. 115 strous tenet of the learned Allatius that our poet died, like the Roman Virgil and Horace, and like our own Shakespeare, very comfortably off, if not indeed abso¬ lutely wealthy. The following is one of the said legends : Scindapsus, the atten¬ dant in charge of our poor blind poet, had been guilty of a grave dereliction of duty, as we are told first by Hypermenes in his “ Chios,” and after him by Ptolemy and others, in not burning the poet’s body, and was fined a thousand drachms in con¬ sequence. By his being buried at I os, and an oracle afterwards obtained, I os secured his body for ever, which his attendant should have burnt, and sent the ashes to Chios, seeing that I os would never part with it to Chios any more than Catana would part with the body of Stesichorus to Himera, or Oenoe with that of Hesiod to Orchomenus, albeit the oracle compelled the latter at last to do so. “Twice born, twice buried,” says Pindar; twice born meaning that Hesiod was re-embodied in Stesichorus just as Euphorbus was in Pythagoras, and Homer in Ennius: and twice buried, in reference to his re-inter¬ ment, showing thereby the extreme import- 1 2 116 The Complete Life of Homer. ance attached by antiquity to the place where the bones lay. Every reader will be reminded here of the case of Theseus and others in ancient, and Napoleon in modern times. And the prettiest ghost- story I know is of a child whose bones had been disturbed, and who came to his mother at night complaining, “ Oh, mother, dear mother! they have turned me out of my old bed.” That Scindapsus was guilty of a heinous offence at once against piety and patriotism he might have learnt from our poet himself in those charming lines where he says :— “ Come, let us gather our dead, With oxen and mules so fleet, And lay in a circle and burn A little beyond the fleet. That when we return at last To our own dear native shore, His comrade may bear to each man’s child, The remains of his sire no more.” Pity the Chians did not know the value of the poet Heaven had sent them earlier ! When he was alive they neglected, insulted, and starved him; but when he was dead they made a fuss over his bones. As if it mattered one straw whether they had his The Complete Life of Homer. 117 bones or his ashes, or neither one nor other. But in the superstition of their too-late remorse they no doubt thought it did. They had blasphemed the spirit, they would now idolize the letter; they had spurned the Heaven-sent prophet, they would make a sacred relic of the mantle he had dropped. The finest soul God ever breathed forth they had with their cold¬ blooded heartlessness driven from its frail tenement of clay; and now of that poor time-decayed, wrong and sorrow-flawed, death-broken hovel they would make a temple. They had hissed their Roscius off the stage, they would paint on every drop-curtain the empty mask he had, as he fled, left behind him. Methinks I see his widow (such a wife as Milton or Shakespeare, or Dante, or Socrates had groaned with) beating her breast and tearing her hair. Methinks I see his two daughters (such Gonerils and Regans as Lear invoked Heavens curse upon, such children as rebelled against Sophocles and Milton) crying, “ Oh, father, oh, dear father, why have we not even thy ashes to mourn over ? ” Poets decreed by Heaven to life-long celibacy have ever such 118 The Complete Life of Homer. wives and such children ; and the profound silence of antiquity, and the sinister gibes of Plato concerning Creophylus, the poet’s son-in-law, fill our souls with evil auguries. But the whole story is obviously absurd. What ! a slave fined from to ^50! How rich then his master must have been ! How comes it then that his master went about singing a little while before at the doors of the well-to-do for coppers, and for clay pipkins to drink out of, and was jeered at by the vile rabble of Colophon for bringing himself in his old age to such abject poverty ? And if the slave was fined forty pounds for next to nothing, how came the master to be fined only forty shillings (fifty drachms) for the very serious offence of hawking about a blas¬ phemous poem, as the pseudo-Cornelius Nepos tells us he was? But, in truth, our poor blind poet’s attendant does not appear to have accompanied him from Chios at all, and if he did his name was not Scindapsus, but Buccon ; no dainty slave with a hundred guineas in his purse, but a half-starved ragamuffin whose odd¬ jobbing, tatterdemalion, utter rascality John Tzetzes attempts to be funny over, The Complete Life of Homer . 119 in his “ Chiliades,” by nicknaming him Bouclon and Flaskon. But this idea of our poet’s being well off arises from con¬ founding the two Homers. The younger Homer was fairly well off, I grant you, but even he did not pay his valet at that ducal rate. Of all the many extraordinary features in the story of Homer, the following are perhaps the most extraordinary. Take any poet, any philosopher you will, take Shakespeare even, how small a part does his life embrace of the history of the time in which he lived ? But the life of Homer told without digressions, but in its entirety, embraces absolutely the whole. Of the history of Greece from 1015 to 943 b.c., we know absolutely nothing except from the Life of Homer. Yet do we see dimly through a mist not one Homer but two, and we have to stagger about like drunken men as we strive delicately to ravel the mingled threads of two distinct human lives. In brief, on the one hand, alone of all mere thinkers and writers, the Life of Homer is the history of Greece for seventy years; and, on the other hand, alone of all men, in writing the life of one Homer, 120 The Complete Life of Homer. we must write the life of another—his shadow, his double, his pseudo. Again, three whole volumes of the General Cata¬ logue of the British Museum are not sufficient to contain the mere list of all the editions and translations of Homer; yet in his lifetime he left portions of his works in pawn to defray his paltry tavern bills (a few crusts of bread, cheese and bacon enough to flavour them, and a bed of straw), and 400 years afterwards a com¬ plete copy of his immortal works could nowhere be found. At least, so we are told. Again, alive, the very abjects,—the street Arabs of Smyrna and Cyme,—“made mouths at him and ceased not”; dead, he was made the subject of prophecy. Daphne the daughter of Teiresias, the Sibyl, and the Oracle at Delphi, all conferred upon him that rarest and most unique of posthumous honours—they prophesied about him after the event, cart before the horse husteron proteron metaprophecies. All is the strangest, wildest contrast,—the most pointed, most epigrammatical antithesis. Lastly, all the noblest blood of “prehis¬ toric” Greece, that of Inachus, Io, and Danaus, that of Prometheus and Deucalion, The Complete Life of Homer. 12 1 that of Kretheus, Tyro, and Melampus, flowed in his veins, both on the father s and on the mother’s side, yet he held out his hand for bread, and was told to keep his distance, and stand away from the table, like “ an old dog as he was,” and had stools thrown at him by the drunken Trullibers of Scio (“Odyss.,” xvii. 446-462). Homer’s Tombstone. EN0ADE TENIERENKEFA LENKATAGAI AKALUP( SE) ANDRONEROONKOSMETO RA0 EIONOMERON TONTROIKONATEIPOIE SEIKOSMESENUSTERON ETESIDIAKOSIOIST(ES SA)RAKONTAGEG(RAFATO VTOOMHROSOEUFRONOS) All the lines, excepting that concluding hexametrical distich, consisting of exactly 18 letters,—the letters in brackets grow¬ ing very faint, and the last line (as last lines of tombstones are apt to do) altogether disappearing in the course of time. I think the dispute about the time when the stone was erected proves something, otherwise the controversy above spoken of would have had no locus standi; in other words, it proves that whoever put 122 The Complete Life of Homer. up the stone added the date to it ;• all the letters therefore being capitals and having no stops, and the GEG being capable of being taken for GEGONE, the great Apollodorus misread the inscription ; “ Here lies Homer. He was bom (gegone) 240 years after the fall of Troy/’ How else, but for some such inscription or entry in the Ian archives, could he possibly have got his “240 years”? But the ESSA in the TES- SARAKONTA becoming very faint, Aristotle’s informant probably read TRAKONTA, i.e., “ Here Homer was buried 230 years after the fall of Troy.” If the reader admits this, my argument (page 108) based on a comparison of the dates of death of Aristotle and Herodotus will, of course, be greatly strengthened. It will then be absolutely exact. And the TESSARAKONTA ultimately vanishing altogether, Euthymenes and Archemorus got their 200 years. All three, of course, erroneously ; as the letters in the last five lines must necessarily have been an exact multiple of five by a quasi-metrical law with which the son of Euphron rigidly complied, as some safeguard against the ravages of time. CHAPTER IV. homer’s own account. But no Life of Homer is worthy of the name that ignores the extent to which he speaks of himself throughout his poems. He tells us of his birth under the pseudo¬ nym of Simoeisius, of his exile from an ungrateful city under that of Demodocus. He honours his adopted father Maeon, his mother Kretheis, his dear old school¬ master Phemius, the son of Pronapus,* Mentes his skipper, and Mentor, that took such care of him when he fell half blind at Ithaca, with conspicuous mentions. He tells us nothing about himself (his audience would not have tolerated him if he had), but, as our Yankee cousins say, “ he hints a lot.” To begin with his birth, he * Diodorus Siculus. 124 The Complete Life of Homer. devotes twelve lines (“ Iliad,” v. 542-553) to the native place and parentage of Krethon, the heroic ancestor from whom his mother derived her name — Kretheis, i.e., the Kretheid. Just as the Glaucus of the “Iliad” is not the son of Sisyphus, but the great-grandson, so the Krethon of the “ Lives” is the grandson of Krethon the hero. And this view is confirmed by the parallel case of Mseon, Homer s father by adoption. Maeon, too, is mentioned as a Cyclic hero (“ Iliad,” iv. 394),— “ Maeon, the son of Haemon, like the immortal gods.” And observe how well all fits in. Krethon the hero was from the river Alpheus, which flows at its full breadth through the land of the Pylians, through Pherse, his native city; and how specially dear, and doubly and trebly familiar, this part of Greece was to Homer we all know. And this Krethon (that is, descendant of Kretheus) was the son of Orsilochus, the son of Kretheus. Kretheus married his niece Tyro, by whom he had Neleus. But he had also a son Orsilochus, men¬ tioned in the most persistent manner again The Complete Life of Homer. 125 and again* as the son of the river Alpheus by a mountain nymph, just as Homer himself was the son of the river Meles, i.e. y he was the illegitimate son of Kre- theus by a mountain nymph, as Homer calls her ; but who, as Pausanias informs us, was Telegone, the great-grand¬ daughter of Danaus.f He was the father of Diodes, the father of two sons, (1) Krethon, (2) Orsilochus, so named from his grandfather. This, of course, gives us Homer the son of Kretheis, the daughter of Melanippus, the son of Ithagenes II., the son of Kre- theus, the son of Ithagenes I., the son of Krethon (i.e. y the Kretheid), the son of Orsilochus, the illegitimate son of Kre- theus by Telegone the Danaid. But the poor toiling spider has not yet completed her labours. She has proved that Krethon was the son of Diodes, the son of Orsilochus, the illegitimate half-brother of Neleus and Diodes, consequently the illegitimate half-cousin of Nestor, whom, as the head of his house, Homer idolized. It * Odyss., iii. 489; xv. 187 ; xx. 176. | Paus., iv. 30, § 2. 126 The Complete Life of Homer, is also written in the “ Life” that Kretheis was the daughter of Melanopus (corrupted from Melanippus), the son of Ithagenes II., the son of Krethon. But it still remains to be proved that the Krethon of the “ Life,” according to Herodotus, was the grandson of the Krethon of the “Iliad” (book v. 542). The proof is as follows :— The Aineadae had now reigned in peace over the Troad, after the departure of the Greeks, for three generations, in accordance with the prophecy of Poseidon (“Iliad,” v. 307, 308), but now Alneas II. (not the AEneas of the “ Iliad,” but his grandson), after Troy had been taken and sacked for the third time by the Amazons, goes to Italy to consult the aged daughter of the Glaucus that exchanged armour with Diomedes (a noteworthy fact as proving that the Aineadae reigned three generations at Troy and no more), and founds Alba. Virgil, “Aineid/’ iv. 340-346, “ Me si . . . patriaestf read between the lines, points, I think, this way ; and Creusa’s words (Ain., ii. 785-6), “ Non . . . ibo,” and Aineas’s “Iliaci . . . manu ” (Ain., ii. 431-4), most distinctly refer to the same old legend. The Stemma The Complete Life of Homer. 127 /Eneadum establishes the truth of the point I here contend for beyond all possibility of further controversy. (1) /Eneas I. marries Eurydice, by whom he has Ilus ; (2) Ilus II., corrupted into lulus (originally named Ascanius, but on ascending the throne of Troy he assumed the name of 0 him by right of descent from whom he did so; (3) /Eneas II. (son of Ilus II.) marries Creusa, by whom he has lulus; after leaving the Troad and ceasing to be king thereof, marries Lavinia, by whom he has Ascanius. N.B.—The strict ap¬ propriateness of these two names is surely obvious. Note also (1), that the /Eneades reigned in the Troad long even after the departure of /Eneas; (2) that even to the time of Homer (as Homer’s own language shows), and long after, their race was still held in the (highest honour; (3) that the natives of the Troad worshipped /Eneas as their ancestor. All which could not pos¬ sibly have been the case had /Eneas scuttled out of Troy with all his belong¬ ings, as Virgil describes him to have done. Virgil’s /Eneas, then, was not Homer’s, but two generations later, as appears yet more clearly from his mention of Sisyphus 128 The Complete Life of Homer. /Eolides,that is, Sisyphus the son of /Eolus, the son of the Glaucus of the “ Iliad,” as a companion of his /Eneas. The Kretheus, therefore, of whom he makes such con¬ spicuous mention, must have been two generations after Krethon, exactly as Sisyphus was two generations after Glaucus, and Virgil’s /Eneas two after Homer’s /Eneas. And from this Kretheus II. (Herodotus’s Krethon II.) Homer doubtless derived his gift of song:— “ Crethea Musarum Comitem cui carmina semper, Et citharse cordi numerosque intendere nervis.” “ Kretheus the lay dear to the muses still, Adapting to his harp with fervent skill.” Nor was he the only member of our poet’s family, on the mother’s side, en¬ dowed with extraordinary poetical gifts. Our poet’s maternal grandfather also— Melanopus,—we read in Pausanias, was a poet of some distinction ; and to this it is that Virgil no doubt alludes. He was (there can surely be, after all that I have just been saying, no doubt of it) the son of Ithagenes I., so called because legiti¬ mately born after his father’s departure with Agamemnon (just as, in fact, Itha The Complete Life of Homer . 129 genes II. was after his father’s with yEneas), the son of Krethon, the Trojan hero, the son, as Homer tells us, of Diodes of Pherae, on the Alpheus, in the tutelary deityship of Tyche, or Fortune, an ocean nymph of Anthea. Hence, Simoeisius, Homer’s double in the “ Iliad,” was called Anthemion, i.e. } Oriundus Anthea. Our poet’s name in the “ Lives ” is Melesagoras,* and in the above epigram he is the son of Meles-Demagoras, and in the “ Lives ” the son of Demasagoras,*— from all which, and also from the Demo- in Demo-docus, his double in the “ Odyssey,” I infer that he was the son of one Demas- agoras or Demagoras, of Cyprus, but adopted into the Maeonid family, and hence called Maeonides; the more so, as Demodocus seems merely a slight modi¬ fication of Demo-tokus, i.e ., son of Dem(agoras). Lucian calls his mother Melanope (the daughter of Melanopus), from which it appears that he also was a believer in the story of the pseudo- Herodotus. Her true name Kretheis (daughter of Kretheus) got gradually * Westermann’s “ Lives,” p. 31 130 The Coi 7 iplete Life of Homer . corrupted, like so many other Hellenic names, to Kritheis (the Wheat-nymph), and as such she received homage from the Smyrnseans, as one of the numphai agronomoi. He was surnamed Auletes (corrupted to Aletes, the wanderer, and from that to Altes *) from his Lydo-Amazon origin. He refers to his own birth (“ Iliad,” iv. 474-476) “ Blooming Simoeisius, whom once his mother Bore on the banks of Simois, wherefore they called him Simoeisius.” ; For Simois read Meles, and for Simoeisius Melesigenes. It is remarkable, indeed, how prominently river-birth figures in the stemma and the works of our poet. (1) Homer is born on the banks of the Meles. (2) Tyro, the double of Homer’s mother, the consort of the august founder of his race, and the ancestress of the Codrid princes, his cousins, under whose consan¬ guineous government he died, brought forth her first-born on the banks of the Enipeus. (3) Orsilochus, the ancestor * Schol. Iliad, xxii. 51. The Complete Life of Homer . 131 from whom he was eighth in descent, was the son of the Alpheus. (4) Simoeisius, his double in the “ Iliad,” was, as we have just seen, born on the banks of the Simois. (5) Exactly similar was the birth of Satnius :— “ Whom to CEnops, the herdsman, a maiden so fair, On Satnioeis’s green margin did bear.” * (6) Minerva, his patron goddess, daughter of Metis,—and none the less so because she was bottled up in the body of her father Jupiter,—she, I say, was first seen on the banks of the River Tritonis. And Homer was said, like her, to have been the son of Metis, or Eumetis. All this is surely some¬ thing more than singular. That he refers to his own early priva¬ tions as the fatherless child of a poor for¬ saken sempstress mother, in his “Asty- anax” f was plainly seen from the first,as we see by that strange variation on his name, Melesi#7z<7;r, a combination of Scamandrius and Asty anax. But this is not all. I * 11., xiv. 444, 445. f II., xxii. 484-507. * K 2 132 The Complete Life of Homer. read in Strabo the following quotation from Mimnermus :— “We left the lofty city of Pylos, And came on ship-board to Asia, And sat before lovely Kolophon In the insolence of overwhelming superiority, And thence, issuing from the city-croiwrid river, By Heaven’s will we took y£olid Smyrna.” The word here to which I would direct attention is city-crown d (Astuoentos), which the self-satisfied stupidity of the soi-disant learned has corrupted into the utterly unmeaning “strandy” (akteentos). This word tells us that when Smyrna was the capital of ^Eolis it was called Astu, exactly as London is called the City and Constantinople Stamboul. The Amazono- Colophonians crept along the river Meles, and surprised Smyrna about 987 B.c., on a very small scale possibly as the Greeks had surprised Troy just two centuries ago; and from this we see, even more clearly than ever, that Homer was indeed the Astu-anax that he here describes,—that in portraying the imaginary sorrows of the orphan prince of Troy he portrays the only too real sorrows of the orphan street- arab of Smyrna. The Complete Life of Homer. 133 To the incessant struggle between the different Greek races for his native city, that drove him from it at last, like Dante, into life-long exile, we owe the moral of the most patriotic of poems,—the evil of intestine divisions,—the neglect of which led to the final decay and ruin of Greece some thousand years afterwards. “ Odys¬ sey,” i.-v. ix.-xii., gives us an idealised account of his eight years of voyaging by sea; and his epigrams partially supply the blank between his being laid up almost blind at Colophon, and his death at “fishy ” Ios. The scene when Ulysses arrives at Ithaca, and the intercourse between him and Eumaeus, are drawn very largely from the life. Demodocus, at the court of Alcinous, represents the treatment the blind poet received from all true-hearted lovers of song; Ulysses, at Ithaca, the coarse insults he had to put up with from the rude, unfeeling, and ignoble. Book iv. gives us Homer at Chios; book xiii. gives us Homer at Ithaca; books xiv. and xv. at Bolissus. All the portion concerning the suitors refers to his unworthy reception at Chios till his Penelope took pity upon him ; it portrays him prematurely worn 134 The Complete Life of Homer. out by a life of hardship. We see in it the incipient enfeeblement of his vital powers. The interminable eating and drinking grow insufferably irksome. And were felt so by antiquity. The references to the last twelve books of the “ Odyssey,” in the various Greek and Latin authors, remaining to us are scant indeed. His hymns tell us something of himself,—his “Margites” something. His “Cypria” tells us that he held none of the semi-barbarous views too often attributed to him, but regarded war as the greatest evil that Heaven can send upon our suffering race, especially when aggravated by civil discord; and his “ Batrachomyomachia ” exhibits the war of ^Eolid with Ionid,—of Athens with Sparta; till some mightier power than either swallows both up alike, as a perfect tragi-comedy,—a tragedy for the human actors, a comedy for the gods that look on. But, above all, we find in the “ Odyssey ” a wondrously rich mine of Homeric auto¬ biography. Can we doubt that the following lines contain allusions to the poet's eight years of wandering over the sea, between the The Complete Life of Homer . 135 Gulf of Smyrna and the Pillars of Hercules ?— “ The prime of man he had not long o’erpast, Yet he by many ills was breaking fast; For nothing is more cruel than the sea To spoil a man, however strong he be.”* And can any one doubt that the following* lines refer to the poet’s life of ceaseless wandering in search of bread, till the pitying hand of death at last relieved him? w hen he kept school at •» t * na .— “ Once I’d a place amongst mankind, a home On my own bit of land I occupied, Then oft the wants of wretches that did roam As I do now I plenteously supplied.* But Jove, the son of Saturn, as you see, Was pleased to bring me to sore penuree. Whom me to Egypt with a wandering crew Of pirates sent my fortunes to—undo. We expected him to end with a diffe¬ rent word—“pursue.” To Egypt, mind, w^er'e his father was. Elsewhere he tells us,' in closer accordance with the Herodo- tean story, that the spirit of adventure and the desire to see the world impelled him, “ Heaven-directed,” to leave the dull re¬ pose of home, just as the longing “ To follow to the field some warlike lord” impelled Norval. Odyss., xvii. 382-387. L # 146 The Complete Life of Homer. In vain had she that, when his mother Kretheis and his stepfather were gone, alone was left to take care of him—his un¬ avowed father’s mother, Euryclea,—his whilom nurse and then his housekeeper, wept bitterly when he talked of going abroad in his wild-goose chase after his father, and, just like the faithful retainer in “ Old Mortality,” earnestly protested, and warned him what would come of it. “ What¬ ever has put this thought into your head ?” wailed she. “ Oh, beloved, only hope of this hapless household, why should you go ? Your father is dead far from his native land amongst a strange people. You will never see him more ; and when you are gone they will plot against you and divide all that you leave behind you.”* But of Penelope,—that is, of Kretheis, —the poet says not a word. And why ? She is silent in the tomb. The words of the poet’s devoted monitress come only too true. He never does see his mysterious father. This the poet puts with exceeding force. Harlequin enters upon the scene, and slaps his wand down upon the boards, * Odyss., ii. 361-368. The Complete Life of Homer . 147 and straightway Hyde becomes Jekyl and Homer Ulysses (“ Odyss.,” xvi. 155-219); Telemachus sees his father again, but Homer his father never. And he shares the fate of Demosthenes. His scanty havings are harpied away from him during his absence. He returns from his last voyage to find all gone, and his good old dog Argus* neglected. This dog, then quite young, he used to take out along with his boys when he had his school; and (whilst he pored upon the hallowed spot where, as he nestled a tiny infant amongst the rushes, Artemis had moistened with soul-sustaining nectar the pale lips of his dying mother) those little innocents would throw it into the water, crying, “ Hey, Argy! hey, then, Argy!” (!o, Argidion ! Io> Argidion /), and play at hare and hounds, fox and geese, bloody Tom, and catch-who- can, on the softgreenturf, thedogall the time acting a prominent part and doubling their merriment. Even as Homer says : “And the young men led it against the wild goats and the roesandhares”(“ Odyss.,”xvii. 294- * So named from his great and glorious ancestor that gave its name to the then capital of Greece. L 2 148 The Complete Life of Homer. 295). That is, our poet’s pretty lads lugged it barking along with them in all their above-named merry antics. The word Agineskon alone betrays the true nature of the “hunting.” The boys themselves were “ the wild goats and the roes and the hares.” The commencement of the twenty- first book of the “ Iliad ” is an exactly similar adaptation of the sports of Homers “little wanton boys,” and as such I have retranslated it in the ninth idyll of my “ Reign of Love,” entitled “ Frolics on the Eld,” where I have depicted the boys of Raby and their angel prince, Master Eddie Middleton, sporting about on the banks of the Eld, just as our gentle poet, as he con¬ templates his boys sporting about on the banks of the Meles, portrays from the spectacle before him the struggle between Achilles and the Trojans, and the river Xanthus and Vulcan. Any one who has ever read the nursery rhyme of “ Hey- diddle-diddle,”—any one with the smallest poetical insight,—will have no difficulty in admitting the probability of the above conception. But alas! on his return to the “sweet Auburn ” he had left behind him all is The Complete Life of Homer. 149 sadly, sadly changed. He finds his poor dog “uncared for after the departure of his master, lying on a dungheap before the door, and swarming with dog-fleas ” {“ Odyss.,” xvii. 296-300), and “in sorry plight, neglected by careless sluts ” (“ Odyss.,” xvii. 319-320), Hyrnetho, H omer’s would-be stepfathers widow, to wit, and her maids, who think of nothing but dressing themselves up, and keeping company with the young men of Smyrna (“Odyss.,” xxii., and elsewhere). Lastly, a word about Homer’s one attendant, Buccon. Buccon, we are told in Tzetzes’s “ Scholia ” upon his own “ Al¬ legorise Iliadeae,” is the same as Bruchon, i.e., the brayer, a word used by the Lydians and Ephesian Ionians to signify Ass. And Tzetzes jests upon the word, just as Horace does on the name of his young friend, Asella (Epistles, bk. i.,ep. xiv., 6, 9, 11, and 19). I fancy this one attendant our poet was compelled to get to wait on him in his blindness is referred to (“ Odyss.,” xiv. 449-452) under the name of Mesaulius, that is, the Mesaulian. Mesaulius strikes me as having a very Homerico-Lydian sound. The autobiographical element of the 150 The Co 7 nplete Life of Homer . “Odyssey ” terminates with the scandalous scene between Ulysses and Antinous, in the seventeenth book, unless we choose to regard the boxing match between Ulysses and Irus as allegorical of the poetical rivalry between Homer and Syagrus. And if for Arnaios, Irus’s true name (“ Odyss.,” xviii. 5), we might read Argaios, this would easily be anagrammed to Agrios, wild, and that improved upon to Syagros, wild pig, to express the despicable qualities with which his exas¬ perated rival credits him. Indeed, this reading seems probable for two reasons : 1. Argeios is a real name, which Arnaios is not. 2. Arnaios, as a corruption of Argeios, signifying “ of Arne,’* may very possibly have been directed by a hostile clique against the celebrated Terpander, who came from Arne to Lesbos. As appears from what follows, and from what Dr. Smith tells us about his true birthplace, this would have been a pretty sharp double sting. Furthermore, it was doubtless as fine a thing for a Hellene to claim descent from Argos, as it is for an Englishman to claim descent from the Conqueror. And if his mother were weak enough to do so The Complete Life of Homer. 151 in christening Irus Argeios, the rival literary clique at Chios may very likely have laughed at him for it, and by changing the “ g ” into an “ n ” have dubbed him a low-class Boeotian lamb-stealer. And when he insisted upon the “ g,” they may have poked fun at him, as I have said, on the other tack. The wit seems small, but some in Shakespeare is not much bigger. We learn something also from Homer’s treatment of his principal characters. Thus, an Asiatic Greek would hardly have taken so unpromising a subject as the return of Ulysses had not Herodotus’s account been true, that the grateful poet owed the restoration of his eyesight, if not life itself, to the care of Mentor and the hospitality of the Ithacans. So he makes Achilles his hero because the Thessalians (probably from Scyros in Asia Minor) founded Cyme, the birth-place of his mother. Agamemnon is so highly honoured because yEolis was, in Homer’s day, a dukedom, shall I say, of the descendants of Penthilus, the grandson of Agamemnon, the King of Men. Nestor figures conspicuously in the “ Iliad,” and yet more in the “ Odyssey,” (1) because 152 The Complete Life of Homer. Homer was, on his mother’s side, a Kretheid ; (2) because his and Nestor’s kinsmen, the Codridae, were in his time Dukes of Ionia; (3) because his wife was a namesake of Eurydice, Nestor’s wife, and therefore, in all probability, a Kretheid, even if not a direct descendant of Nestor. Lastly, Homer deriving Erectheid blood (1) through the ancestor from whom he took his name—Homer of Smyrna ; and if) from the colony which went out from /Athens to Smyrna on the occasion of the ^usurpation of Higeus; he speaks of sErechtheid Athens, and mentions Menes- itheus, the son of Peteus, the son of •Orneus, the son of Erechtheus, with ■ distinguished honour, but never once ^mentions Demophon, or Acamas, or ^Egeus, and only once Theseus, and then without one applauding epithet. Even, -granting that Theseus was the true and mot the supposititious son of ^Egeus (albeit, Vbeiieving as I do in an all-pervading law x>f Nemesis, I regard the singular barren¬ ness of that prince as Heaven’s righteous visitation of his impious fraud, I mean his supposititious usurpation of the throne of Cecrops, even as the degeneracy of the The Complete Life of Homer. 153 line of Theseus himself was of the black¬ guardism of his prime and the dotage of his later years in respect to the other sex), but even if we admit Theseus to have been the true son of HLgeus, HEgeus, anyhow, was in no way allied to the Erechtheids, but was the son of Scyrias, as Plutarch expressly informs us.* Every reader of the “ Odyssey ” must be astonished at the fuss our poets make about Theoclymenus, a purely fictitious and gratuitously interpolated character, and his stemma given for five generations, and at the extraordinary favour shown both here and elsewhere to Amphiaraus. I can only account for this on the supposition that Homer’s father, Dmasagoras, claimed descent, through Theoclymenus, from the great Melampus. The only Greek Homerologist that gives Dmasagoras as Homer’s father, gives Salamis also as his birthplace. i\nd what do we read in the “Odyssey ” ?— “ Then they sold me to a stranger, Whom they met upon the way, Dmetor the son of Iasus, Cyprus who did firmly sway ” f * Plut, Thes. t Odyss., xvii. 442-43. 154 The Complete Life of Homer. (“ at the death of Cinyras,” II., xi. 20). Dmetor is, of course, the same as Dmesagoras, just as Homer is called in¬ differently Melesigenes, Melesianax, and Melesagoras. Meles is the root of Homer’s name, and Dmes, that is, Dmetor, conqueror, is the root of his father’s name, agoras in each case being a comparatively insignificant affix, impossible, as one may say, in the heroic age, but common enough afterwards. Dmasagoras, then, the father of Homer, was a Cypriote of Salamis, and the son of Iasus. Iasus, the father of Io, was really a poor faineant prince : how then comes Homer to speak of Iasian Argos ? Why, of course, because his father was the son of Iasus. Hence, partly, and for the reasons elsewhere given, Cleanthes and others thought Homer (that is, thought his father, Dmasagoras) an Argive. Again, it is in the highest degree pro¬ bable that Theoclymenus, the hapless fugitive Telemachus had so generously sheltered, should name his son Telemachus from his beloved patron. Otherwise, what possessed Dmasagoras to take the alias of Telemachus, in consequence of which The Complete Life of Homer. 155 Homer was , in a manner, the son of a> though not of the Telemachus, thus verify¬ ing the strange account of his parentage given by his Egyptian biographers ? And now, at last, we have the hapless adven¬ turer’s complete stemma. Dmasagoras (in Homer, Dmetor), of Salamis, the son of Iasus (so named from his celebrated ancestor), by Euryclea, the daughter of Ops, the son of Peisenor, the son of Telemachus II., the son of Theoclymenus, the son of Polypheides (the son of Mantius, the son of Melampus, according to the Homeric genealogy, but according to the true genealogy as given by Pausanias), the son of Coeranus, the son of Abas (surnamed Mantius, to distinguish him from the Abas), the son of Melampus.* And Dmetor (i.e., Dmasagoras) went as chaplain on board a merchant brig (to adapt the parlance of the eleventh century before, to that of the nineteenth century after Christ) from Cyprus to Egypt (Homer, in the foregoing passage, dis¬ tinctly tells us so), stopping at the important town of Cyme on the way; and there he seduced poor Kretheis. * Paus., i. 43, § 5. 156 The Complete Life of Homer . And when he came to Egypt he very naturally took to soothsaying, his ancestors being all so supereminently distinguished in that line, viz., Melampus, Mantius (as the name itself shows), Polyphides, next of all mankind after his cousin Amphiaraus, the most skilful of all mankind in the art, and Theoclymenus. But to return for a moment to Theseus. Besides those already given, Homer had yet other reasons for ignoring him. Ion of Chios states that CEnopion and Staphylus, the sons of Ariadne by Onarus, priest of Bacchus, and not by Theseus (this their names alone sufficiently prove), founded Chios, and planted the vine there that sub¬ sequently produced such glorious wines. Hence, and because of the exiles to Sipylus during the usurpation of Higeus, and be¬ cause of theCodridprinces of Ionia, Homer’s inimical silence concerning/Egeus,Theseus, and Demophon. Hence partly the inhospi¬ table first reception of the“Iliad”at Athens, as yet undoctored to suit the national taste by that mean betrayer of his country’s liberties, the perjured and impious usurper Peisistratus. Hence the poet’s feelings towards Ariadne and the Minoses. But The Complete Life of Homer . 157 here one word by the way. Ion of Chios. Does not this strange conjunction of words suggest an intimate connexion between the two islands that figure so conspicuously in Homeric biography ? Our poet’s references to Creophylus are not very plain. Perhaps ,—that is, in books xiv,, xv., and xvii., that our poet is thus autobiographical. The country seat near Ithaca is Bolissus, Eumseus at Bolissus, but 710 farther is Glaucus. Ulysses in rags is Homer, but Ulysses in rags only. Here comes in the faint germ of Mr. Stevenson’s most ingenious story. As Minerva trans¬ forms the hero of the wreck from hero to beggar, he becomes alternately Jekyl and Hyde, Ulysses and Homer. Apollo forbid that I should pollute the pure stream of legendary history with allegorical abomi¬ nations, but that the lying tales of Ulysses and the wily devices and contrivances of that hero and his worthy offspring, and, above all, the harlequinade of Minerva, just referred to, gave the poet the oppor¬ tunity for autobiographising that he makes such use of in the above-named books, there can be no reasonable doubt. It is no part of the function of the bio¬ grapher of Homer to enter upon an elabo- N 178 The Complete Life of Homer . rate criticism of his poems. The reader can best judge of their merits by a diligent study of them; but I could not forbear a few words on the vital question of their historical truth. Nor can I forbear saying something also on a point where he has been hardly less maligned. Against his morality you can say nothing worse than that it is that of a Dyak of Borneo. It is that of primeval man unenlightened, but undepraved. No writer has depicted the horrors of war, more feelingly, or with greater force; and, had his note of warning only been taken to heart, Greece might now be the mistress of the world, instead of being the smallest of European powers. “ Bound to his fellows by no social tie, An outlawed exile may he wander far; And him may hearth and altar all deny, That loves in*kindred states to kindle war.” And with respect to slavery, even in its mildest form, what poet has written better ? “ Accursed slavery, ’neath thy withering chain, Of virtue but the shadow doth remain ; For manhood’s better part they lack that do But what thy stinging lash compels them to.” In a word, he was probably as far superior to his a^e as he could have been to influ- o The Complete Life of Homer. 179 ence it,—as far superior as in his miser¬ ably degraded social position he durst or would have been permitted to be—with his boundless hospitality, unsuspecting simpli¬ city, warm attachment to kith and kin and clan and country, and scorn of the barbarian and the plebs, a Conservative, perhaps, but an ideal one. Had he lived in the time of Aristophanes he would have protested with him against the Peloponnesian War ; and had he lived now, he would have protested against the wars that have desolated Europe so long. The swine of Circe are the beasts in human form that vexed his childhood at Smyrna, and his declining years at Chios. The first line of the “ Odyssey " has never yet received adequate attention. Evu£ 7 T£ (tell) is a strong contrast to a£&£ (sing), in the first line of the “ Iliad.” In the “ Iliad ” the poet says “ Sing, O Goddess!” In the “ Odyssey,” “Tell, O Muse!” The “Iliad” was designed entirely for recitation ; the “ Odyssey ” partly, at least, if not even principally, for the closet. It is just conceivable that Homer never wrote the “Iliad” down after all ; it is quite possible that the N 2 i8o The Complete Life of Homer . “ Odyssey ” was oftener read than recited, even in the poet’s own lifetime. It cannot be doubted that the poet was telline his own tale, as well as that of o Ulysses, where he says :— “ Tell me, 0 Muse ! of the wise one, Who, wandering the wide world through. Saw the cities of many peoples, And their manners and customs knew, And sorrows many upon the sea, In his heart endured that patient he.” * We are now introduced to the suitors, and amongst them Telemachus, a faint foreshadowing of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, —“ his closed eyes drawing pictures to his soul of his glorious father dashing in and scattering the cowardly suitors before him like frightened hares,’’t and “ Phe- mius singing amongst the suitors, through necessity.”J Now how do we connect this with Homer? Even thus : at the enforced departure of Maeon and the Amazons from Smyrna, Homer and his ill- fated mother lost their sole protector. She * Odyss., i. 1-4. t Odyss., i. 115-116. J Odyss., i. 154. The Complete Life of Homer. 181 was now exposed a helpless prey to the coarse, insolent solicitations of a set of loafing rowdies from all parts of Hellas. Wretchedly poor, and unprotected, in a garret of some low Smyrniot slum or other, what was she to do ? Appeal to their respect for a lonely woman’s honour, when the mere existence of the trembling child beside her proved that she had, alas ! for •ever, stained its virgin whiteness ? Fly for shelter to her friends, when she had not one left in the whole world ? This lasted four whole years, and then-“ Four years !” cries a hypersceptical opponent; “I •have studied my Homer far more dili¬ gently than you, and with immeasurably vaster appliances and means to boot of scholia, &c., and I find no such thing.” Because you have never once looked under the surface ; because you have never once scratched the surface with your nail. Therefore, with a thousand times my poor store of learning, you have only seen one side of this marvellous poem. Homer describes a dog dying of disease, the con¬ sequence of gross neglect, evidently a poor man’s dog, evidently his own dog. And you see nothing but Ulysses’s dog, a king’s 182 The Complete Life of Homer. dog. A dog kept by Penelope and Tele- machus, still both alive, could not have been thus neglected to death, but, at twenty-five would far more likely have been dying of sheer old age, of which, however, our poet lets drop notone syllable. So Telemachus speaks of his doubtful birth in language that in the son of any lawfully-married mother would be most unprincely, nay, most unbecoming a gentleman, and in the son of the chaste Penelope would be inap¬ propriate in the extreme ; and you do not see that the poet is speaking in only too sober earnest of his own most dubious paternity. So here, in Book II., 11 . 85-110, we have the celebrated story of Penelope’s web, that reads so prettily in Homer, and makes such a pretty picture in the National Gallery. But when we apply the critical nail, we see quite a different story below the surface. The story, as we have it, is as grossly improbable as anything not physically impossible can be. That so many suitors, elsewhere so artful, should not have amongst them the brains of some ridiculous Welsh giant, should allow them¬ selves to be fooled so preposterously for four whole years together, quite exceeds The Complete Life of Homer. 183 all the limits of the wildest poetical licence. But we may fairly take the four years to represent the period between the departure of Maeon and the time when Kretheis was driven to decide upon changing her state to escape from the dangerous importunities of these unscrupulous sons of Belial :— “ Flown with insolence and wine.” Penelope’s web was some device by which she kept them, perhaps, some weeks, but certainly not four whole years, at bay, till, much to the delight of the little Homer, she was rescued from them by the honour¬ able proposals of Phemius. But what is meant by Phemius’s “ singing amongst them by necessity” ? That he was obliged to earn his bread in this way, and only after long delay was he in a position to offer her a home. And during this period she was driven to many miserable shifts to escape from their outrageous bestiality. And now we understand why Homer should falsify history in his account of the “ Death of the Suitors.” History informs us that Ulysses and his companions slew those who had usurped his kingdom, when 184 The Complete Life of Homer . stupified by meat and wine. But this does not meet our poet’s autobiographical views. He looks back upon the detestable way in which they insulted his poor mother, and he remembers, to his dying day, her wrung look of mingled agony, shame, disgust, and fear. When he was “ A little boy aged ten,” we can fancy him, like little Tommy Merton, crying for a sword to run through these Thrasonical braggarts of thedEolian wars, and imagining his dear father Dmasagoras’s return from Egypt, and the vengeance dealt by the equally out¬ raged husband and child upon • these swinish Alsatians. Ulysses’s unsparing vengeance appears to us excessive, nay, ^repulsive, but to Homer it quite evidently does not appear so. It is, perhaps, dif¬ ficult for us adequately to conceive the dastardly cruelty with which these lawless ruffians may have taken advantage of the lonely woman’s fears to take the very bread out of her little child’s mouth, and drive her to the very verge of dishonesty to her employers, and the streets of Smyrna The Complete Life of Homer. 185 for a living. And Penelope, very love¬ able, but somewhat weak, is evidently a fine picture of Kretheis. We have two interesting traits of our poet’s personal character. One in this book :— “ Many there came to our abode, for he Was the true soul of hospitalitee,” * says Telemachus, in a passage harmonising very closely with another already quoted (p. 145),f in which Homer speaks of himself as ministering to the wants of the wander¬ ing children of sorrow in the days of his prosperity as principal of Minerva House Academy, Smyrna, like the charming character of whom Goldsmith writes in his “ Deserted Village ” :— “ A man he was to all the country dear, And passing rich on forty pounds a year.” “ For he was mild as a father” (“Odyssey” ii. 47). Hardly Ulysses’s true charac¬ ter, surely! The other, when Ulysses speaks like “ Some mute inglorious idiot passion fixt,” * Odyss., i. 176-7. + Cf. also Odyss., xix. 314-316. 186 The Complete Life of Homer. as Cowper forcibly translates the line, we have doubtless a description of our poet’s own earnest but ungraceful delivery. He gives his audience curiously broad hints on the nature of the hospitality due to the sacred poet, e. g., when Ulysses gives the bard the best cut of the chine, with expressions the most complimen¬ tary, * and where Nestor vows he will never allow the son of Ulysses to sleep on the hard mast-planks of the ship as long as he has a bed to offer him ;+ and various other passages, wherein he shows his high conception of his sacred function, and his own warm-hearted hospitality that must have made him doubly susceptible to the cold, grudging hospitality of others. He makes no claim to descent from Danaus. This Pausanias thinks an over¬ sight ; I do not. An usher at a cheap boarding-school boasting of his lineal descent from William the Conqueror cuts but a sorry figure; and our poet boasting of his from more gods than one, as he chawed his eleemosynary bacon, would have cut an even sorrier appearance. * Odyss., viii. 474-481. f Odyss., iii. 352-355. CHAPTER V. HIS DATE. It is evident that the school of Apollo- dorus, in giving Homer a date of 240 years and more after the Fall of Troy, has confounded the elder Homer with the younger one. So late a date is indeed absolutely irreconcilable with the fact that Lycurgus saw the author’s own copy of the “ Iliad ” in the possession of the pos¬ terity of Creophylus. Nor is the school of Crates, that gives a date of less than a hundred years after the Fall of Troy, a whit nearer the truth. “ But we gather,” say they, “ from his works that he wrote not very long after the Fall of Troy, and certainly before the return of the Heracleids.” We gather no such thing : we gather quite the contrary. The praise given to Phemius in the “ Odyssey” proves nothing. It 188 The Complete Life of Homer . is a merely flattering eulogy upon the more father than Phoenix of teachers that watered the tender bud of song and de¬ lighted the boy-poet with old tales of Troy. Visiting Troy at the end of his travels he sees remains of Troy, but none of the Greek encampment; hence his re¬ marks thereupon. These two passages prove nothing whatever either way, but all the rest is in favour of a late date. Poseidon’s prophecy concerning the rule of Hineas and his son and his son’s son chanced, as we have seen, to be literally fulfilled, even as was Dido’s exactly parallel prophecy of the Punic Wars. But as Virgil lived long after the Punic Wars so did Homer after the capture of Troy by the Amazons. Had he written his “ Iliad” before 1127 b.c. under the rule, say, of the third and last JE neas, he might have ven¬ tured upon the prophecy. But this view, that he sang so soon after the Fall of Troy is wholly irreconcileable with the “ Iliad,” ii. 486 ; but if he wrote after 1127 b.c., he would certainly have qualified his prophecy had not the facts been mellowed to the right point of venerable obscurity by the lapse of time. The prophecy is obviously The Complete Life of Homer. 189 written by one that was not aware that only three generations of HLneadae reigned in the Troad, but believed that they reigned for an indefinite period. When a prophet means three times, neither more nor less, he writes very differently (see 2 Kings xiii. 18, 19). Again, Nestor’s “ Laudatio temporis acti ” is paralleled with Homer’s. But nothing can be more dissimilar. Achilles was certainly greater than Peleus, Aga¬ memnon than Atreus, Diomedes than Tydeus, Sthenelus than Capaneus. “We are far better men than our sires,” quoth the last of these; and Homer, beyond all doubt, smiles over his spirited por¬ trayal of this natural infirmity of age. But what Homer says is very different. We all at fifty, like Nestor, give the preference to our own generation over the succeeding one. “The boys are spoilt, the girls no longer marry for love, the stage is mere scene-painting, the clowns can do nothing but jump about.” But none of us are so absurd as to imagine that Tom Brown, when we were young fellows, could lift a mass with ease that two lads now-a-days cannot so much as stir. But this is just 190 The Complete Life of Homer. what Homer says of his heroes. How so ? Because he believed that with the Trojan War the race of heroes died out, and an entirely different race of men succeeded. Now this is a phase of belief that nothing but a considerable lapse of time renders possible. However we may revere our fathers and grandfathers, as we grow old like them, we cannot but see that, physi¬ cally speaking, they were much like our¬ selves at the same age. Only a generation of which we have no personal knowledge, and of which none we ever conversed with had, can we think wholly different from ourselves as Homer thought his heroes. He would not have written,— “ Many sons of the gods fight round Priam’s great city,” had his father or grandfather, or even great-grandfather been there. Mermerus, the grandson of Medea, flourished as a hoary-headed magician, and Ulysses came to his untimely end on the sea-shore some thirty years after the great quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon. And at least a century elapsed between the return of The Complete Life of Homer. 191 Ulysses and the youthful exploits of the vain-glorious Nestor and the other pre¬ vious matters referred to in the “ Iliad ” as falling well within that hero’s lifetime : and our poet is all out in his chronological perspective if he was born in the lifetime of the hero of the “ Odyssey,” or less than a century at least after the Fall of Troy. Again, when Homer speaks of Crete in his own person he calls it hundred-citied ; when he speaks of it in the person of Ulysses, he calls it ninety-citied,—a clear allusion to the Dorian immigration, about sixty years after the return of the Hera- cleids. Similarly he calls Corinth Ephyre when his heroes speak, and Corinth (a name it can only have acquired at or after the Dorian conquest) when he speaks himself. The most interesting case of this double nomenclature is contained in those celebrated lines :— “ Which men call Batieia, but immortals The tomb of Myrina the Amazon.” Meaning to say that in the time of Priam it was called Batieia, from the daughter of Teucer, the ancestress of his race; but in 192 The Complete Life of Homer. Homer’s time, long after the capture of Troy by the Amazons, the supposed monument of Myrina, one of the greatest of their queens, was to be seen there. Now this indicates a period very long subsequent to that capture. So the Hyle of Priam disappeared, and was replaced by Neonteichos (1007 and the poet on leaving that place at once immortalised his benefactor, and affixed the date and place of his birth to his work. Homer again states that the Boeotians occupied Boeotia 1153 b.c. ; but it is clear from Thucydides that they migrated from Thessaly 1123 b.c. This glaring ana¬ chronism, of course, clearly proves that our poet must have written long after the latter date. Homer’s fondness for Nestor also proves him to have written after the Neleid Apcecia, as does also his use of demos and arc hoi, as applied to Athens. Besides, towards the close of the “ Odyssey,” that is, the end of his life, when his knowledge of European Greece had become much enlarged, he speaks of the Dorian immigrants as opposed to the native Cretans, and calls them the three- The Complete Life of Homer . 193 fold people, which shows that he wrote after the Dorian conquest. As does also his mention in the “ Hymn to Apollo” of Knidos, the capital of the Dorian Hexa- polis. And the variation in his name,—in all probability, the original spelling of it, Melissigenes,—shows that he was born after the Neleid Apoecists had given its present name to the Meles. Lastly, Homer’s belief in the literal truth of the legend of the “Wooden Horse” proves him to have lived long after the siege. This Palaephatus saw, and we may plainly see, was a mere poliorcetic stratagem by which the Greeks were admitted into the city under cover of night and a pretence of raising the siege and withdrawing, and by means of a com¬ plicated web of fratricidal treachery. On further reading, however, Dares’s expla¬ nation of the modus operandi commends itself more to my judgment than that of Palaephatus. He says “ Polydamas” (one of the traitors within the walls) “recom¬ mends them ” (Agamemnon and the rest of the twenty-three) “to bring their army by night to the Scaean gate, where there was a horse s head carved outside , and 194 The Complete Life of Homer. there keep watch,” &c.* Still there is an element of truth, no doubt, in the account of Palaephatus also. The meta¬ morphosis of Cadmus and Harmonia into snakes is a case of a very similar kind. Dying in exile amongst the Enchelyes (Eels), a people of Illyria, two eels, the device of that people, were sculptured on their grave. And in process of time the eels were very naturally taken for snakes ; and Cadmus and Harmonia were fabled to have been turned not into eels, as in a sense they really were, but into snakes. Nor would he have deified the mother of Achilles had he lived so near her time. A genuine apotheosis, of which this was the very last in Hellenic annals, of course, took time. Even the minor honour of canonisation is not conferred, I believe, in less than a century after death at the very least. The two extreme dates, then, having been alike clearly disproved, which of the four intermediate dates appears the most probable,—that of Aristotle, Aristarchus and Castor (1043 b.c.), that of Ephorus * Dares, “Excidium Trojse,” cap. xl. The Complete Life of Homer. 195 and Archilochus (1056 b.c. ), that of Solinus, Tatian, Clemens Alexandrinus, and Alla- tius (1003 b.c. ), or that of Cassius, Philo- stratus, Philochorus, and Cyril (1015 b.c.) ? It is only reasonable to give the pre¬ ference to dates when backed by detail to dates that stand alone; it is, therefore, only reasonable to give the preference to No. r and No. 4 over Nos. 2 and 3 ; and, again, it is a fortiori only reasonable to give the preference to a date backed by perfectly reasonable and probable details to a date backed by perfectly mythological, super¬ natural, and impossible details ; it is, there¬ fore, only reasonable to prefer No. 4 to No. 1, and therefore, a fortiori , to the other two. But . besides all this, we must needs object to the third (that of those who advocate Colophon as the native city of our poet, 1003 b.c.), for the following all- sufficient reasons :—(1.) It makes him out a Lydo-Amazon, the thing he most of all abhorred. His treatment of Diana, the patron goddess of the Amazons and of Mars their ancestor, proves this. (2.) It makes him out to have been born at Colophon. But even Antimachus and o 2 196 The Complete Life of Homer. Nicander only claim him as a Colopho¬ nian in the sense that they themselves were so ; and Mimnermus, Xenophanes, and Hermesianax, though all three Colo¬ phonians, do not claim him at all. No one, so far as I am aware, asserts that he was born at Colophon. But whilst the advocates of the claim of Colophon put Homer too late, Aristotle and his school (for the directly contrary reason) put him a little too early, so as to make out that the Athenians themselves colonised Smyrna at the Apoecia, and not Lydian refugees from Ephesus, some twelve years before, and ASolic immigrants from Cyme and elsewhere some thirty-six years after. But this date also we must reject, for the reasons already adduced, and also for the following : (1) the palpable motive ; (2) the suspicion attaching to a date so artfully attached to an event so prominent; (3) the gross improbability of the whole story ; (4) its distinct contradic¬ tion, as we have seen, of Aristotle’s own more sober conclusion. It strikes me forcibly that the story in Aristotle, of the girl running off to Goat’s Bay, and there being carried off by The Complete Life of Ilorner. 197 # pirates to Smyrna, is simply taken from Eumaeus’s story, in the 15th book of the “ Odyssey” ( 11 . 415-482), of the daughter of Arybas running off with the Phoenician sea-wolves after being seduced by one of them. If we only suppose her with child (and as they had been at the island a whole year, why not ?), and further sup¬ pose Syrie, with its two cities, to be the same as Phoenice [Ios] with its two cities, I os and Aigina (and, again, why not? Recollect, to an Ithacan I os was above , and Syrie below Delos), and the stories are identical ; only in Homer the woman dies at sea. Just as Homer probably took his story of the dog Argus, so he may have taken the story of the daughter of Arybas from contemporary, or nearly contempo¬ rary, actual fact. The story in Aristotle may, then, be that of Homer slightly modified, and may have taken place about 1044, we h in the boy and girl memory of Homer’s maternal grandmother, Clymene, and great-uncle and namesake, Homer of Smyrna. N.B., of Smyrna. But the heroine of the story was most certainly not Homer’s mother or any near con¬ nexion of his. 198 The Complete Life of Homer. But the date of 1015 b.c. is altogether unexceptionable, for the following most all-sufficient reasons :— (1.) 130 years after the expedition to Troy, which Agamemnon and Menelaus led, Lesbos, which before had none, was built all over with cities. And twenty years after the colonisation of Lesbos by the ./Eolians, under Penthilus, Cyme in Aiolis,—in Hiolis, mind, not Cumae in Italy,—which is also called Phriconis, was founded. And eighteen years after Cyme, Smyrna was founded by the Cymaeans, and in it Homer was born. In other words, Homer was born 168 years after the Fall of Troy A But this great cardinal fact, combined with the Herodotean date of the Fall of Troy, gives the false date of Chares and the pseudo-Herodotus. Combined with the true date of the first siege of Troy by Hercules, it gives us the false date of Aristotle. Combined with the false date of Sosibius (1171 b.c.), it gives us the false date of Solinus Tatian and Allatius. Combined with the true date of the Amazonian capture of Troy * Westermann’s “Lives,” p. 20. The Complete Life of Homer. 199 (1127 b.c.), it gives us that of our good old friend, “ Whittakers Almanack,” p.8o; the accredited date, when I was a boy, about 960 b.c. But all this only proves the vital importance of the 168 years as an element in the calculation and the great probability of the Homeric date (1015 b.c.) obtained by combining the true date of the siege of Troy therewith. For this alone rests upon a well-made-out series of historical events, which none of the rest even prete 7 id to do. But those that deny that Homer was born 168 years after the Fall of Troy, and was not born in the archonship of Acastus at all, confound the true Homer with a false one. Thus, Ephorus, in stating that Homer was born 127 years after the Fall of Troy, in the archonship of Medon, 1056 b.c., confounds him with Homer of Cyme. * Apollodorus and his school, in stating that he was born 240 years after the Fall of Troy, in the archonship of Phorbas, confound him with Homer the younger,—the mistake made by all chron- ologists after that eminent writer down to Blair, and Townsend, and Whittaker. Crates and his school, that make him born 200 The Complete Life of Homer. about the return of the Heracleids, when Athens was ruled, not by archons, but by kings, confound him with Homer of Smyrna ; while, directly contrary to Crates, Theopompus, by making him born in the reign of Gyges, 500 years after the Fall of Troy, confounds him with some insigni¬ ficant Homerid of Chios,—the eighth Homer of the pseudo-Archilochus,—of whom we know nothing whatever. (2.) As the Ians must have known their own great date of dates, if not by the tombstone that Homer II. set up, or by their own venerable archives, at least traditionally ; and as Aristotle, from the very nature of his supernatural myth, must also have known that date, and by adding Homer’s age at death, obtained 1044 B.c., as the date of his birth, and as the Hero- dotean account, which represents him as only moderately old at death, gives us 1015 B.c. as the date of his birth, it fol¬ lows that Aristotle must have made him immoderately old (ninety to wit), asSolinus, Tzetzes, and Cramer have it, to obtain his own Phil-Athenian date of birth,—1044 b.c. And hence, furthermore, it necessarily follows, beyond all reasonable controversy, The Complete Life of Homer. 201 that our date of birth (differing from his only by assigning a more reasonable age at death), must be the date. (3.) It satisfies the weighty statements of Philochorus.* Philochorus says : — “ Homer flourished (y;x[molxe) in the archon- ship of Archippus, forty years after the Ionic Apoecia, 180 years after the Fall of Troy.” However we interpret the word t]x[xolxe 9 not one of the other dates satisfies more than one at most of the three statements contained in the above quotation. But this satisfies them all with the most startling accuracy. Hx[xotxs — he was called, like Christ and Samuel; he changed his name like Abraham ; he first received the sacred and immortal name of Homer from his celebrated “ homou ” (“and me too”), when he spoke “ semi-divinely ” at the commencement of the great Colophon¬ ian war, being now about twelve years old in the year 1003 b.c., in the eleventh year of the archonship of Archippus, exactly forty years after the Ionic Apoecia, and exactly 180 years after the Fall of Troy. He also “ flourished ” in another sense, just * Baletta’s “ Life of Homer,” p. 30. 202 The Complete Life of Homer. at the close of Archippus’s archonship, 995 b.c., when the melodious Swan of the Meles first began to sing in its sequestered caves. * The only other date that can possibly be twisted so as to satisfy the above crucial statement, is 1003 B.c., and our date is obviously far superior to that: (1.) In that it rests on a reasonable, but that on a most treasonable, interpretation of ; for how can “ he flourished” mean “ he was born”? (2.) In that, seeing it is admitted on all hands that Charidemus took, and that the yEolids settled at Cyme 1033 B.c., it is more decent, more charitable to the memory of poor Kretheis, and much more in accordance with natural probability and the Herodotean story, to suppose that Kretheis was seduced at the tender aofe of seventeen (1016 b.c.), than at the ripe age of thirty (1004 b.c.), when she was certainly old enough to know better. But the date 1003 being obtained by adding 90, supposed age at death, to 913, supposed date of interment, is really a compound of two most signal errors. * Westermann’s “ Lives,” p. 4. The Complete Life of Homer. 203 (4.) It satisfies the element of truth in every author. If born 1015 b.c., Homer was born in the archonship of Acastus, as Euthymenes says ; at the very close of it, as the opponents of Euthymenes say ; in the year when the archonship of Archippus began, according to the full force of the statement of the venerable Philochorus. (5.) Hesiod knew most distinctly, as I have shown in Chapter IX., that Hesiod and a Homer flourished in the time of the Lycurgus whilst he was viceroy of Sparta.* He also knew, I infer, that the Homer was bom during the minority of Labotas.f Hence two fright- ful blunders of his : (1) that the Lycurgus was guardian of Labotas, $—a Lycurgus or a somebody whose name resembled that great man’s may have been ; (2) that the Homer was a contemporary of the Lycurgus, whose date he knew to be three centuries after the Fall of Troy, and four centuries before his own birth. But if we separate his data, we obtain the exact truth therefrom. According to the date * Herodotus, ii. 53. f Herodotus, i. 65. J Paus., iii. 2, § 3. 204 The Complete Life of Homer. of Eusebius,* Labotas’s nominal reign began 1021, and Homer was born in his minority,—-ioi 5, or thereabouts. As, then, in Aristotle and the rest, so in Herodotus, we see how one mistake involved another. (6.) Lastly, let us once more briefly run over the history of Homer’s family, and we shall see how well the date of 1015 or 1014 fits in. Kretheus begat two sons by two different women, Orsilochus and Neleus. Orsilochus had a son, Diodes, fondly attached, as we learn from the “ Odyssey,” to his half-cousin, Nestor. Diodes had two sons, one of whom he named Krethon, from his illustrious great- grandsire ; the other Orsilochus, from his grandfather. They were both killed in the year 1184 b.c. But Krethon left a boy, Ithagenes, who, as we know from the etymon of his name, as already explained, was born 1192 b.c., in the first year of the war. His son, Kretheus (mentioned in Virgil as a companion of dEneas, i.e., as already explained of dEneas II.), went with that hero to Italy after the capture of Troy by the Amazons, 1127. He left * Chronicon, i. 320. The Complete Life of Homer. 205 a son, in whom he revived his great¬ grandfathers claim to the blood of his great-grandfather, Kretheus I.—Krethon, that is, the descendant of Kretheus (just as Deucalion, of Crete, was the descendant of Deucalus, and zEolion of Lesbos, the descendant of ^Eolus),—Krethon II., the great-grandson of Krethon I., who, in his turn, was the great-grandson of Kretheus himself. This Kretheus may reasonably be supposed to have been born about 1135, and to have had a son, Ithagenes, born in his fathers absence, doing des¬ perate battle with the Amazons, now in the zenith of their power, and threatening to overthrow all Western Asia, 1105 B - c * His son, Melanopus, would be born about 1075, and, marrying apparently rather late in life, in 1033, was the father of a daughter who bore Homer in 1015 or 1014 B.C. STEMMA HOMERICUM. A MATRE. Inachus Phoroneus Apis (by incest with sister) Argos Iasus I. 206 The Complete Life of Homer. Deucalion * Hellen t dEolus I. Mimas J Hippotes Hiolus II.§ Neleus I 1 Kretheus I. had by , . 2 Orsilochus 3 Diodes 4 Krethon I. 5 Ithagenes I. (born 1192) 6 Kretheus II. (went with AEneas II. to Italy 1127) 7 Krethon II. 8 Ithagenes II. (married Mela- nope, descended from Clymene I., attendant of Helen and Melanippus, of Percote) 9 Melanopus, married . 10 Clymene III. (so named from her mother), alias Melanope (so named from her father and grand¬ mother), alias Kretheis (so named from her great ancestor, Kretheus I.), born 1033. 2. Has by Dmasagoras, or Mceon, or Kleanax) 11 Homer, so named from his great - uncle and great- great - great - grandfather Epaphus Libye Belus Danaus Philodameia || Pharis I Telegone Homer I. (of Smyrna born according to Crates, about 1104 B.C.) O my res * § ** (1) Homer II. (of Cyme, born according to Ephorus, 1056 B.C., and plainly identical with the pseudo- Archilochus’s Homer). (2) Clymene II. Clymene II. * Odyssi, xix. 181. + II., ii. 683, &c. £ Odyss., iii. 172, § Odyss., x. 2, 36, || Great-grand-daughter of Danaus, See Paus., iv. 30, s. 2. ** “Lives,” p, 1, The Complete Life of Homer. 207 (marries Eurydice II.,* probably a descendant of Nestor and Eurydice I., from whom she derives her name. As a descen¬ dant of Telemachus, by their daughter Polycaste, she would naturally stimu¬ late our poet to write his “ Odyssey”; by her he had) 12 Arsiphone (married Kreo- phylus, the elder) 13 Terpander (of Phocosa) 14 Gnotor (of Cyme) 15 Arsiphone II. married . . HomerIV.(the son of Euphron 16 Euryphon, or Euphron and the Phocian).f Theolaus H.B. — The intricate stemma of Homer II. will be found in a ' subsequent chapter , STEMMA HOMERICUM A PATRE. Amythaon 1 Melampus 2 Abas (surnamed Mantius) 3 Coeranus 4 Polypheides X 5 Theoclymenus (unmarried 11 73) 6 Telemachus § * 7 Peisenor 8 Ops || (Cleitus) H 9 Euryclea, marries . . . Iasus II. (an Inachid) 10 Dmasagoras (unmarried 1015 B.C., subsequently marries ^Ethra, a descendant of /Ethra, Helen’s attendant) * An obvious pseudonym. • Of course, she got called so. Query, is it so obvious? t The “ Lives,” p. 47. ^ % Cf Odyss,, xv. 249. § See p. 253. || Odyss,, i. 429, and elsewhere. IT Paus., i. 43, § 5 5 IL» xv. 445, with which cf Odyss., xv. 250, 251. 2 o8 The Complete Life of Homer . ii Homer I. 15 Homer II., flourished 884 B.C. 16 Euphron (emigrated to Arne, leaving his brother, Theolaus, President of the Homeridse at Chios) 17 Phoceus (said to have been son of Homer, though grand¬ son, just as Agamemnon was called Atreides, though the son of Pleisthenes) 18 Boeus 19 Derdeneus * (Query, Dardaneus) 20 Terpander,f so-called from his ancestor of Phocsea, flourished 708 B.c. The period between Homer the younger and his descendant, Terpander, was one of great literary activity. In it flourished Archilochus 727 b.c., Callinus, a little before, Cinaethon 765 b.c., and Arctinus and Lesches contended about the time of the First Olympiad,—query, in honour of the quatercentenary of the Fall of Troy, 783 b.c. ? Shortly after which, in all probability, Lesches wrote his most pleasant and ingenious “ Agon.” Earlier still were Stasinus and Hegesinus, and, as I infer from the Borghese tablet, Telesis, of Methymna. Such is our poet’s truly extraordinary stemma on both the father’s and the mother’s side. James I., in a letter to Burghley,—Burghley, the oppressor to the death of Spenser; Burghley, the * Parian Marble, 34. f Suidas, art. “Terpander.” The Complete Life of Homer . 209 Polonius of Shakespeare—calls our poet “ one beggarly writing fellow.” Would he have called him so, I wonder, had he known that the noblest blood on earth ran in his veins, hat-in-hand, blind beggar as he was ? Thus, look which way we will, it is impossible not to see that the reasons for admitting the date of 1015 B.c. are over¬ whelmingly strong. Stronger reasons at such a distance of time it is surely most unreasonable to look for. Two more remarks whilst we have the Homeric stemma before us. We have seen our poet’s childlike simplicity in his singing songs for fieldfares to the boys, and going round from house to house singing for half-pence, and in the miser¬ able price he put upon the priceless treasures of his art—a farthing’s worth of fieldfares, a clay-pipkin, a bed and supper. Bed and board was all he ever asked for, and it was all he ever got—the bed and board of a ragged, half-starved mendicant. We have seen, too, that this childlike simplicity was combined with a touching confidingness no less childlike. We have seen how he let Creophylus take advantage p 2io The Complete Life of Homer. , of his blindness to cheat him out of the best pieces at dinner; we have seen how he let Thestorides take advantage of his blindness to cheat him out of all his poetry. And when he found out at last that he had been imposed upon, he could hardly believe it possible, and was utterly astonished. “ Oh, Thestorides ! ” cried he, “ Of all earth’s riddles passing hard to find, None mock all guessing like a villain’s mind.” And the three bars sinister in his stemma show whence he derived these lovable qualities. They were in his blood ; he derived them from his mother; he derived them from his ancestress Telegone; he derived them from the blood yet more remote that he shared with Tyro. GENEALOGICAL RESUME. Troy taken... ••• ••• ••• yEolic emigration under Penthilus Final colonisation of Lesbos Ionic Apoecia Foundation of Cyme Foundation of Smyrna Birth of Homer ... Archippus succeeds Acastus as Archon 11S3 1123 io53 1044 io33 1015 1015-14 1014 The Complete Life of Homer. 211 Expulsion of Amazons from Smyrna, Homer setat. 7. His first Homou (“And me too ”) His mother marries Phemius The Colophonian War against Smyrna, Homer a boy of 12 or 13 Call of Homer (as we say Call of Abraham, Call of Samuel); Homer first conscious of his sacred function. His second Homou (“ And me too ”) Homer succeeds Phemius in his school ... Capture of Smyrna by the Amazono-Colo- phonians... Death of Homer’s Mother Exile of Homer Re-colonisation of Smyrna by Athens, commonly called the Ampliatio in urbem ... ... ... . Smyrna joins the Ionic League ... Homer returns to Smyrna... Arrival of Homer at Chios Homer marries Homer dies at Ios... 1008 1004 1003 1003 988 986 986 9 8 5 9 8 3 9 8 3 975 9 6 5 963 944 P 2 CHAPTER VI. HIS BIRTH-PLACE. “ Seven cities claim’d great Homer dead Through which alive he begg’d his bread.” The cities referred to in the above well- known lines are named in the following even yet more familiar line— “ Smyrna, Rhodus, Colophon, Salamis, Chios, Argos, Athenae.” Smyrna, Rhodes, Colophon, Salamis, Chios, Argos, Athens. Of this line there were three other versions : — (1) Smyrna, Rhodus, Colophon, Salamis,Ios,* Argos, Athenae. (2) Cyme, Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Pylos, Argos, Athenae. (3) Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Ithace, Pylos, Argos, Athenae. * Here Ios takes the place of Chios as the place of his birth, even as Chios takes the place elsewhere The Complete Life of Homer. 213 Raising the seven to eleven in all. But why was he claimed by these eleven cities ? For one or other of the following reasons, or no reasons :— He was a Smyrnsean, because born on the banks of the Meles, in the neighbour¬ hood of that city. But he was of Athens because, as the epigram runs, Smyrna was a colony of Ephesus, which, in its turn, was colonised by Athens. “ He was, he was our golden citizen, Since we Athenians Smyrna colonised.” Of Cumae, because that was the cradle of his race ; Ephorus himself, a Cumaean, naturally tries to make him out something more—both the son of a Cumaean father and a Cumaean mother. Of Colophon, because his father was a Colophonian; and, also, because if he were born as late as the school of Apollodorus would have him, Smyrna had then fallen into the hands of the Colophonians. And a Lydian for just the contrary reason, be¬ cause, if born earlier, Smyrna was then, of Ios as the place of his death. In all probability, as I have said already, they are both alike a mere copyist’s blunder—a mere lapsus calajui. 214 The Complete Life of Homer. as Aristotle says, in the power of the Lydians ; though very shortly afterwards, when he was still a mere child, the Lydians had to give way before the rising power of the Htolians. Of Egypt, by his travels there, and because there he found the materials for writing his “ Iliad,” or, at any rate, because he first wrote it there ; there he first saw books; in a literary sense, therefore, hundred-gated Thebes was, indeed, his native city, and he was an Egyptian in the same sense that he was an Orpheid. He made him¬ self a Chian by living there, and an Ian by dying there. Argos claimed him be¬ cause he wrote the “Iliad”; Ithaca be¬ cause he wrote the “ Odyssey ” ; Pylos, because of Thamyris and Nestor and Krethon. Thessaly, because his mother’s family came from Magnesia, and also be¬ cause of Achilles. Cyprus, because he wrote a , if not the “Cypria.” Cenchreae in the Troad, because it was inferred from the prophecy of Poseidon (II., vi. 307, 308) that he was born under the sway of the ./Eneadae. The claims of Lucania, of Italy, and of Rome are absurd shadows of shadows, based as they are upon that of The Complete Life of Homer. 215 Troy. That of Grynium is merely that of Grynean Apollo, the tutelary deity, whose poet of poets he was, and in whose temple he was finally canonised. Rhodes, raised from beneath the sea by Apollo, and peopled by the children of the Sun, claimed him no less naturally from the mythological standpoint. The claim of Gnossus or Crete is obviously identical with that of I os ; the claim of Mycenae with that of Argos. Syria claimed him because his heroes eat no fish, and in Syria fish are sacred animals. So at least says Athenaeus, quoting from Meleager of Gadara. But 1 do not quite see how this is reconcileable with Homer’s own % account of the diet of the Hellenic Sindbad and his shipmates, and also that of Mene- laus and his crew when they could get nothing better. Ulysses says of his crew :— “ Now fish in lake, now bird in air, Now beast on plain for food they snare.”* And Menelaus of his :— “ Hunger so pinch’t their bellies they A fishing went day after day.” f * Odyss., xii. 330, 331. f Odyss., iv. 368-9. 216 The Complete Life of Homer. And, again, in another place “ Odyss.,” xix. 109-114), we find these words :— “ Like to a blameless king who, god-like in virtue and wisdom, Justice ever maintains, w’hose rich land unfailingly yields him Harvests of barley and wheat, and his orchards are heavily fruited; Strong are the young of his flock, and the sea yields him fish in abundance. ” But I fancy Syria is merely a mistake for Syrie, the island mentioned, “ Odyssey,” xv. 403-484, from whence came our poet’s pseudo-mother, told of in the Aristotelian myth. And in exactly the same way another almost equally weak claim, that of Rhodes, may be eliminated, if we sup¬ pose a Rhodes in theThebaid,*—a sort of St. John’s Wood, in the suburbs of Thebes, where Homer’s half-brother was born. I admit this conjecture is wholly baseless ; but, on the other hand, the claim of Rhodes is very nearly baseless too, and it is absolutely unaccountable that it should have been admitted amongst the Seven, unless we can either make it a * Just as there was an Ithaca in Syria. The Complete Life of Homer. 217 suburb of Thebes or place it in the Troad. On the contrary, the claim of Argos is strengthened by the suspicion that sly, good man Kleanax may have been Homer’s father. The Babylonians claimed him, saying that he got his name of Homer because he was their bailsman, i.e ., went on an embassy from them to the Athenians. At least so says Bachman.* But I fancy this must have been a joke in the “ Baby¬ lonians” of Aristophanes, to which Lucian pleasantly alludes when he says, “No; our poet was not a Smyrniote, nor yet a Colophonian, nor yet a Chian, but a Babylonian,” jeering at the ridiculously slender grounds on which many of the Hellenic cities, both in Asia and in Europe, based their claims. Cyprus claimed him because of his vivid description of the locust-plague, so common in that island even to this day. Lastly, the Dorians claimed him (1) “because he was exposed on the banks of the Meles, Dorian fashion (2) because the name of Ortis Dorio, that is, Ortis the Dorian, is found in his pseudo- * “Anecdota,” vol. ii. p. 328. 218 The Complete Life of Homer. stemma. Thus the arch-heretical Chori- zontes Hellanicus and Xenon would seem to have recognised (i) Homer’s birth on the Meles ; (2) to have attributed the stemma of the younger Homer to the elder one ; (3) to have denied the elder Homer’s claim to the “ Odyssey,” because this was certainly a product of the Chian school, and Homer was no less certainly not a Chian. u Oh, happy and unhappy, for you are born to both ; You seek your fatherland, but you have only a motherland: * Your mother city is an isle nor near nor far from Crete ; In it it is thy doom to end thy days. The island of Ios is the fatherland of your mother ; In it shall you be buried, but beware of the young men’s riddle.” The claim of Ios is an instance of the principle of successive evolutions. Be¬ ginning with Homer’s dying there, as he doubtless did, they concocted an oracle to prove that his mother was from that island, as she certainly was not, but most pro¬ bably her name was Clymene ; for, after * Being of unacknowledged paternity. The Complete Life of Homer. 219 all, Melanope and Kretheis are only patro¬ nymics. Then they made up a tale from that told in Homer (“ Odyss.” xv. 415-481), as discussed in last chapter, pp. 196, 197,— a tale which the Philathenians eagerly adopted,— that she had a lover there, and conceived Homer there, and that at the end of a year’s guilty intimacy with the fascinating but profligate stranger, she fled in her shame to a spot under the special protection of Jove’s Aigis (Aigina), thus making out Homer’s mother an Ian, of Cretan origin (hence the phrase “ nor near nor far from Crete ”), and sacrificed a goat on our poet’s tomb as a mark that wherever he might roam he was an Aigaian Greek—a Greek of the branch that had spread all over the Aigaian Sea, in the time of Minos II., from the isle where Amalthea the goat (aig), now a constella¬ tion, had suckled the king of heaven in his infancy. Last of all they pitched upon a dim, mildewed, long-forgotten grave, which may or may not have been that of the unfortunate daughter of Arybas, sup¬ posing her to have been washed ashore upon I os, or that of the mother of Homer the Younger, supposing him to have been 220 The Complete Life of Homer. born at I os; and which, again, may or may not have had on it the sacred name of Clymene. And this they declared to be the grave of the mother of the author of the “ Iliad.” But beyond this even they durst not go, even they durst not contradict the notorious fact that Homer was born on the banks of the Meles, though their trumped-up tombstone im¬ plied as much, unless, indeed, it was only her cenotaph. But Colophon states its case thus :— “ Oh, Homer, son of Meles.” (Therefore it allows Homer to have been born at Smyrna.) “ Oh, glory of Greece, And Colophon thy fatherland .” This last line claims Homer’s father, whether Maeon or Dmasagoras, or who¬ ever he was, as a Colophonian. But Kleanax was certainly an Argive, and Dmasagoras has been proved up to the hilt a Salaminian, therefore Maeon must have been a Colophonian in the opinion of the Epigrammatist, as it is clear The Complete Life of Homer. 221 from “ The Lives ” he was, for we read in “ The Lives ” that he came with the Amazons, and Strabo tells us that the Amazons returned to Colophon. And naturally so, that being the native city of their leader. And Homer no less natu¬ rally said, “And me too,” as wanting to go with his adopted father. Such are the earliest memorials on record concerning our poet being an oracle of extreme antiquity but deplorable in¬ veracity, and an inscription on his statue about the middle of the sixth century b.c. in the temple of Delphi. The legend in connection with the former is adopted by Aristotle. His motive for pre-dating the poet’s birth has already been pointed out. The claim of Dmasagoras is also vehe¬ mently contradicted by another epigram on another statue of Homer— “ I am not, and I will not be a Salaminian, Or a son of Meles-Demagoras meaning, “ I am not of Salamis or Colo¬ phon, but a true Smyrniote. My father was Maeon, not Demagoras ; my mother Cretheis, not Themisto.” But the people of Cyprus said that The- 222 The Complete Life of Horner. misto, one of the maidens of their land, was his mother, and that the birth of Homer was predicted in the following lines :— “ And then in sea-girt Cyprus a mighty bard shall be, Whom Themisto shall bring forth in the country queen of women ; A far-famed bard secluded from wealthy Salamis, Alone the woes of merry Greece he shall be the first to sing, And ageless and immortal be for ever and for ever.” * This, however, is written on behalf of Stasinus, who shares with Hegesinus the honour of being the writer of “ The Cypria,” t and who was born in the coun¬ try, J while his rival was a citizen of Sala¬ mis. It has nothing to do with Homer, and the claim of Cyprus is solely based on a false interpretation of a sham prophecy. Most certainly, had Homer been a Cypriote, he would have had more to say about Teucer in the “ Iliad,” and would not have * Pausanias, x. 24. t Athenasus, xv. p. 682; Epic. Gr. Fr., p. 2. j “ In the immediate neighbourhood of Salamis, c a Sabbath-day’s journey therefrom’” (Epiphanius). “ In the fields as you go from Salamis ” (Pausanias). I The Complete Life of Homer. 223 ignored him in the “ Odyssey.’’ Nor would he have scorned the patron goddess of his native isle so openly ; nor would he have given only one line to Salamis in his “ Catalogue.” So, had he been born at Rhodes, Apollo’s own special bard could never have kept silence about the supernatural origin of his native isle. The claim of Rhodes is indeed based on a confusion between Helios, the Sun-god, and Apollo, universal in Ovid’s time, but absolutely unknown to our poet. But be this as it may, all , as far as I can see, admit that Homer was born at Smyrna. He was, undoubtedly, a citizen of Chios, and as such, Pindar, Simonides,* * * § and Theocritus + hail him as the Man of Chios ; but I have nowhere seen it even hinted that he was born there. Indeed, Pindar himself recognises Smyrna as his native place.$ He says he was a Smyr- niote and a Chian, exactly as we say.§ I will not weary the reader with the in¬ numerable proofs offered by a multitude * Bergk., “Poet. Lyr. Gr.” p. 289. t Idyll, vii. 47. j “ Lives,” p. 28 ; Find. Fr., 1S9. § Plat. “Life” (Works, vol. vi.). 224 The Complete Life of Homer. of writers, from the pseudo-Herodotus downwards, that Homer was an Hiolic, not an Ionic, Greek. Look at the nume¬ rous episodes devoted to Nestor, Bellero- phon, Krethon, and other EEolids, and to none else, save Typhon and Niobe of Smyrniotis — certainly to no Dorian or Amphictyonid ; and can you doubt it ? And if an yEolid, of necessity a Smyrniote. That Homer was a native of Smyrna, appears also most plainly from his works, (i.) Sipylus was the native mountain of his race. Thither, when the people were turned to stone (“ II.,” xxiv. 671), that is, buried in an earthquake, came a colony from Athens, but not sent by Theseus, whom Homer mentions but once, and with¬ out applauding epithet. “ 11.,” i. 265, and “ Odyss.,” xi. 63, are interpolated by Pei- sistratus (just as he expolated Hesiod) in honour of the great national hero. And Aristeides confounds two quite distinct Theseuses—Theseus, the putative son of JEge us, and a Theseus, one of the founders of Cyme, an Admetid who flourished two centuries later. It probably came on the occasion of the usurpation of the supposi¬ titious Erechtheid-HEgeus. And thence The Complete Life of Homer. 225 came the Pelopidae. Hence Homer’s one object of reverence at Athens :— “The people of high-souled Erechtheus, Whom whilom Athene the fair.’ - * * * § Hence Athene was his tutelary deity. Hence the story of Athene and Hephaes¬ tus mysteriously introduces,! and the house of Pelops is, the one great theme of the Cycle, &c., &c. And can we doubt what he means by the “ beds of the nymphs ” in a passage so strangely inter¬ polated ?—the cave where he sang in his boyhood. (2.) The abominably insulting usage of Artemis, the tutelary deity of the Amazons, at the hands of Juno, the tute¬ lary deity of the Argives, { points clearly to the final disappearance of the Lydo- Amazons before the Argive-Hiolians in Homer’s childhood.§ (3.) The introduc¬ tion of Tyche in the hymn to Ceres (line 420) connects the Tyche whose temple was at Smyrna with the Tyche of Homer’s maternal ancestors. And hence Phe- * II., if 547. f “ Epic., Gr. Fragm.,” p. 4. J II., xxi. 480-493. § Westermann’s “Lives,” p. 22. Q 226 The Complete Life of Homer . reptolis,* as being the tutelary deity of Pherae.f (4.) In the hymn to Artemis we read :— “Sing, Artemis, 0 Muse, the sister of Apollo, Who having yoked the horses of Meles deep-grown with rushes, Drives her all-golden chariot swiftly thro’ Smyrna To vine-abounding Claros, where silver-bow’d Apollo sits waiting for her.” Cf Pindar, “ 01 .,” vi. 40, vii. 54; andean there be a doubt that reference is made to the birth of the poet amidst the rushes of the Meles with her as unseen midwife to the poet that ages ago was five minutes old midwife to the poet’s patron God ? And she flies to Claros to bear to her brother the glad intelligence. (5.) Com¬ pare, too,— “ ’Neath snowy Tmolus in the wealthy deme Of Hyle ” (“ II.,” xx. 3S5), and “ The seven-hide shield which Tychius wrought, The best of leather-cutters who at Hyle dwelt ” (“ II.,” vii. 220, 221), * Paus., iv. 30-36. t v. 543- The Complete Life of Homer. 227 with Westermann’s “ Lives,” pp. 4 and 14, and we cannot fail to see their exact iden¬ tity ; we cannot fail to see that the “ Lives ” are here drawn bodily from Homer, that Homer here glorifies his benefactor, Ty- chius, oriundus Tyche Smyrnseensi, who dwelt hard by Homer’s native place :— “ In Hyle’s wealthy deme the oak-grown spot, Where Typhon lies at Arima” (“II.,” ii. 783). There is more in this last point than meets the eye. Typhon’s place of penal durance was unknown. Every one placed it in the nearest earthquake or volcanic centre. An Icelander would have put it under Mount Hecla ; a South American, under Chimbo¬ razo or Cotopaxi; an Italian placed it under Mount Etna or in the island of Pithecusa ; a Syrian or Egyptian, in the middle of the Serbonian bog which ex¬ tended from Syria to Pelusium in Egypt: Herodorus, indeed, does so. Homer, there¬ fore, in placing it at Arima, proves himself a Smyrniote. (6.) Note also Ulysses, in one of his lying tales, calls himself the illegitimate son of Castor, the son of Hylax, and further that Hyle. was a suburb of Smyrna. Q 2 228 The Complete Life of Homer. (7.) Lastly, in the “ Lives,” we have him saying :— “ Hiolid Smyrna on my mother’s knee, A babe I watcht thy shore lasht by the sea.” (8.) Aristeides, the rhetorician priest of Hephaestus at Smyrna, 178 to 180 a.d., had the honour of at last decisively settling the dispute, even as the epigram has it:— “Aristeides put an end to the dispute amongst the cities of Ionia which they had before concerning the birthplace of Homer. They now all say with one mouth, ‘ Smyrna bore divine Homer,’—Smyrna, which brought forth the rhetorician Aristeides.”* But Smyrna only brought forth Aristeides as Chios brought forth Homer. Aristeides was born at Adriani, just as Homer was born at Smyrna. It is, in fact, only this equivocal use of such words as egeneto and ekmake that leaves the smallest shade of doubt upon a question otherwise as clear as crystal. But, un¬ fortunately, people born at one place and living and dying at another were apt to be thus reckoned two-citied. And so they were if they were born in one place and their parents in another. Thus, Archilo- * Anthol. Planud., 320. The Complete Life of Homer . 229 chus was both a Parian and a Thasian, Protagenes a Teian and an Abderite, Ter- pander both of Arne and of Antissa, &c. Just so, though Hercules was born at Tiryns, Plutarch calls him “ our Boeotian and Argive Hercules.” And just so Mimnermus was called a Colophonian, even as Homer was, though really a Smyrniote like Homer, but descended from the Colophonians that re-conquered Smyrna from the ^Eolians. Yet, he plainly calls himself a Colophonian :— “ By the will of the gods we took ^Bolid Smyrna.” But he does not claim Homer as a fellow- citizen, whilst Homer himself tells us that he is heart and soul an Hiolid. The case of Pindar is also most illustra¬ tive of that of Homer. Like Homer, he is claimed by two birthplaces, Thebes, where he was actually born, and Cynos- cephalae, a village in the territory of Thebes, from whence his parents came. Yet so inveterate was the tendency to confound birthplace and mother-city, that, whilst Aristotle distinctly states that Homer was born on the banks of the Meles, two of the “ Lives ” declare that 230 The Complete Life of Homer. Aristotle proves that he was from the Isle of Ios, where he really never set foot till a few weeks before his death. Like Homer, too, three fathers claim Pindar,—Pagondas, Daiphontus, and Scopelinus, the flute- player. He was the son of Scopelinus, in the sense that Homer was the son of Thamyris ; Scopelinus taught the one to play the flute, and Thamyris the other. And he was the son of Daiphontus, in the sense that Homer was the son of Demagoras, that is, according to the flesh. And he was the son of Pagondas, in the sense that Homer was the son of Maeon, for Mseon adopted Homer, and Pagondas Pindar. Lastly, like Homer, he is claimed by two mothers, Myrto and Cleidike. He was the son of Cleidike, as Homer was the son of Cretheis and the son of Myrto both as Homer was the son of Hyrnetho, that is, by adoption, and as Homer was the son of Calliope. For he was the disciple of Myrto, the first, and, next to Corinna, the greatest, of Theban poetesses. Nor do Homer and Pindar stand alone in their multi-paternity. Five fathers claim Stesichorus,* seven Sappho, f and four the * The “Lives,” p. 113. f Ibid., p. in. The Complete Life of Homer. 231 Sibyl of ErythraeA Stesichorus is like Homer, too, in his polypolitism. “ He is called, it is true, Stesichorus, of Himera, but some say that he was from Matauria, in Italy ; some, that he was banished from Pallantium, in Arcadia, and came to Catane, and there he died and was buried.”f Thus, four birthplaces claim Stesichorus, three Mimnermus, six Aristophanes, and eight or nine the Sibyl. { So Homer’s son-in-law, Creophylus I., was at once a Samian, a Chian, and an Ian. That is to say, he was born at Samos, and died at Ios, but resident for a time at Chios, when Homer made it for many ages the literary centre of Western Asia. On reconsideration I doubt this. His family was of Samos, and he lived at Chios, in the time of Homer the elder. But to say he was an Ian is to confound the two Homers. See for this chapter ix. on the pseudo-Homer. (9.) The claim of Athens, based as it is, whether on the original colonisation of Smyrna, in the reign of yEgeus, or on the subsequent Ionic Apoecia 1044-3 B * c *> 1S * The “ Lives,” p. 83. + Ibid., p. 84. J Ibid., p. 113. 232 The Complete Life of Homer. of course, all so much more evidence in favour of that of Smyrna. Homer had, doubtless, Erechtheid blood in him, but no poet, no rhetorician, no orator from H^schylus to Baletta, neither Isocrates, nor Aristeides, nor Photius, ever, in his most high-flown panegyric, claimed this height of honours for his dear native city.* ** (10.) The variations in Homer’s name, Melesigenes and Melissigenes, Melesa- goras and Melissagoras, are significant. They show that the Cecropian bees, that were, we read, the device of the Neleid Apcecists, gave a new and most appropriate name to the honey-sweet waters of the rush- fringed stream that before was called Ache- lous. They show, as so many other things show, the poet’s intimate familiarity with Smyrniotic topography, f They show that he was born after, but not very long after, the Neleid Apcecia. They show (like that other variation, Kretheis or Kritheis) the exceeding antiquity of the Pseudo-Hero- dotean legends, and the marvellous veri- * Philostratus, “ Imagines,” bk. ii. c. viii. p. 22. t Aristeides, vol. i. 425 ; “ Monodia epi Smyrna,” Isidorus, lib. xiv. cap. i.; Antholog., lib. iv. ** Epigr. in Peisistr.” The Complete Life of Homer . 233 similitude far exceeding mere ordinary probability thereof. (11.) We know from the Smyrnean in¬ scriptions that Tyche was a quarter of Smyrna,—the Kretheid quarter.* Tychius (who afterwards moved to Neonteichos, anciently called Hyle) was consequently Homer’s near neighbour. How natural, then, his kindness when “ the wondrous boy” of twenty years ago returned home at last a poor, blind, heart-broken beggar! Combine this with what I have noticed elsewhere about Hyle, and Arima, and Sipylus, and the Achelous and the Meles, and Smyrna itself, and surely the proof almost attains to certainty. (12.) Alexander believed in Smyrna, and therefore rebuilt it,t or at least left word on his deathbed that it should be rebuilt. Virgil believed Homer a Smyrniote and a Kretheid, hence his poet Kretheus. Theopompus, in assigning to Homer a date of 500 years after the epoch, evidently * Aristeides, vol. i. pp. 32-72 ; “ Smyrniotikos Politikos,” Aristot. “Poet.” Euseb. “Chron.” (‘ Smyrna in urbis modum ampliata ’). t Aristeides, vol. i. pp. 434-436 ; “ Palinodia,” Paus. “ Achaica.” 234 The Complete Life of Homer. confounded the great poet with some local Homer (No. 6 in Archilochus’s list of the eight Homers, of whom Xenophon says “ The last and greatest of the Homers lived after Thales ”), as was natural enough in a Chian, pleading the cause of his native town before the mighty con¬ queror of Asia, but, as we have just seen, Ephorus having just brought out his great work, Alexander knew better, despite even the potent authority of Anaximenes. And now to conclude. All ancient Greece from Lesches to Christodorus,— Asius, Scylax, Hellanicus, Xenon, Pigres, Eugeon or Eumeon, Ephorus, Moschus, Crates, Stesimbrotus, Archilochus, the Pseudo - Herodotus, Pindar, Aristotle, Philostratus, Himerius, Lucian, Conon, Ptolemy, Aristeides, the true Plutarch and the false Plutarch, Nonnus, Tzetzes, and, above all, Quintus Smyrnaeus, by his very name, the fifth Smyrnaean (Homer, Bion, Theo, and Hermippus being the other four), although, indeed, there were others, viz., Scopelianus, Polemo, the tutor of Aris¬ teides, Nicolaus, and Hermogenes, the editor of the “Life,” in the reign of Adrian. The Complete Life of Homer. 235 All the Latin writers, — Cicero, Ovid, Martial, Tibullus, Silius, Ausonius, and Solinus declare positively, and in every imaginable way (not to speak of all our great modern names, Politian, Milton, Eras¬ mus, Bentley, and Casaubon, with but one solitary exception, that of Allatius), that Homer was born on the banks of the Meles, near Smyrna. No author, I believe, has ever categorically denied this fact. Excluding Theopompus (whose false date sufficiently condemns him, identifying our poet, as he does, with a Chian Homerid who lived 500 years after the Trojan War), no writer, Greek or Latin, states that he was born at Chios. They only call him “a Chian ” and “of Chios” (just as Christ was called “a Nazarene,” and “ of Nazareth ”), and “ the man of Chios,” (just as Pope speaks of the “ Man of Ross”), “ the Chian bard,” and the like, having regard only to the place where he lived and died, and from whence he poured forth his melodies, and not to the place where he first breathed the breath of life at all. Thus Themistius does not doubt whether he was born at Smyrna or at Chios, but only at which of the two places 236 The Complete Life of Homer. he wrote his poems. So Alcaeus Mity- lenaeus, represents him as saying :— “ Sing, O Muses of Chios, my verses to the sons of Greece.” So Theocritus speaks of him as a Chian warbler. And that he, Simonides, Pindar, and the rest mean no more, I prove thus : though Pindar calls him a Chian,* he states in a passage now lost that he was born at Smyrna.f The pseudo-Plutarchus, whilst distinctly stating in one place that he was born on the Meles,J nevertheless, in another place calls him a Chian and Smyrniote.§ Bacchylides, who, as country¬ man and kinsman of Simonides, must be presumed to hold his view, agrees with Aristotle ; therefore it may be presumed that Simonides does so too. And Themistius with the mighty Master, whose works he paraphrased ; and Theocritus (though of Chian origin) with his fellow Dorian. The Argive quinquennia at Chios and the Homeridse there lasting till * Lives, p. 30. f Ibid., p. 28. J Ibid., pp. 21, 22. § Moralia, vol. vi. (Tauchnitz). The Complete Life of Homer . 237 after Pindar’s time, all come to the same thing. Aristotle, “Rhetoric,” ii. 23, dis¬ tinctly denies the claim of Chios, saying, “ The Chians honoured Homer, though not a citizen.” Hermesianax also denies it, saying :— “ To narrow Ithaca sweet Homer soar’d, In song divine for wise Penelope, (The nom de guerre of a patriotess of Smyrna, of whom Homer was absurdly supposed to be epris, The real truth being that the poet’s love for Penelope is a mere allegorical interpretation of the “ Odyssey,” Penelope, like Spenser’s Gloriana, being the Chian laureateship.) “ For whose sake, after many toils, he dwelt In a small isle # far from broad fatherland ; t And Menelaus and Ulysses mourn’d In their long wanderings shadowing forth his own.” J And to the self-same purport, Homer himself sings thus :— “ And with her was, I read, a minstrel swain ; But when the fates decreed his prince should fall, Then did the traitor take the faithful bard, And leave him on a desert isle to die.” § * Chios. t Hiolis. J Baletta, “ Life of Homer,” p. 30. § Odyss., iii. 267-271. 233 The Complete Life of Homer. Referring to the circumstances now all but lost in oblivion of the poet’s exile from his native place. And in the well-known hymn :— “ Who is the sweetest bard performing here? A blind man, and he dwells in ‘ craggy Chios.’ ” The singular way in which the place of one’s exile takes the place of one’s actual birthplace in the Greek mind is admirably illustrated in the case of one whose fate was singularly similar in this respect to that of our poet, Herodotus :— “ This dust conceals Herodotus when dead : Sprung from a Dorian fatherland, he shunn’d The terrible reproach of hostile faction, And made proud Thurium his fatherland.” * Lesches too, the author of an “ I lias Parva,” flourished 700 b.c., —that is, long before Pigres. He was, as we learn from Plutarch (“ Conviv. Sept. Sap.”), the author of the “ Contest between Homer and Hesiod.” In it he tells us that Homer wrote his (not Pigres’s Boccaccioesque) “ Margites ” at Colophonf. Now, in the * Anth. Gr. (Tauchnitz), vol. iii. p. 378. f Lives, p. 34. The Complete Life of Homer. 239 six admirable lines we have still left of it, we read :— “ An old man came to Colophon : a holy bard was he, And in his hand a sweet-voiced lyre this child of Phoebus bore.” Compare this with the Pseudo-Hero¬ dotus.* “ From thence he went to Colo¬ phon, and there (the Colophonians agree with me in saying, contrary to the account of the Ithacans), he was once more attacked with eye-disease, and became blind/’ And can we doubt that Colophon was not his birthplace,—that he was only a visitor there, but unhappily detained by a sad fatality ? In spite, then, of the well-known line in the “ Ciris ” :— “ Quae Colophoniaco Scyllae dicantur Homero In spite of the epigram on Nicander :— “ Having nourish’d the twain,” &c., Colophon does not really claim him. It is true Antimachus and Nicander call him * Lives, p. 4. 240 The Complete Life of Homer . a Colophonian, but so they call themselves Colophonians; yet Nicander flatly con¬ tradicts the above lying epigram upon him, saying of himself :— “ Him Claros nurtured.” The exquisite melody of the line thus obtained may, probably, have seduced the learned author of “ Ciris ” in his unfledged youth, and other warblers after him, to apply the epithet Colophoniac to Homer, but it is true in a sense besides : true enough for poetry anyhow. Homer was a Colophonian though not a native of Colophon, exactly as one may be a Staffordshire man without being a native of Stafford. Thus, as all roads lead to Rome, so all rival claims meet at the river Meles. Whether you call him an Ian or a Colo¬ phonian, you alike make him born on its banks. And whether you call him Lydus, or Auletes, or Maeonius, or Maeonides, it comes to the same thing. For Lydia (as Herodotus tells us), was anciently called Maeonia, and Smyrna, during the two centuries when Lydia ruled the sea, was the capital of both. Hence it was called The Complete Life of Homer. 241 Lydian Smyrna, even as the learned Scy- lax says,—“ Lydia Smyrna ubi Homerus erat.”* As, then, neither Colophon nor Ios, nor Cumae nor Athens, really disputes the claim of the Meles, so neither does Chios. Whether we take the account of Aris¬ totle or that of Ephorus, they distinctly state that he was born there. Chios is, at the worst, but silent. Even Chios, as we learn from the “ Lives ” (p. 24), only claimed him after all, not as being born there, but as being (1) a citizen; (2) the father of the Homeridae. In a word, no city but Smyrna seriously claimed to be his birthplace , but only his father’s or mother’s, till very late times indeed. At last, when the two Homers were utterly amalgamated, and heretical views the most absurd propounded, the Pseudo-Herodotus was either merely re-published (if we may rely on the authority of Stephanus Byzantius, Suidas, Tzetzes, and Eustathius), or translated from the original Carian (of a , if not the Herodotus), or most lyingly concocted by Hermogenes, of Smyrna, author of * Scylax, cap. 89. F 242 The Complete Life of Homer. “ Smyrna” and “ The Wisdom of Homer,” and Aristeides wrote his “ Monody,” his “ Palinode,” &c., and the question was be¬ lieved to be finally and for ever settled in favour of Smyrna and the Meles, as indeed it should have been, for the other cities have no case whatever, as has, I trust, been satisfactorily demonstrated. And from this time the Smyrnaean legend bore full and undivided sway, and ex¬ panded, by degrees, to its full dimensions. Homer’s mother was no longer Kretheis, but Kritheis, a numphe agronomos , and worshipped at Smyrna as such, and as such she no longer merely bore Homer on the banks of the Meles, but was beloved by the god of that river. And Homer himself encourages this legend in his story of Tyro (“Odyss.,” xi. 278):— “Who loved the divine river Enipeus, The most beautiful on the face of the earth, And oft she went to the lovely streams of Enipeus.’’ Kretheis, like Tyro, was the orphan daughter of an Hiolid, to whom Homer, out of filial pity, sorely misapplies the epithet “ blameless.” Kretheis, like Tyro, The Complete Life of Homer . 243 was beloved by a river god, and after him was wedded to an ordinary mortal. Thus thrice Homer refers emphatically, and at length, to his birth on the banks of the Meles, but only once to the native city that had spurned him, and that with thinly veiled contempt. Diana passed through Smyrna on her way from the Meles to Claros. That is all, and that is all that Homer did on his way from his mother’s womb to his final canonisation. But to re¬ turn. There were pictures of the loves of the river Meles and the wheat-nymph, and one of these Philostratus describes most charmingly (“ Imagines,” book ii. c. 8). Athenaeus, too, tells us of the nuptial supper of the Meles. No doubt, a sort of harvest- home in honour of him and his wheat- nymph bride, where bards most appro¬ priately congregated, and sang, and were regaled with barley-bread ( krithe ) in honour of Kritheis , and cheese ( turos) in honour of Turo. Then Conon tells us how Orpheus’s head was found at the mouth of the Meles still all alive and singing,*—a legend reminding us very * “ Muthographoi ” (Westermann), p. 147. R 2 244 The Complete Life of Homer . strongly of that of St. Gengulphus, but the significance of it most obvious. Lastly, a hurried glance at the map is alone sufficient to establish the claim of Smyrna. Is it not obvious that Larissa and Magnesia in ^Eolis are Larissa and Magnesia in Thessaly over again, both as regards their relative position and the mountain between them, that they are named from them and peopled from them ? And is not £< Larissaeus Achilles” the hero of the “ Iliad ”? And is not Mount Sipylos the home of the Pelopidae. And did not Pelops’s charioteer give name to “ divine Killa ”? And cannot we, from his own words, picture to ourselves the imaginative boy-poet shudderingly hearing the wrath¬ ful groans of the buried fiend of Arima at every sigh of the wind in the woods of Hyle, and imagining to himself the shape of poor Niobe in the frowning rocks, and dreaming of the dances of the nymphs on the banks of the pleasant stream that the Dolopian settlers had named from their own and from the Seiren mermaids that made its waters perilous, and gave to each splash of the overgrown sacred fish its mother- instilled terror for the little rustic urchin ? The Complete Life of Homer. 245 Even so Beattie sings of his Edwin :— “ When the loud-sounding curfew from afar, Loaded with loud lament the lonely gale, Young Edwin lighted by the evening star, Lingering and listening wander’d down the vale, Or when the setting moon in crimson dyed, Hung o’er the dark and melancholy deep, To haunted stream remote from man he hied, Where fays of yore their revels wont to keep. And there let fancy roam at large.” Next, bearing in mind that Ithaca stands in Homeric allegory for Smyrna, let us briefly compare the geography of the two. And can we doubt that, as Ithaca is Smyrna town, so Neios isNaulochus? Of course they are; Neios and Nau- lochus both mean “ship-haven.” Now take the lines :— “ Aground my ship lieth Aloof from the city In Riverbed harbour, ’Neath woody Ship Hill.” * Can we doubt that we have here a fine picture taken from nature of Naulochus (ship-haven), lying aloof from Smyrna just * Odyss., i. 185-6. 246 The Complete Life of Homer. , where the river Meles flows into the gulf, with a hill, and a woody hill too, just as at Weston-super-Mare, giving name to Hyle (Woodlands) where our worthy friend Tychius dwelt. And now let me introduce Alcibiades, of Smyrna, commonly called Quintus Smyrn^eus, to the reader. All we know of him is derived from the inscription upon his tomb, written in close imitation of Homer:— “ ‘ Here earth covers the sacred head That sang of the heroes Divine ’* —Alcibiades.” “ A.U.C.M.L.f Atalante To her dear Patron at the end of his honourable life, Has set up this monument.” (Another proof, this, that Homers tomb was the duly signed and dated one the reader has already seen at the end of Chapter III.) Atalanta, so named from his beloved M t ‘ * \ , I 4 • * Quoted from Homer’s tomb. See supra. f Hitherto absurdly misread A.U.R.E.L. As if Aurelia Atalante were not as absurdly impossible a name as (say) Elizabeth Pausanias. The Complete Life of Homer . 247 mythology, set up the above to her former master, A.U.C.M.L., i.e.> 297 b.c. He seems to have died in Calabria, and to have been buried at Naples, in imitation of Virgil, on whose monument we read :— “ Calabri rapuere ; tenet nunc Parthenope ; ” and to have called himself the Homeric Fifth, and the Fifth Smyrnean, in imita¬ tion of Ennius, who, in one of his lost poems, imagines himself to be a fifth Metempsychosis of Homer. He was born at Smyrna. In one passage he pictures himself as “ tending his sheep on the plains of Smyrna by the temple of Diana, on a hill, not very high, nor yet very low.”* This passage explains the line that has puzzled all the commentators, speaking of Ithaca :— Avrrj ce ydapa\rj 7rurv7rEpTnrr] elv u\l keItcu “And it lies at the bottom of a hill rising to its highest elevation as you get close to the seaboard.” + I will not weary the reader with dis¬ cussing the tedious performance of Aris- * Quintus Smyrnasus, “ Posthomerica.” t Odyss., ix. 45. 248 The Complete Life of Homer . teides, trusting I have proved my point without it. But one word of “ the temple of Artemis, in a garden free to the public ”* as at Trezene, according to the charming description in Euripides’s “ Hippolytus.” Does not this, I ask, admirably harmonise with Homer’s hymn to Artemis, discussed elsewhere ? She comes from her temple on the hill down to the river, and there delivers the poor mother in the cruel pangs of child-birth. Again, Herodotus tells us that Theseus, a descendant of Eumelus, the son of Admetus, was foremost and wealthiest amongst the founders of Smyrna, and named the new-born city from his Ama¬ zonian wife, Smyrna, who, like Mseon’s wife, Hyrnetho, doubtless an Amazonian, subsequently became the heroine Epony- mus of the place, and had a shrine on the banks of the Meles. What more natural than that the poet that was born on those banks should commemorate the unparal¬ leled nobility of his descent as follows :— “ Iphthime offspring of Icarius’ bed, Whom ere he went to Troy Eumelus wed; ” * Quintus Smyrnceus, “ Posthomerica.” The Complete Life of Homer. 249 thus making Theseus everything that was most splendid in point of ancestry, de¬ scended, as he was, by Iphthime, from Perieres and Gorgophone, that is, from Atlas on the one side and from Perseus and Inachus on the other, and by Eumelus from Admetus and Cretheus, and /Eolus and Deucalion. One more proof, and I have done. Does any one doubt my view of Homer’s story of Niobe ? If he does, then let him read it by the side of that of Alcibiades of Smyrna, commonly called “ Quintus Smyr- naeus,” and he can doubt no longer. Smyrnaeus’s (“Posthomerica,” i. 293-306) is merely an expansion of Homer’s (“ II.” xxiv. 614-617) from four lines to fourteen, and evidently taken at the same time from nature and from Homer’s miniature, which must also, therefore, have been taken from nature, though less distinctly, being a re¬ miniscence only. Lastly, Nemesis was especially called Smyrnaean. But Nemesis was the mother of Helen, and the whole cycle, especially as treated by Homer, might well be en¬ titled “ Nemesis.” This surely goes to show, amongst other things, the close con- 250 The Complete Life of Horner. nexion between Homer and the cycle and Smyrna and Nemesis; in other words, either that Smyrna worshipped Nemesis because Homer wrote of her doings, or that Homer wrote of Nemesis because she was the patron goddess of his native city, as, indeed, in a sense she was, for never had city such reverses, or writhed so sorely beneath her avenging scourge—one or the other. In other words, Homer was veritably Smyrnaeus. Nothing shows better the difference of Chios and Smyrna than a comparison be¬ tween the coins minted at Smyrna and Chios in honour of our poet. The coins of Smyrna have upon them the river God Meles and the nymph Kretheis—the one, I presume, on the one side, and the other on the other. That is, Smyrna distinctly asserts that Homer was brought forth by Kretheis on the banks of the Meles. The coins of Chios, on the contrary, have on the one side Homer, now an old man, with his immortal work, the “ Kuklos,” in his hands, and on the other, the Sphynx grasping a lyre. That is, the Chians assert with perfect truth that Homer, now on the shady side of fifty, composed his The Complete Life of Homer. 251^ immortal poems there, and that he died at Ios, a victim to the riddle of the Sphinx that even he failed to solve. This inci¬ dent, in a modern biographer’s eyes so trivial that he would be ashamed to men¬ tion it, the ancient Greeks dwelt upon with strange persistency; the Delphic oracle foretold it, Delphico more, sixty years or so after the event; all Homer’s biographers, from Herodotus to Tzetzes, mention it ; and just as Blind CEdipus and Blind Homer became proverbial for riddle¬ solving, so the oldest enigma in the worlds the Sphinx’s, and the next oldest, the Ian fisher-lads’, became proverbial for brain¬ splitting difficulty. Even as Alcaeus the Messenian puts it:— “ Once the fisher-lads of Ios Dumbfoundered the Maeonian bard, With the help of his own Muses, Having set him a conundrum.” This isj I think, a very fair poetical ex¬ planation of the figure of the Sphynx and the Lyre on the Chian coinage. Hundred-gated Thebes, in Egypt, is, indeed, the only city that really disputes with Smyrna the honour of being the birthplace of Homer. Heliodorus, in 252 The Complete Life of Homer . two places of his “ yEthiopica,” and Alex¬ ander of Paphos, declare that he was born at Thebes. As also does Antipater Sidonius in his epigram on Homer’s statue, and Olympiodorus apud Photium and Johannes Podasimus in his “ Scholia” on Hesiod’s “Shield of Hercules,” and Chal- cidius in his “ Commentary on the Timseus of Plato.” And Lucian, an incomparably higher authority than any of these, says quite truly: “ Either Smyrna or the Thebaid,”—much like our “ Either Porson or the Devil.” But how is this ? The Egyptians here say that his father was Demasagoras and his mother ^Ethra, and the Sibyl begins her prophecy some 1,500 years after the event thus :— Oh ! victorious Dmasagoras, all glorious and crowned ! ” * But in the “Certamen” of Lesches f we read, “the Egyptians say he was the son of Menelachus the scribe.” How is this ? Light breaks in here upon a very dark place at last. Menelachus must have been an alias of Demasagoras. After * Allatius, “ De Patria Homeri,” p. 45. t Westermann’s “ Lives,” p. 34. The Complete Life of Homer. 253 seducing and throwing upon the world our sweet poet’s simple-hearted mother, Demasagoras went, I presume, as a military adventurer to the land of the Pharaohs. Here he may have thought it prudent to drop his former grievously sullied name for an alias , and give himself out as Tele- machus, the son of Persepolis, the son of Telemachus, the son of Ulysses, by Polycaste, the daughter of Nestor.* Na¬ turally, Telemachus I. had a grandson Telemachus II. Such was the Greek custom. If you will not believe me, believe Aristophanes :— “ A the son of B, the son of A the son of B,” And see Bentley’s “ Phalaris ” thereupon. See also Stemmas innumerable in Dr. Smith’s “ Biographical Dictionary” and elsewhere. And this proves my inference that Telemachus was in his stemma. Else why should he have taken that name ? It also satisfactorily explains why some, I presume the good people of Ithaca and thereabouts, said he was the son of Telemachus, by Epicaste, being so only according to Demasagoras’s made-up * Hesiod’s “ Fragments.” 254 The Complete Life of Homer . tale and not really so. And the Egyp¬ tians being more familiar with the name of Menelaus than with that of Telemachus, jumbled up the two names into Mene- lachus. Last of all, Demasagoras like the versatile Graeculus of Juvenal :— “ Grammaticus, rhetor, geometres, pictor, aliptes, Augur, schoenobates, medicus, magus/’ now a grazier on the banks of the Hermus, now a soldier, now a deputy clerk, turns prophet and marries one ^Ethra, who either was or, after his fashion, gave herself out to be, a lineal descendant of the zEthra, who was with Menelaus in Egypt. Read “ Odyss.,” and see how well the two tales fit in. But now a Daemon (Daemon No. 2) comes upon the stage. But this Daemon was Hermes. ‘'Nonsense,” you say. No, only a little imagination. For Daemon (Aa/pv) read Daemon (Aa^jjamv), and for the God of Merchants, read a merchant:— “ Dedecoris pretiosus emptor ; ” and we have the “Story of Democritus of Trezene/’* that Homer was the son of * Westermann, u Lives,” p. 34. The Complete Life of Homer. 255 Daemon, a merchant. Demasagoras’s wife wife proved false to him. Thus did right¬ eous Nemesis punish him for deserting poor Kretheis. It may, however, have only been his humbug, or hers. They appear to have been a rather shady couple. CHAPTER VII. HIS WORKS. Homer wrote thirteen works,* of which only two,the “ Iliad” and the “ Odyssey,’’are in the present day admitted to be his, and too many do not admit even the “Odyssey.” Yet a comparison of the hymns, the lives, and the story of the blind bard Demo- docus should leave us, even in this hyper- sceptical age, no reasonable doubt of it. And, barring a few eccentric Chorizontes, universally (and most justly) despised in their day as ultra-paradoxists, such has been the universal undoubting opinion of mankind till the close of the last century. And the difference in the poems is fully accounted for by the difference of circum- * Proclus, Hesiod, Tzetzes, Chiliades. The Complete Life of Homer. 257 stances. The author of the “ Iliad ” was young, healthy, and clear-sighted ; the author of the “Odyssey” old, worn out, and blind. The “ Iliad ” is Asiatic in its myth (and other) ologies ; the “ Odyssey ” European ; the “ Iliad ” is addressed to men ; the “ Odyssey ” to women. The “ Iliad ” is Achilles ; the “ Odyssey ” Ulysses. The “ Iliad ” is ' history— “ Greece, Asiatic and European, two hun¬ dred years ago by a poet ”; the “ Odyssey ” is a fairy tale—the Greek version of “ Arabian Nights.” Lastly, the “ Iliad ” is history ; the “ Odyssey ” autobiography. As in the “Iliad” Homer tells us the story of his birth on the banks of Meles, so in the “ Odyssey ” he tells us the story of his exile. Thus, by the two most touching and interesting incidents in his life, he stamps his name no less in¬ geniously than beautifully upon either poem. But now to proceed in due chronological order. Even before his voyages to and fro, our poet was wont to muse in the caves of Smyrna, over the sweet tale of Troy, and at Ithaca, where he fell blind, he is said to have invoked the shade of s 258 The Complete Life of Homer . Ulysses, &c.,* that is, from this time he took his future line as a patriotic poet, and advocated with all his might of song the genuine orthodox war against the bar¬ barians, and internal concord between the several States of Hellas. At Colophon he fell blind, and returned to his native city. There he wrote his charming hymn to Diana, the ninth of the present series, and one of the three or possibly four hymns that are beyond all reasonable dispute his, though possibly more or less adulterated with spurious matter. Here he visited Troy, having already made considerable progress with his “Ilias Mikra.” And,going from Smyrna, his thankless native city, he went to Neonteichos. And there he pub¬ lished his “ Amphiaraus’s ride to Thebes,, and other poems.” And from thence,, pouring forth song after song, he arrived at Phocsea, where he fell into the spider hands of Thestorides, who cheated our poor blind poet out of all the labours of his muse up to this time. He now went to Bolissus, and from thence to Chios, * Philostratus, 11 Heroica.” The Complete Life of Homer. 259 where, in the course of the next twenty years or so, he wrote the “ Iliad/’ of which the “ Ilias Mikra,” written at Cenchrese and Smyrna, was the rough outline, and the ‘‘ Odyssey.” His marriage took place whilst he was in the midst of his “ Iliad.” The supernatural and incomparably most precious books of his “ Odyssey ” were probably written early, possibly even at Ithaca ; but the later, and autobiographical portion, not till quite towards the end of his life. At Chios also he probably wrote the “ Amazonia,” and projected the “ Tele- gonia.” After leaving Chios, he wrote but a few more small pieces, which have been already discussed, viz. : (1) “ The Furnace” ; (2) “ Eiresione ” ; (3) “ The Fisher Lads,” and the last of his hymns,—“ The Hymn to Apollo,” of which more anon. To recapitulate. His thirteen works were as follows, with date and place of publication and authorities in favour of their authenticity. H. for Herodotus, L. for Lesches, T. forTzetzes, P. for Proclus, PI. for Plutarch, S. for Suidas, and A. for Anonymous. “Life” (Westermann, p. 29) 260 The Complete Life of Homer. i Cypria Kolophon, 97 6 S. (Also Pindar, Fr. 189; Aristophanes; Polybius, xxiv. 8; Aristotle, “ Rhet.,” i. 15 ; and Plato, “ Euthyphr.,” p. 12a, quote it. Herodotus mani¬ fests an inclination to dispute its authenticity, on the authority of Demodamas ; but his argu¬ ments are singularly weak.) 2 Aix Smyrna, 975 T. P. 0 Amphia- raus Neonteichos, 974-3 H. S. T. 4 The Hymns (First Series) Neonteichos, 974-3 H. T. 5 Phocais Phocaea, 973 H. 6 Ilias Mikra Phocaea, 973 H. S. 7 Nostoi Phocaea, 971 S. P. (Heyne) 8a Batracho- myoma- chia Bolissus, 968 H. PI. A. S. T. 8 b Kerkopes Bolissus, 967 H. P. T. 8 c Iamboi Bolissus, 966 H. P. S. T. 9 Iliad Chios, 957 All. 10 Amazonia Chios, ? S. 11 Odyssey Chios, 945 All. 12 Margites Kolophon, 944 H.P.T. PI. A. L. T 3 Epigrams Chios, 944 All. The Complete Life of Homer . 261 If we class 8a, 8b, and 8c under the common name of Paignia (see “ Lives,” pp. 24, 27, 33), we get the veritable Thirteen of Proclus and Tzetzes. The “ Cypria,” the “ Aix,” the “ Iliad,” the “Amazonia,” the “ I lias Mikra,” the “ Nostoi,” the “ Odyssey,” and the “ Tele- gonia ” constitute the Homeric Kuklos. Of these the “Telegonia” was never written, but the prophecy of the death of Ulysses (“ Odyssey,” xi. 134-137),— “ And from the seaboard death shall come to thee, Worn out with sleek old age, and prosperous round thee Thy people shall attend thy funeral,”— appears to contemplate it, as it was doubtless applied to our poet himself. It may even have originated the (so far as I can see) groundless and improbable notion that his mother was an Ian. Com¬ mentators have erroneously represented it as the prophecy of an Odyssean Euthanasia. It is certain from “Odyssey,” xxiii. 281-287 (from 11. 281 and 287 especially), that, in spite of all the delicate euphemisms of Teiresias, the prophecy distinctly adum¬ brates the great hero’s death, as we have 262 The Complete Life of Homer . it in Dictys Cretensis, book vi., chaps, xiv. and xv. ; in the surviving fragments of Sophocles’s satiric play, “ Odysseus Acan- thoplex ” (Ulysses scratched to death with a fish-bone); in Horace, book iii. odexxix. 1 ; Pliny, vii. 45, 46, x. 149; and count¬ less other authors of undisputed authority. And now it only remains to discuss the history and character of each of the above works. First, of the “Cypria” (the Tricks of Venus). Proclus tells us that there were eleven books of this poem published. And Athenaeus quotes the eleventh.* But of the ten surviving fragments, consisting in all of less than fifty lines, five fragments of thirty-four lines, or somewhat more than two-thirds of the whole, are obviously from the first book, the argument of which Proclus epitomises thus. Jupiter deliberates with Themis con¬ cerning the Trojan War; and Eris gathers the fatal apple in the garden of the Hesperides, and presents it at the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, with the laconic in- * Athenaeus, xv. p. 682 e. The Complete Life of Homer. 263 scription, “ Pulchriori.” The goddesses are all up in arms at this, and Jupiter and all the gods being far too discreet to incur the immortal resentment of all the god- desses but one,—the successful one,— Mercury conducts the three principal god¬ desses, Minerva, Juno, and Venus, to Paris, on Mount Ida, by the command of Jove, there to await his decision, and Paris decides for Aphrodite, being induced to do so by the hope of marrying Helen. The fragments are all of surpassing beauty. Fragment i. represents Jupiter meditating the destruction of the race of heroes then oppressing the face of Mother Earth with their bloody feuds. Fragment ii., “ Eris in the Garden of the Hesperides, plucking the fatal Apple,” we have in the National Gallery, but not in the surviving works of Homer. Fragments iii. and iv. are parts of a magnificent portrait of the Goddess of Beauty. Fragment v. “ The Story of Venus and Mars,” originally in the “Cypria,” and preserved in the “Odyssey.” Fragments vi. and vii. are concerning Helen and her brothers, and her birth by Jupiter out of Nemesis or divine ven¬ geance. Homer, however, says nothing 264 The Complete Life of Homer . of the celebrated allegorical egg laid by Nemesis. That was the ingenious inven¬ tion of later times. Fragment viii. (dis¬ tinctly referred to in “ Iliad,” ii.) gives us the death of Helen’s brothers, Castor and Pollux,—no doubt a part of the pre¬ liminary story of Helen. This last frag¬ ment is strangely mean, but the rest are very beautiful, and every way worthy of Homer. Fragment ix. tells us of the three days’ voyage from Sparta to Troy of the guilty pair. Fragment x. describes a banquet in which the heroes plan ven¬ geance, and Menelaus consoles himself for the loss of his wife with copious draughts of wine. This fragment forcibly reminds us of Horace, book i., ode vii. In Fragment i.:— “ Hr ere fjLvpta 0v\ci kcitu yfloru nXci^opei'’ arCpuiv Wrcuorr efianwer,” &C. — I unhesitatingly complete line 2 with the surely exquisitely beautiful “ m -vcuovt The “Cypria” of Stasinus was so called because that pseudo-poet was a Cyprian ; but by the “Cypria” of Homer we must understand the scheme of Almighty Jove The Complete Life of Homer. 265 for the destruction of the heroic race through the instrumentality of Cyprian Venus, whom Homer, being blind and ugly, worshipped not. Even as Isaiah says :— “ His visage was marred more than any man’s, and his form more than the sons of men.” See also Epigram 12. Homer himself makes very significant reference to the scope of his earliest poem in the fifth line of his “Iliad”:— “ And the scheme of Jove was accomplished The “ Aix ” (or Goat) was a continuation of the “Cypria.” Venus having a grudge against Tyndarus for neglecting her wor¬ ship, the day before the Greeks were to set sail from Aulis, there was a great hunt, celebrated in the most ancient Greek in¬ scriptions, and here Agamemnon killed the goat sacred to Diana.*' This brought down upon him the vengeance of that in¬ flammable divinity, only to be allayed by the sacrifice of his daughter at Aulis, which brought down upon him the im- * Ptolemy, N.H. 5. 266 The Complete Life of Homer. placable hate of her mother, who dis¬ honoured his bed in his absence, and treacherously murdered him—treachery for treachery—on his return from Troy. It was an execrable house from Tantalus downwards. And the vengeance of Venus was implacable. “ Aix,” however, has a secondary reference to ^A-bearing J ove, the prime mover of all the woes, whose mere tool Cyprian Venus was. The “ I lias Mikra ” (Short Iliad) was a brief epitome of the Siege of Troy, from the landing of Protesilaus to the capture of the place. This appears clearly from the two lines preserved by Herodotus :— “ I sing of Ilium, round whose lofty walls The warlike Danaoi suffered long and sore.” The “ I lias Mikra ” of Lesches was quite a different thing. It was not an epitome, indeed, at all. Homer refers to his I lias Mikra” in the “ Death of Hector” : “ Beware lest thou provoke Jove’s wrath that day When Paris and Apollo thee shall slay.” “Iliad,” xxii. 359, 360. From it we have, besides the lines given The Complete Life of Homer . 267 us by Herodotus, the following- very singular fragment: “ I said that with Achilles I ne’er would angry be, To such a terrible extent He was so dear to me.” The Agamemnon party had carried things with a high hand ; left Philoctetes to pine his heart out in the Isle of Lemnos, and stoned Palamedes to death. But Achilles, on his return from the capture of the Chersonese, was greatly incensed, as was also Ajax. Ajax, however, was soon fooled with soft words into orood humour o again, but Achilles retained his resentment long, and put the death of Palamedes to an air on his lyre that led to very angry words between himself and Ulysses, to the great gratification of that mean, half- blooded kincr of men—Agamemnon—who was glad that the anger of Achilles had lighted on any head but his own. To this quarrel we have distinct reference in “Odyssey/’ viii. 75-82 :— “ The quarrel of Ulysses And Achilles son of Thetis, How once they quarrell’d at the feast Of the immortal de’ties. 268 The Complete Life of Homer. “ While Trides chuckled to himself, ‘ I wish they’d come to blows’; And thus began, by Heaven’s deep scheme, Of Greece and Troy the woes.” There are nine fragments in all of the “ Ilias Mikra,” besides a tenth preserved in our poet’s “ Epigrams.” There is even less doubt that Homer wrote an “ Ilias Mikra,” albeit differing in every way from the “Ilias Mikra” of Lesches, than that he wrote a “ Cypria,” albeit differing in every way from the “ Cypria ” of Stasinus. For, firstly, we have an allusion to it in the “ Death of Hector,”* and an extract from it,—the “Wooden Horse, ”f —in Homer himself; secondly, two lines of it are quoted by Herodotus as the commencement of that poem ; thirdly, to five more Aristophanes makes unmistakeable allusion in his “ Knights,”+ obviously accounting them Homer’s; fourthly, ^Eschines also§ quotes half a line out of it, assigning it to Homer :— “ Word came to the army.” * Iliad, xxii. 359, 360. J Aristoph., “ Equit.” t Odyssey. § /Eschin., 11 Oratt.” The Complete Life of Homer . 269 Of the “ Ride of Amphiaraus ” we have only two lines left, of which more by and by ; but the subject would be an attractive one to our poet, and Herodotus, Tzetzes, and Suidasare amply sufficient authorities. It is an entirely different work from the “ Thebaid.” The subject of Thebes is one that Homer altogether eschews. Amphiaraus is a sage driven to a tomb in a foreign land by a worthless woman acted on by a Theban refugee. If we may be allowed to combine the account of Herme- sianax and of Homer, both of which I have quoted elsewhere, Homer’s own case was sufficiently similar. Hyrnetho, Mseon’s widow, was Eriphyle. An unworthy second husband, at once Polynices and ^Egysthus. The Amazono-Colophonian host, mainly foreign foes, but partly exiles anxious to return to Smyrna, would exactly parallel the mixture of foreign foes from the Peloponnesus mingled with the Theban exiles under Polynices. Amphi¬ araus was a better Balaam, and in Homer very likely was swallowed up at the com¬ mencement of the Theban, just as Protesi- laus was killed at the very commencement of the Trojan war. I may add that the 270 The Complete Life of Homer. important figure Theoclymenus (a direct descendant of Amphiaraus) cuts in the “ Odyssey,” where he appears again and again, and especially the passage in “Odyssey,” xv. 223-294, show the espe¬ cial interest with which our poet regarded Amphiaraus, whose lineage he traces for the actually in Homer unprecedented maximum number of seven generations, ranging in locality from Pylos to Argos, and from Argos to Ithaca,—that is, over all the lands that, for his father’s sake and his mother’s, and his Mentor’s and his Mentes’s sake, our poet loved with all a poet’s love till thought and memory and speech failed at death’s awful portal. And of Amphiaraus he speaks thus highly “ Amphiaraus that died for his people.” Homer is thinking of the yet nobler Codrus. I regret to see that Liddell and Scott, in their immortal lexicon, mistrans¬ late this word by the idiotically unmean¬ ing phrase, “ nation-stirring,” and credit Nonnus with the sole use of the immea¬ surably higher, and in this case strikingly The Complete Life of Homer. 271 su gge s ti ve epithet here set down. Amphi- araus doubtless saved his people, as Codrus and Decius and Curtius did, by dying him¬ self for them :— “Whom Jupiter loved in his heart of hearts, And Apollo with love manifold, And yet, oh mysterious Heaven ! He lived not to be old; But died before Thebes,—the old story,— By a wanton bought and sold.” With all this before us, is it possible to doubt the account of Herodotus that Homer wrote the “ Ride of Amphiaraus,” or to believe with Welcker that the “ Am¬ phiaraus” is identical with the “Thebaid” of which, as I conceive Homer to have treated it, it was not, properly speaking, even an incident ? Just as much and just as little was it a part of the “ Alcmaeonis.” Of the “ Phocais ” (Story of Phocsea) we have not a syllable left, and no author I have access to affords any hint of the treat¬ ment. One is consequently divided be¬ tween the idea that the treatment was that of Virgil, “ Georg.,” iv. 388-530, or that of Horace, “ Epode,” xvi. 15,16; in other words, Proteus and his Seals, or the Pho- csean Colony, perhaps both. Its genuineness 272 The Complete Life of Homer. is proved not only on the authority of Herodotus, but also of the Phocseans, who not only assured Herodotus of the fact, but also gave so gratefully warm a recep¬ tion to his grandson, Terpander, that he obtained the name, “Terpander Phocmus,” being thereby distinguished from the Ter¬ pander. The story told by Menelaus in “Odyssey” v. is manifestly a passage from the lost “ Phocais.” The following seems to be a fragment of the “ Nostoi ” (the Return of the Heroes from Troy) :— “ Oh, fool, to slay the father And leave the child behind.” ./Egysthus is doubtless here meant. The miserable end of the King of Men and the punishment of his murderer forms, we may suppose, the theme of one of the books of this poem, to which Homer refers in book i. 11-13, of what is un¬ questionably the sequel to it,—the “ Odys¬ sey.” Indeed, the first four books of the “ Odyssey” are an ingenious adaptation of the “ Nostoi ” to th^t poem. And now we come to the Bolissus The Complete Life of Homer. 273 poems,—the “ Batrachomyomachia,” the “ Kerkopes,” and the “ Iamboi.” The “Kerkopes” (or Apes) may be dis¬ missed in a few words. The title alone shows that it was a satirical performance written in a period of great bitterness and dejection. Suidas has preserved three lines which are believed to be from the “ Kerkopes,” but they are flat and insipid to the last degree, and totally unworthy of Homer. Still they have the true Homeric ring, and I fear we must give our poet the discredit of them. Of the “Kerkopes” we are enabled to rescue a second fragment from the jaws of Time by means of a fragment of Pindar. The fragment, as by this aid I venture to restore it, is as follows :— Ej'ft’au Ceiva ttciOopteq arn(rdu\u](Tiv erjmv 11 pwog rwrottn Knrwiccipa vvara^uvrEg KEpicoJiTEg ueikeXiomtl cecevtcu. (The words underlined are in Pindar.) “ Then paying for their folly penance due, Nodding with head down on the hero’s back, The Apes were bound with ignominious fetters.” The “ Batrachomyomachia” (The Fight between the Frogs and the Mice), 274 The Complete Life of Homer. attributed to Homer by the consent of all the authorities, translated by Parnell, and universally believed to be Homer’s till the commencement of the hypersceptical period, has been rejected on grounds more absurdly trifling than an ordinary reader would believe were possible. The critics complain of his talking of the crowing of a cock, when in his time there were no cocks in all Greece to crow. As if the device of Idomeneus were not a cock ; as if Sophocles did not refer to the well-known sleep-dispelling property of the cock’s “shrill clarion,” in a period long anterior to the birth of Homer, both in his “ Admetus ” and elsewhere. “ Mv cock,” says Admetus, “used to wake him up ” (meaning Apollo) “to go to his work at the mill ; ” and in another play, the title of which is uncertain, he speaks of “ the bird that cries, ‘ Coccu, Coccu.’ ” As if many of the ancient heroes did not go by that name ; as if TEschylus, twice at least, and Aristophanes—; as if Homer him¬ self did not tell us that world-known story ; as if he ever was in Greece. But why waste more space upon an objection so wholly trivial ? “ But the poem speaks of writing The Complete Life of Homer . 275 on tablets, therefore it cannot be Homer’s.” Nay we are expressly told (see Chap, viii.) that Homer echarasse , i.e., used tablets. And besides, being as European as he was Asiatic, he was as likely, when he got to Chios, an island far on the way to Greece, to write on tablets as on parchment. He probably wrote on both, on the system that I have set forth elsewhere. And, indeed, his blindness made tablets well-nigh necessary, if even they were not invented for it. I think while Homer was drudging his heart out upon the uncongenial brats of a sordid, low-minded fellow, whose name history has righteously declined to record, with temper soured and spirit crushed, his genius may have been under a temporary cloud; much as Shakespeare’s was when he wrote his “Troilus and Cressida” and “ Timon of Athens.” And, besides, neither the sonorous flow of the Greek hexameter nor the sublime genius of our poet are at all suitable for aught so mean as parody. Voltaire has failed in comedy, •a branch of literature one would have thought altogether in his line, far more signally than Homer has in burlesque, a branch of literature altogether out of his T 2 2 j 6 The Complete Life of Homer . \ line. Indeed, he has not, that I can see,, failed at all. The “ Batrachomyomachia ” is not, it is true, mirth-provoking in the smallest degree ; to split the sides of the vulgar was utterly out of Homer’s power, even in the brightest hour of his existence, much less under his present distressing circumstances; but it is artistic, enter¬ taining, thoughtful, and improves upon perusal. It is, we are told, a story com¬ posed for boys. Beyond all question, Homer wrote it for the delectation of his youthful charge at Bolissus. Certainly Pigres did not write it, for the humour is delicate, not broad, Erasmuslike, not Rabe¬ laisian. Besides the “ Batrachomyo¬ machia,” Homer is said to have written (doubtless with the same object) the “ Arachnomachia ” (the Fight of the Spiders), the “ Psaromachia ” (the Fight of the Starlings), and the “ Gerano- machia” (the Fight of the Cranes). But surely these were imitations by various hands, when Pigres first intro¬ duced the “Batrachomyomachia” at the Carian court, and it became for a time the rage. For attributing the “ Arachno- o o machia” and the “ Geranomachia ” to The Complete Life of Homer. 277 Homer, we have no authority at all, and for attributing the “ Psaromachia ” we have only the weak authority of Suidas; the words, “And ‘the Fight of the Star¬ lings/ and ‘ the Seven Shearings,’ ” not being in the original work of Herodotus at all, but having been unwarrantably foisted in by Westermann (see Wester- mann’s “Lives,” p. 13, note on line 320). Exactly so, some half-century or so ago, “ The Butterfly’s Ball ” produced a sensation in a small way, and elicited numerous poems of the same description, eg., “The Fishes’ Gala,” “The Peacock’s Banquet.” This last was my own con¬ templated contribution to the series, when a boy of some thirteen or fourteen. Even to this day I remember a stanza of it, wretched enough I am afraid :— “ The fishes’ gala frolickt o’er, Amidst the waves’ tempestuous roar, Unawed by fear of man ; The dolphins lept, the Tritons play’d, The one provok’d, the other stay’d The surge that foaming ran.” But it would be ridiculous indeed for a New Zealand Suidas of the Thirtieth Century to represent the author of the 2/8 The Complete Life of Homer. “ Butterfly’s Ball ” as the author also of “The Fishes’ Gala” and “The Peacock’s Banquet.” The “Iamboi” contained the “ Hepta- paktion ” (the Seven Shearings), the “ Epikichlides ” (Fieldfares), and the “Kenoi” (Empty Ones). The book appears to have gone sometimes by the title of one piece and sometimes by that of another, and it is therefore a threefold betise on the part of Suidas to say, “ ‘ The Fieldfares ’ and ‘ The Seven Shearings,’ ” that is to say, his ‘ Iambics,’ . . . . the ‘ Paignia ’ (Foolings) ” ; as if “The Fieldfares” and “The Seven Shearings” were not one as much as the other a portion of his “ Iambics,” and a oortion of the “ Paignia,” or as -L O if they formed each, or even both to¬ gether, a distinct poem. Just so, Suidas represents an extempore epigram, hardly worth the pipkin that our poet was paid for it,—“ The Potters,”—as a distinct poem, instead of being only one, and that a very unworthy one, of a series of epigrams. Still we are highly indebted to him for mentioning “ The Amazonia,” and “The Nostoi,” which else we should The Complete Life of Homer. 279 not have known to have been our poet's. Not one line of the “Iamboi” is now extant, yet, all the same, it supplies Homeric bibliography with a very inter¬ esting and important piece of information. “ Heptapaktion,” or “ Heptapektike,” or “ Heptapaktite,” one and all come to much the same as the more common reading, “Heptapektos Aix” (the Seven- times-shorn Goat). But who was the goat; and what is the meaning of his beincr seven times shorn? Turn we to o “ Aulus Gellius,” and we read that a goat was sacrificed to Homer after his death. And why ? Because his earliest poem was entitled “Aix,” from the goat which Agamemnon slew in the great hunt before setting out for Troy. Which goat led to the second act of the vengeance of Venus on the house of Tyndarus—the Sacrifice of Iphigenia, the Adultery of Clytemnestra, and the murder of Aga¬ memnon,—the first act of the vengeance being the Rape of Helen, &c. During the earlier years of Homer’s career, “ The Goat” was probably the most celebrated, as it was certainly the first published, of his productions. Hence, as Dickens 280 The Complete Life of Homer. gave himself the name of “ Boz,” and the authoress of “Moths” has given herself the name of “ Ouida,”—and to come more closely to the point, as Scott was known as “Waverley,” Butler as “Hudibras,” and Swift as “Gulliver,”—so for a time Homer called himself and was known as “Aix” (the Goat). Hence the “ Seven-times- shorn Goat” means the poor blind poet that was swindled by Thestorides out of his seven poems—the Pre-Bolissic “Hepta- biblion ” (p. 260, 11. 1-16) already com¬ memorated. “ Archilochum proprio rabies arinavit iambo.” The title of the poem was naturally no less well adapted to the iambic metre than the subject itself—the denunciation of a piece of rascality so unspeakably vile and treacherous. The little piece with which the volume concluded, called “ Epikichlides, or, the Fieldfares,” because the poet sang it to the delighted village lads of Bolissus for the simple fee of some fieldfares they had trapped and killed amongst them, was mainly iambic, as we learn from that pas¬ sage in Athenceus, in which he tells us The Complete Life of Homer. 2 81 that “the works of Archilochus,” which we know were iambic, “and the greater part of Homer’s ‘ Fieldfares,’ were similar in point of metrical construction.”* And, indeed, their very name, just like “ Hepta- paktion,” suggests iambic treatment. We can even fancy the poet winding up with some such verses as the following :— o “ Kcu vvv aoi^rjQ evekev w tt atfieg 0 tXoi T v(j)\ yepovn tore f.101 rag E 7 rua>(Xt$ac.” And now, dear lads, for his minstrelsee, Give his Fieldfares to the blind old man—that’s me.” But what can Athenaeus mean by “ the Fieldfares,” referring to the passions,—evi¬ dently a good-humoured sally for the delec¬ tation of a pack of light-hearted peasant lads ? Athenaeus obviously refers to the “ Heptapaktion,” which formed the solid piece de resistance, and with reference to which the justly-incensed poet might well have written as motto on the title-page :— “ The Seven Shearings and other Poems, by Homerus Melesigenes. Si natura negat facit indignatio versum. Anno CCVIII. post Trojam captain Bolissi Scripsit Bucco.” * Athenaeus, xiv. 4. 282 The Complete Life of Homer. ^ 'll /|« <|\ »N »!' 'll '{l '*1 'll ill 7j\ "l\ Tjx 7j\ vj\ * # -4c & % We come now to the poems written during the few remaining months of our poet’s life after leaving Chios,—the “Mar- gites,” the “ Kaminos,” the “ Eiresione,” the “Hymn to Apollo,” and the “Alieis.” The “ Margites ” must have been a truly splendid performance. Certain miserable,, low-minded, purse-proud sons of Belial, at Colophon, had taunted our poet with having wasted his talents and made no better provision for his old age, to say nothing of his wife and children, and wandering about “ without visible means of ’subsistence,” singing catches, with a voice broken by age and want and disease, for half-pence and scraps of bread and meat. But, doubtless, some good Sama¬ ritan or other gave him a bellyful of broken meat that the house-dog had de¬ clined and a stoup of wine that was begin¬ ning to turn sour, and then, like Scott’s immortal minstrel, he burst forth into an impassioned blaze of immortal song. The authenticity of the “Margites” is in¬ disputable. The bill is backed by Proclus > The Complete Life of Homer. 283, Plutarch, Anon. (“ Lives,” p. 29), Lesches, Aristotle, Plato, Hephaestion, Tzetzes, Harpocration, Aristophanes, Allatius, and Bentley. But how is it that amongst so many that attest the Homeric origin of the “ Mar- gites ” we in vain look for the venerable authority of the “ Life of Lives,” the pseudo- Herodotus ? And how is it that Suidas assures us that Pigres, not Homer, wrote it, and that the imperial authoress of the “ Vio- larium” abjudicates it ? Answer : Because both Pigres and Homer wrote it. Because Pigres engrafted his Boccaccioesque obscenities upon the venerable fragments of the true “Margites” only one generation at most before the birth of Herodotus. If Herodotus and the pseudo-Herodotus are, as I firmly believe, one and the same per¬ son, then the pseudo-Herodotus must have known this, but durst not avow his knowledge, and therefore preferred to say nothing whatever on the subject. Nothing could be more unlike than the “ Margites ” of Pigres, as it appears in Kinkel’s “ Epicorum Graecorum Frag¬ ments ” and the true “Margites” of our immortal poet, so far as we can judge 284 The Complete Life of Homer. from the few truly magnificent fragments remaining of it. Pigres’s “Margites” was intended to split the sides of the free and easy Bohemian Court of Halicarnassus with merriment. Homer’s “ Margites” was as far removed from anything approaching to jocularity as the Sermon on the Mount, or the minstrel’s sublime outburst :— “ Ob, Caledonia, stern and wild ! ” As will plainly appear from the following outline of the Death-note of the Wild Swan of the Meles that Pigres travestied some four centuries after into obstreperous cacklings :— o An aged man and a divine minstrel, the servant of the Muses and of far-darting Apollo, came to Colophon with a melo¬ dious lyre in his well-practised hands. This old man was Homer ; this old man was Margites. Homer was fond, we know, of this bitter self-pleasantry. When young he had called himself the “ Goat.” As we have not one single line of his poem, so-called, I have only been able im¬ perfectly to explain why; but the reason that most commends itself to myjudgment is that, just as the children of Belial at The Complete Life of Homer . 285 Samaria cried out to Elisha, “ Go up, thou bald head,” so the children of Belial at Smyrna and Cyme (the Chorazin and Bethsaida of Philo-Homeric hagiology) cried after our poet, “ There goes the goat; there goes the blind old billy-goat!” “ Nil habet infelix paupertas durius in se Quam quod ridiculos homines facit.” Tattered, squalid, with sightless eyes, stag¬ gering gait, and neglected beard, who can wonder that he was an object of wicked derision to these wretched brats ? Where the parents were brutal, can we wonder that the children were unmannerly ? Where the parents denied him food and lodging, can we wonder that the children should call out after him ? Where the parents jeered at his blindness, can we wonder that the children laughed at his beard ? The children bawling out after him, and the parents refusing him bread, make two well-matched pictures of the Cimmerian darkness of Calibandom in all the moral obscenity of its demi-savage ignorance, “naked, and not ashamed.” Even so he caught up the ruffian taunt of the Dogberrys of Cyme, and ever after accentuated his name (not Homeros, but 286 The Complete Life of Homer. Homeros), not to signify hostage, as before, but blind beggar. Oh! what an awful day must that have been for him when he was thus twice outraged; and now he caught up the taunt so often hurled against the children of genius by dull common¬ place blockheadry, and wrote his “ Fool.” “ This fool,” our poet goes on to say, “ the gods made neither a digger nor a plougher, nor good for anything in the ’varsal w r orld. He could only keep on singing and beg¬ ging till p’liceman A bade him ‘move on!’” Only that. This is all we have of Homer’s portrait of himself at seventy. Against it he sets the true fool, who knows how to do a great many things, but knows none of them thoroughly. “Jack of all trades, master of none,” the most perfect possible antithesis to the poet who knew but one thing, but knew that as no other man ever did or ever will, either before or after him. In other words, the poem might have been called, “The •so-called Fool, but really Wise, and the so- called Wise but really Fool.” The marvel¬ lously wise old man Margites says really clever things with a mock air of folly,— £.o\, “ Who is the true begetter of a man, The Complete Life of Homer. 287 who has the greater part in the child,— his father or his mother ? ” As we all know, a favourite doubt amongst the ancient philosophers. Polypragmon, on the contrary, the Colophonian Dogberry, ,says really asinine commonplaces with a mock air of wisdom. The piece ends, of course, in the ignominious overthrow of the grovelling on all fours pseudo-political economy of three thousand years ago. And now let the very cleverest of my readers ponder on the account given of “ Margites ” in Kinkel’s “ Epicorum P'rag- menta,” pp. 67-69, and summon his utmost power of clairvoyance to bear upon it. Can he reconcile what he finds there ? Though he dilates his eyes to their very utmost, I am sure he cannot. In the hands of Pigres, the marvellously wise old man of Tzetzes sinks into the idiotic Margites of Eustathius, his Socratic irony becomes drivelling folly, and the divine minstrel becomes the laughing-stock of the Attic stage for the preposterous lunacy of his second childhood. In brief, the Margites of Homer is a Julian mockingly accept¬ ing the ill-bred taunts of the frivolous mob of Antioch only the more effectually ! 288 The Complete Life of Homer . to confute the foes of “divine philosophy” and lash them with righteous scorn. The Margites of Pigres, on the contrary, is a Handy Andy, a Wise Man of Gotham. Homer wrote a “ Defence of Poetry,” an “Apologia pro Vita sua.” Pigres wrote a witty burlesque,—a masterpiece of Boccac- cioesque obscenity. No wonder Aristotle and Plato, and those that contemplated only the unmistakably Homeric fragments still remaining, should unhesitatingly pro¬ nounce the “ Margites ” the work of Homer, whilst Suidas and Eudocia, and those who looked rather at the gro¬ tesque and plainly unhomeric elements, as unhesitatingly pronounced it the work of Homers ape, Pigres, the Interpolator. And this is what Lucian means when he mockingly says that Pigres or Tigres was Homer’s father, because Homer’s “ Paig- nia ” — the “ Batrachomyomachia,” the “ Margites,” and perhaps others—were thus fathered upon him. And now we come to the Hymns, three of which, “To Apollo,” “To Diana,” and “To Ceres,” I believe to be Homer’s. Of this last only a part remains ; for Pausanias has certain lines out of it in his “ Mes- The Complete Life of Homer . 289 seniaca” that we no longer have. They are all of them worthy of our great poet, and bear strong internal marks of authen¬ ticity. The “ Hymn to Mercury ” is more questionable. It has the irresistible autho¬ rity of Shelley; and Shelley was not to be imposed upon by any name, however great. He told Byron to his face that his “ Deformed Transformed ” was the worst thing he had ever written, and borrowed too,—an inferior rechauffe of Goethe’s “Faust.” Nor did he hesitate to pro¬ nounce, no doubt rightly, the “ Two Noble Kinsmen,” whether partly Shake¬ speare’s or not, a wholly worthless per¬ formance. But he thought the “Hymn to Mercury” well worth translation, and it is certainly a most agreeable and entertaining performance. Still, as Dr. I line observes, it bears internal marks of not being Homer’s, and we have four reasons for assigning it to Terpan- der: (1) Its great excellence. (2) Its being to Hermes, Terpander’s god of gods. (3) Its mention of the seven¬ stringed lyre, Terpander’s especial inven¬ tion. (4) Terpander’s direct descent from Homer renders it the more probable that u 290 The Complete Life of Homer. his chef-d'oeuvre should be added to his immortal ancestor’s works. And now we come to our poet’s last work of all,—“ Hymn to Apollo.” Homer wrote this hymn previous to leaving Samos for Athens, with a view to recitation at Delos, when he touched at that island on his way thither. Unhappily, unfavourable winds somewhat deflected him from his course to I os, and there he died, his “ Hymn to Apollo ” unrecited, his visit to Athens unpaid. The following is the order in which the islands and cities between Athens and Crete come in Homer (of the mountains I take no account):—1, Aigina ; 2, Euboia; 3, Aigai; 4, Peiresiai; 5, Pe- parethos; 6, Samothrace; 7, Skuros; 8, Phokaia; 9, Imbros ; 10, Lemnos; 11, Lesbos; 12, Chios; 13, Korukos ; 14, Klaros ; 15, Samos; 16, Miletos ; 17, Cos; 18, Knidos; 19, Karpathos ; 20, Naxos; 21, Paros; 22, Rhenaia; 23, between Chios and Corycus, Erythrse, at the foot of Mount Mimas, by implication. Now, which of these is unworthy of mention ? Aigina, the native seat of the yEacidae, and deriving its name from the sacred Aigis of the god of the Cretan sea, The Complete Life of Homer . 291 —Jove, to whom, next only to Crete itself, it was sacred ? Euboia, the greatest island in the Aigaian sea ? Aigai, that gave the Aigaian sea its name ? Peire- siai and Peparethos, rivals in the produc¬ tion of “wine that maketh glad the poet’s, heart,” and inspires his joyous lay ? Samo- . thrace, the home of the mysteries of the Cabiri ? Phokaia, the theme of the “ Pho- cais ” ? Imbros, with traditions so similar to those of our own poet’s native Smyrna, a harbour of the same name as Smyrna had of old,—Naulochus,—and an eyot in front of it, with a wicked giant, the Typhon of the Aegean, howling beneath its crust ? Lemnos, the seat of Vulcan and the love- tryst of Hupnos ? Lesbos, the first home of the yEolian emigrants ? Chios, Homer’s own home ? Erythrae, the home of the Sybil, all hospitable welcome to our poet at the foot of Mount Mimas, named from his celebrated yEolid ancestor ? Corycus, the • native place of the nymph beloved by Apollo, from whom the Corycian cave on Mount Parnassus derived its name, and from whom the Muses, too, were called Corycidae Nymphae ? Klaros, so promi- • nently connected in the “ Hymn to Artemis” u 2 292 The Complete Life of Homer. with our poet’s birth on the banks of the Meles ? Samos, where he was now re¬ siding, and from whence he was about to set sail ? Miletus, the Alma Mater of Asiatic Greek literature ? Cos Meropis, so called because there first Merops, a son of the earth, was endowed with a human voice,—in other words, because there first the gods gave to man the gift of articulate speech ? Cos, the seat of the Asclepiadse, the descendants of him that was the dearest to Apollo of all his children, and through whom, as Pausanius shows, our poet claimed kindred with them thus:—Antideia, the daughter of Diocles , married Machaon, the son of /Esculapius, and by him became the ancestress of the Asclepiadse : hence our poet’s reference to the story of Panda- reus, of Cos, who pledged Jupiter’s golden dog with Tantalus the Bad, and then could not get it back; for which the thief was swal¬ lowed up alive like Dathan and Abiram, and the roguish broker delivered up to the torments of his mortal foe ? Knidos, one of the two principal seats of Venus,—Knidos, the capital of the Dorian Hexapolis, but founded by Triopas, one of the early Argive kings, many ages before the Trojan The Complete Life of Homer . 293 war ? Karpathos, that gave name to the Karpathian sea ? Naxos, so celebrated in the myths of Theseus and Ariadne, devoted to the worship of Bacchus, and abounding in corn, wine, oil, and fruit, whose eight distinct names alone show its great import¬ ance ? Paros, celebrated for its marble, on which all the marvels of bygone history were inscribed, and from which doubtless came the marble on which was inscribed our poet’s ambiguous epitaph ? Or, lastly, little Rhenaea, a chain’s length only from Delos,—weasel-less, guineafowl-less Rhe¬ naea, that Apollo loved so dearly ? Could a better selection of names pos¬ sibly have been given, or possessing greater interest for the Homeric biblio¬ grapher ? Especially if we reflect that in Homer’s time Apollo was the god of wine (as inspiring the poet’s lay), not Bacchus. Hence the mention of the principal wine¬ growing islands,—Peparethos, Lemnos, Lesbos, Chios, and Naxos. Nor will any thoughtful reader be disconcerted by the appearance of the names of mountains of, 10 us, but little interest or significance,^., * Hor., Od., III. xxviii. 12, 13. 294 The Complete Life of Homer . Akrokane, Aigageai, and Mycale, when he reflects what a prominent figure moun¬ tains make in the habitat of the ^ods and their intercourse with man ; that on their summits sacrifice was offered to the gods, and in their cool caves the sacred poet mused and sang. But, above all, note the prominence given to Lesbos and Chios, each occupy¬ ing one entire line, the former as the an¬ cestral seat of our poet’s race, the latter as the place of his abode during the last twenty or four-and-twenty years of his life. “ And Chios, dear Chios, the fairest by far Of all the green islands that lie in the sea,” needs no remark of mine to emphasise its deep significance. But — “And goodly Lesbos, the ancestral seat Of Makar, worthy son of Miolus,” requires a few words. “ Makar founded Lesbos after the flood.”* From this Makar, the tutelary hero of the aborigines, the Makar of Homer’s date derived his name. The * Suidas, art. “ Makar.” The Complete Life of Homer. 295 Lesbians called themselves yEoliots or ASoliones, from their ancestor, Aiolos or Piebald, the Aeolian being a mixed race. The phrase, Makar ./Eolion, may mean no more than this; but I think it means much more. I think it is history packed very close. When Gras won the great victory that gave to Hellas the sea¬ board of Asia Minor, he called his new-born boy Makar, in compliment to the aborigines, much as our Edward called his new-born boy Edward of Carnarvon, Prince of Wales. His son was called Aiolos ; his son was also called Makar, but to dis¬ tinguish him from Makar I. with the addi¬ tion ^Eolion, double-edged, Graeco more, that is, signifying both son of Aiolos, his father, and descendant of Aiolos, as being an Hioliot. Just in the same way Minos called his son Deucalion (as being a Deu- calid on the mother’s side) and Orpheus gave his son Ortis the surname of Dorion to attest his Dorian origin. The reader will see the purport of the above remarks further on. To be brief, the mentions we have of Phocaea, Imbros, and Samos, and the strikingly conspicuous mention of Chios 296 The Complete Life of Homer . and Lesbos go far to prove the soundness of our view, and not less do the names that are absent. Thus, the absence of Rhodes and Colophon proves that Homer was born at neither of those places. The absence of Smyrna, the birthplace of our poet, and of Cyme, the birthplace of our poet’s mother, testify to the ungrateful neglect with which those two cities dis¬ honoured their prophet. “ Them that honour me I will honour, and they that dishonour me shall be lightly esteemed.” Phocsea is here and they are not; Phocsea has the “ Phocais” written in its honour ; Smyrna and Cyme are never once men¬ tioned in the whole range of our poet’s works, save Smyrna, once in the “ Hymn to Artemis,” before she for the second and last time cast him out to wander in want and blindness and beggary over all the coast of Asia Minor, and from islet to islet till he died. But the absence of I os is even more remarkable still. It could have been brought in so easily in a thousand ways. Thus, for instance :— u A<7ri'7raAcua r Io£ re Kai evoecnrt^yoc A/jopyog ” — “ And Astypalaea, and Ios, and inventive Amorgos ”— which would have been all the more The Complete * Zf/0 0/ Homer . 297 natural, as the two islands were originally named from two sisters of Cadmus and Europa—Astypalaea and Phoenike. How then was it not ? Had the hymn been written after the death of Homer,— had it been written by any one but Homer, especially the pseudo-Homer,—nay, had it been written by Homer himself a few months later, it must have been. Its ab¬ sence utterly discredits the account of the pseudo-Plutarchus, Ephorus, and Aristotle, based upon the lying legends of the Ians. Had Homer’s mother been born there, or conceived Homer there, or been stolen by pirates from thence, or had Homer, after his weary and life-long wanderings, re¬ turned there to die (much like the butter¬ fly after depositing her eggs), and be buried there,—then, again I say, some such line as I have interpolated, must have been found in the hymn. Or had Homer consulted the Oracle as alleged, and learned he was to die at Ios, or had he foreseen it of himself, or even if he had intended to stop there, or had not been driven there by stress of wind, then again — “ l\6voenca r’ Tog ”■— “ And fish-abounding Ios ”— 298 The Complete Life of Homer. would have formed the commencement of the last line but one of the list of islands, cities, and mountains, more especially sacred to the god of song. And now let us turn to the contest between Hesiod and Homer, and there we read :—“And having stayed in the city” (Argos) “ a certain time, he sailed to Delos to the assembly, and, standing upon the altar of horn, he recited ” the hymn in question.* Now, the Homer here spoken of by Lesches is the pseudo-Homer. And either he or the true Homer anyhow must have written the hymn. But we shall see, in the course of the next chapter but one, that he could not have written it, therefore the true Homer must have done so. But I regret to see that the gifted and o o venerable author of “ Homeric Synchro¬ nisms ”f complains that “the composer of the hymn has no rule or arrangement.” But is this so ? Most emphatically it is. not so, but the very contrary. See here is the map of the Htgean and the cities and islands in it, between Athens and Crete, beloved by Apollo. * Westermann’s “ Lives,” p. 44. f Pages 101, 102. The Complete Life of Homer. 299 Homeric Map of the Islands, Cities, and Mountains CONSPICUOUS FOR THE CULT OF APOLLO, THE GOD of Song, and Wine, and Music, and given over to his Worship. Mt. Athos. Samothrace. Mt. Tmolus. Lemnos. Troy. Lesbos. Peparethus. Peiresioe. /Egse. [Scyros]. Euboea. Chios. Erythroe. Smyrna. Corycus. Colophon. Claros. Scyros nova. Cumos. Phocoea. Athens. JEgina. Ephesus. Delos. Samos. Rhensea. Miletus. Naxos. Paros. Ios. Cos. Cnidus. Rhodes. Carpathus. Crete. * * * Places conspicuous by their absence are printed in italics.. 300 The Complete Life of Homer . Amongst them are to be seen neither Rhodes nor Colophon, for he was born at neither of those places, and he hated the latter not only as being Amazonian and the cause of his banishment, but also as having blasphemed the God of Song in his person during his recent stay there. Still less do we see Cyme and Smyrna, for they had rejected the God’s high-priest the poet, that, as he had been born within the radius of his especial presence at Claros, so was destined to die within the ■radius of his especial presence at Delos. Neither, lastly, do we see I os, for neither was his mother from that place, nor could he foreknow that he should die there ; nor Troy, where the lot of the schoolmaster amongst its handsome but wanton and idle urchins was a dreary one. Now t , excluding that one line about Scyros, where is the want of “ topical -continuity ” ? If we only transpose— u Hk'vpog tcai <]}u)Kaia kul Ak'poKavrjQ ooog amv ” — “ Scyros and Pbocaea and the lofty mountain of Acrocane ”•— from the sixth line to the ninth of the list, the order is so absolutely unexceptionable The Complete Life of Homer . 301 that one could fancy the poet had a “ Bradshaw ” or an “A B C ” on the table before him in writing his hymn. Obvi¬ ously, however, the Scyros here mentioned is not the Scyros in which Theseus, the especial hero of Athens, was treacherously murdered, and in which Neoptolemus, the ruffianly butcher of our poet’s infant Astyanax, was born. That Scyros was. exactly the one place on the face of the earth that our poet would most studiously avoid mentioning. And, besides, it has no connection either with him or with Apollo, and was wholly out of his route.. The Scyros here referred to is, of course,, the Scyros of which our poet wrote :— “ Achilles slept in the corner of the tent, And by his side fair-cheek’d Diomede, Whom he from Lesbos carried, Phorbas’ daughter; And on the other side Patroclus lay, And by him Iphis, great Achilles’ gift, When he won lofty Scyros from Enyeus.” Doubtless hither went the children of Achilles by Diomede and of Patroclus by Iphis, and other Asiatic Thessalians, and named it, just as they named Larissa, Magnesia, Cumae, Arne, and Erythrae from 302 The Complete Life of Homer . the Greek towns of the same name. And in all probability it was their descendants that subsequently colonised Cyme and Smyrna. Well, then, may Scyros have been sacred to Apollo in our poet’s eyes* And this is a further proof that the Scyros of the hymn is not the Scyros of King Lycomedes. Homer (the pseudo- Homer, of course), is said to have died at Scyros. Now, nothing more natural than that he should die at the lofty Scyros of Enyeus, in the course of his Phil-Homeric pilgrimages between Troy and Chios. But what should bring him to such an out-of- the-way island as Scyros ? % % * % % * % * * * * * * * * * vV * # * * * * But why should Higse be especially sacred to Apollo, even though it did give name to the Hvgean Sea ? Permit me to answer this question by another. Why, on the festive day of Neptune, do the poet Horace and his Lyde sing alternately in honour, the one of Neptune and the The Complete Life of Homer. 303 Nereids, and the other of Latona and Diana ? Next to the mother that bore him, at Delos, the god to whom that island belonged obviously deserved com¬ memoration in an ode to Delian Apollo. Next, therefore, only to Delos should /Egae be sacred, not so much because it gave name to the Aegean as because there was Neptune’s “glorious home, golden, shining, and imperishable.” One last question that greatly vexed antiquity. Which was written first,—the “Iliad” or the “Odyssey ” ? Lucian says, in “The True Story,” that Homer told him he wrote the “ Iliad” first. That is, we learn that fact by the perusal of his writings. And so we do. The mental and physical decline and exhaustion of the septuagenarian bard are most palpable in the latter books of the “ Odyssey.” I cannot, however, see that there is greater unity of design in the “ Odyssey ” than in the “ Iliad.” A mere general reader o sees no lack of the said unity in the “Iliad,” whereas in the “Odyssey” he cannot help being struck with the double prooemium (that in Book I. and that in Book V.) and the double Nekuia (that in 304 The Complete Life of Homer. Book XI. and that in Book XXIV.). I am, therefore, led strongly to believe that the first four books after Book I., 1 - 79 , formed originally no part of it, nor the first 27 lines of Book V., nor much, if any, after Book XII. My reasons are—(1) Those already alleged actually conclusive as regards Books I.-IV. (2) The extreme inferiority of Books I.-IV. after the first hundred lines or so and of Books XIV.- XXIII. (3) The sudden flash of fine poetry in the second Nekuia, and “Od.” I. 32-43, which are fragments of the Nostoi. (4) The extremely autobiographical cha¬ racter of Books XIII.-XVIII. Till then Homer speaks of himself very furtively, but now his mask is almost off, his drift almost undisguised. And my conclusions are as follows :— “ Ye all are right and all are wrong,” as the chameleon says in the fable. Homerwrote “Od.” 1 .1-79, and from “Od.” V. 28, to “ Od.” XII. before the “ Iliad,” and the rest afterwards. His audience ^ot weary of the garrulous egotism, as they profanely deemed it, of his decline ; and, in spite of splendid efforts in Books XIX., The Complete Life of Homer. 305 / o r- yjtjMc XXI., XXIII., and XXIV., he found himself compelled to leave Chios by the forbidding spectre of an empty lecture- room. Indeed, so obvious is that decline that sixteen out of the twenty-four Books