before mentioned, and upon her death, soon after, Mæon brought up her child as his own. Here we have an origin of the two epithets or appellatives, Melesigenes and Mæonides. Ephorus* says he was called Homer ("Oμnpos) when he became blind-the Ionians so styling blind men because they were followers of a guide (Ounpeúa). Aristotle'st account is, that the Lydians being pressed by the Æolians, and resolving to abandon Smyrna, made a proclamation, that whoever wished to follow them should go out of the city, and that thereupon Melesigenes said he would follow or accompany them (unpe); upon which he acquired the name of Homer. Another derivation of the name is from pay-one not seeing; as to which notion of his blindness, Paterculus says that whoever thinks Homer was born blind must needs be blind himself in all his senses. It was said also that he was so called from pos (the thigh), because he had some mark on his thigh to denote his illegitimacy. In the Life of Homer by Proclus, the story is that the Poet was delivered up by the people of Smyrna to Chios as a pledge or hostage (öμnpos) on the conclusion of a truce. The derivation that favors the theories both of Wolfe and Heyne is from duo pen-to speak together, or from unpeiv to assemble toge *Plutarch, V. H. + Ibid. ther; but every one of these are mere conjectures and some of them very unhappy ones. The stories proceed in general to state that Homer himself became a schoolmaster and poet of great celebrity at Smyrna, and remained there till Mentes, a foreign merchant, induced him to travel. That the author or authors of the Iliad and Odyssey must have travelled pretty extensively for those times, is unquestionable; for besides the accurate knowledge of Greece Proper displayed in the Catalogue, it is clear that the Poet had a familiar acquaintance with the islands both in the Egean and the Ionian seas,* the coasts of Asia Minor from the Hellespont indefinitely southward, Crete, Cyprus, and Egypt; and possessed also distinct information with respect to Libya, Æthiopia, Phoenicia, Caria, and Phrygia. In his travels Homer visited Ithaca, and there became subject to a disease in his eyes, which after * The late Mr. Bryant was induced by the extreme particularity of the local description of Ithaca in the Odyssey, to contend for that island's being the birth-place of Homer, and he imagined that the poet's own adventures are related under the name of those of Ulysses. But do these descriptions correspond with the actual face of the island? Can any one find the famous cavern of the Nymphs? As to mere particularity of detail, Peter Wilkins and Robinson Crusoe cannot be surpassed. It may be mentioned here that Joshua Barnes wrote a book to prove that King Solomon was the author of the Iliad; and that Constantine Koliades maintains that the real Homer was no other than Ulysses himself. waris teminated in total blindness. From this island he is said to have gone to Italy and even to Spain: but there is no sign in either of the two poems of any knowledge westward of the Ionian Sea. Wherever be went. Homer recited his verses, which were universally admired, except at Smyrna, where he was a prophet in his own country. At Phocæa, a schoolmaster of the name of Thestorides, obtained from Homer a copy of his poetry, and then sailed to Chios and recited the Homeric verses as his own. Homer followed, was rescued by Glaucus, a goatherd, from the attack of his dogs,* and brought by him to Bolissus, a town in Chios, where he resided a long time, in the possession of wealth and a splendid reputation. Thestorides left the island upon Homer's arrival. According to Herodotus he died at Io, on his way to Athens, and was buried near the sea shore. Proclus says, he died in consequence of falling over a stone. Plutarch tells a very different story. He preserves two responses of an oracle to Homer, in both of which he was cautioned to beware of the young men's riddle, and relates that the Poet, being on his voyage to Thebes, to attend a musical or poetical contest at the feast of Saturn in that city, landed in the island of Io, and whilst * An incident supposed to be recorded in that passage of the Odyssey ('. xiv. 29.) where Ulysses is in danger of being torn by the dogs at the porch of the house of Eumeus. sitting on a rock by the sea-shore, observed some young fishermen in a boat; that Homer asked. them if they had any thing, (el Ti ëxov,) and that the young wags who, having had no sport, had been diligently catching, and killing as many as they could catch, of certain personal companions of a race not even yet extinct, answered-" as many as we caught, we left; as many as we could not catch, we carry with us." “Οσσ ̓ ἕλομεν, λιπόμεσθα· ὅσ ̓ οὐχ ἕλομεν, φερόμεσθα. The catastrophe is that Homer, being utterly unable to guess the meaning of this riddle, broke his heart out of pure vexation, and that the inhabitants of the island buried him with great magnificence, and put the following inscription on his tomb: Ενθάδε τὴν ἱερὰν κεφαλὴν κατὰ γαῖα καλύπτει Here Homer the divine, in earthly bed, Poet of Heroes, rests his sacred head. There has been as much doubt and controversy about the age of Homer, as about himself and his poems. According to the argument of Wood,* Haller,† and Mitford, he lived about the middle of the ninth century before Christ; which date agrees exactly with the conjecture of Herodotus, * Essay on the Original Genius, &c. + Heyne, Excurs. IV. ad II. '. xxiv. History of Greece, i. who wrote B. C. 444, and is founded on the assumption that Homer must have lived before the return of the Heraclide into Peloponnesus, an event which took place within eighty years after the Trojan war. The Newtonian calculation is also adopted, which fixes the capture of Troy as low as B. C. 904. The argument is, that it is extremely improbable that Homer, so minute as he is in his descriptions of Greece, and so full of the histories of the reigning dynasties in its various districts, should never notice so very remarkable an occurrence as the almost total abolition of the kingly government throughout Greece, and the substitution of the republican form in its stead. Now this national revolution was coincident with, or immediately consequent on, the return of the descendants of Hercules. It is said also, that the Poet mentions the grandchildren of Æneas as reigning in Troy, in the Prophecy of Neptune in the Iliad, and that in another speecht of Juno's * Νῦν δὲ δὴ Αἰνεία: βίη Τρώεσσιν ἀνάξει [ Καὶ παῖδες παίδων, τοί κεν μετόπισθε γένωνται. Then shall Æneas o'er the Trojans reign, And children's children his great line maintain. Almost the same words occur in the Hymn to Venus, v. 197, 198; and they destroy the very foundation of the Roman claim to Trojan descent through Virgil's hero. The Augustan poet, either on his own authority, or under shelter of an old reading of návrσs for Tpoo, writes Nunc domus Æneæ cunctis dominabitur oris, ↑ A'. iv. 51-4. |