MASTER NEGA TIVE NO. M^ "^ ^^^V ^*^k ^^B ^^~V 803^9 MICROFILMED 1991 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES/NEW YORK (4 as part of the Foundations of Western Civilization Preservation Project" Funded by the NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITffiS Reproductions may not be made without permission from Columbia University Library COPYRIGHT STATEMENT The copyright law of the United States - Title 17, United Slates Code ~ concerns the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material... Columbia University Library reserves the right to refuse to accept a copy order if, in its judgement, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of the copyright law. AUTHOR: WHITE, F. A. TITLE: COMPLETE LIFE OF HOMER PLA CE: LONDON DATE: 1889 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT Master Negative # Bti^FJ^^SjT BIBLIOGRAPHIC MICROFORM TARGET Original Material as Filmed - Existing Bibliographic Record 83HB V/liite, F A Tlie con^^lete life of Homer. 1889. viii, 496 p« London, Bell, ^ I lo Homerus, ■ ■ B iographyi Restrictions on Use: TECHMcXl~mTcR DATA FILM SIZE: sS^^^^Tl. REDUCTION RATIO: j/)C IMAGE PLACEMENT: lA © IB IIB DATE FILMED: l2zJ_jLl^J INITIALS HLMEDBY: RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS. INC WOODBRIDGE, CT c Association for information and Image Management 1100 Wayne Avenue. Suite 1100 ' Silver Spring, Maryland 20910 301/587-8202 Centimeter 1 2 3 Ih I I 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 llll|iiiiliiiiiiijllii|ilii|iliiiili iiilm 12 13 14 15 mm Inches 1.0 I.I 1.25 llllllllllllllllllllll ||l|l||||l|ll 1^ ||2£ [5.0 '""^^S 2.5 HHI 3 2 2.2 |«3 no _ 2.0 1.8 1.4 1.6 TIT I MPNUFPCTURED TO PIIM STPNDRRDS BY RPPLIED IMfiGE- INC. :ta Columbia 5.^nit)erfi(ttp intl)f(£ilpDf2(trttig0rk THE LIBRARIES -* ii'5f tli«.rdi!ji»iinted Aspirations^ 1865, , eight Aristodes, 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 <J^>^^. mam veritudinem,— to the very best of his ability, he might just as well have made Mentes of Ithaca as of Leucas ; the alle- gory would have run the smoother for it. Perhaps, however, he does well thus to enrich the interest of the poem, regarded purely as fiction ; for, after all, Troy is no more Smyrna than Leucas is Ithaca. Homer's third and last voyage was that of Menelaus. Of this he gives the following outline : — ^ '' The wealth that I had gain'd, from land to land Kanging, like white-nosed bee from flower to flower. 34 The Complete Life of Homer, I brought on ship-board in the eighth year, home. Cyprus, Phoenicia, and ^gypt, I Sought in my wanderings ; Ethiopia, too. And the Sidonians, and the Troglodytes That underground in far Arabia dwell, And Libye, where the lambs are born with horns, For thrice a year the sheep bring forth, and there Nor monarch on his throne, nor humble hind Lack cheese, or meal, or honey-flavour'd milk, But all is plenty in that happy land." Need I say that Homer was never in any of these wonderful places, but, no doubt, in this last voyage he certainly did get as far as Egypt, and trafficked there for some time. To go by the card, he probably voyaged from Leucas to Crete, from Crete to Egypt, thence after a some- what protracted stay to Phoenicia, and thence to Cyprus. After this we have no clue to his course till we find him at the end of his eight years' voyages at Kolophon. Possibly Mentes went on his former route to Smyrna, and from thence to the far West, and then back home ; but finding his illustrious fellow-voyager had again contracted his old malady, he was obliged once more to pay him off and leave him at Kolophon. And now I think I need say no more of The Complete Life of Homer. 00 Homer's travels by sea. I presume every reader of this work has either Pope's, or Cowper s, or Chapman's, or Worsley's, or Butcher's translation of the ** Odyssey, " and with that and the map he can beguile a pleasant hour in filling up the above sketch. I have traced the '^ Odyssey" here and elsewhere, as far as I safely may, for materials for a truly historical, and in no respect mythological, life of the great poet. Farther I do not think I ought to go, as, after all, the " Odyssey " is only a work of fiction, though (the reader must particularly note this) of all works of fiction the most autobiographical, even as of all epic poems the ** Iliad" is the most historical. The '' Iliad '' is as true as Shakespeare's John, and four Henries, and Richard HI. ; and the '^ Odyssey" is as true as Scott's '' Waverley," - Old Mortality," and "Fortunes of Nigel." Like the monkey with a cat's paw getting at the roasted chestnuts, we gingerly pick out of them every grain of true history that we can. Thus here, I doubt not, Homer visited the various places I have mentioned, but how far the allegory has personal refer- ence I dare only here and there speculate. D 2 CHAPTER II. FROM HIS EXILE TO HIS LAST JOURNEY FROM CHIOS. One foolish myth tells us that Homer was struck blind by the arms of Achilles ; another, by the wrath of the now deified Helen ; from which I infer (i) that he fell blind on his return from a visit to the ruins of Troy, at a later period. He was not, therefore, quite blind yet, but suffering cruelly from eye disease. He talks a great deal of the wealth acquired by his doubles, Ulysses and Menelaus, but I shrewdly suspect that most of it fell into the hands of his skipper, Mentes, and that the poet himself had not much of ** the abundant wealth " he was so afraid of leaving in his room, lest it should become the spoil of his landlady, — *• the very beautiful tripods and cauldrons of gold and embroidered apparel, The Complete Life of Homer, 37 the iron, the brass, and the gold, and the abundant substance," of which he talks so often and so glibly. Mentes had it all. Mentes was the publisher with his fine place in Surrey ; Homer, the poor Grub- street author, quaking when the day came round for his interview with Mrs. Raddle. Doubtless, however, our poet received a certain small lump of pay when he parted finally with his skipper at Colophon. At Colophon he resumed his abandoned trade of school-keeping, and, even as late as the time of Lesches, the author of '* The Contest between Homer and Hesiod," the people of Colophon showed the identical spot where he commenced his poetical career (though the great bard had chirped a little before in the cool caves of Smyrna) with his *' Margites."* Wilkie Collins tells us he wrote his marvellous book, ** The Moonstone," under precisely similar circumstances of severe mental and physical suffering. Strange, is it not, how the flame of genius rises disdainfully su- perior to this gross mortal disguise of clay } And from Colophon, his sight now grow- ing worse and worse, he bent his steps to his * Lesches, " Agon," p. 34. Westermann. 38 The Coinpleie Life of Homer. native place, Smyrna, and there, according to our author, and not before, as Lesches informs us, at Colophon, he took the great work of his life in hand. That is to say, he began his '* Kuklos." And for a time, we are told by Stephanus Byzantius, he sojourned at Cenchrea^, in the Troad, while he acquired as full information as possible about the affairs of Troy (see Stephanus Byzantius, art. Cenchrece). He had distinguished himself as a highly- gifted being before, and at Colophon, Lesches tells us, he wrote his ** Margites," a statement I will leave, for the present, un- questioned. But now, having a little store in hand, the savings of many years' toil and exposure, and privation by sea and land, he devoted himself wholly to his sacred -callinof. It was at this period of his life, doubt- less, and not before, that he became totally blind. Obviously, the great diversity of accounts indicates that the loss of sight was very gradual. There are no less than four of them. The Ithacans said he be- came blind when at Ithaca. No, said the Colophonians, he recovered from the attack at Ithaca, but fell blind at Colophon. \ The Complete Life of Homei\ 39 No, said a third legend, he was blinded by the arms of Achilles ; that is, he became stone blind on his return to Smyrna, after paying a visit to the ruins of Troy during his sojourn at Cenchreae. No, said a fourth legend, he lost his sight through the anger of the now deified Helen, the same as Stesichorus did ; that is, his already impaired vision was wholly de- stroyed by his too ardent devotion to his poetical studies. I need hardly remind my readers that the ancient Greeks saw a judgment in every calamity that can befall our suffering race ; still less need I inflict upon them three or four pages full of such names as Phaethon, lasius, Actseon, Sten- tor, Linus, Thamyris, and Stesichorus, to prove so mere a truism. But the legend here referred to proves something more. It proves, —(i) that Homer was now far on with his ** Kuklos "; (2) that, Stesichorus-like, his original por- trayal of the fair curse of Asia was very severe, and very unlike his subsequent one ; (3) that the story of the blindness of Thamyris has a personal reference. As Phaethon fell a victim to his devotion to the study of astronomy, and lasius to his 40 The Complete Life of Homer. devotion to agriculture, so Thamyris and Linus before, and other sweet poets after him, from Stesichorus to Milton, fell a victim to their devotion to the Muses. As we see, by a crowd of instances, the high gods punish us alike if we refuse to wor- ship them, and if we worship them over- much. We must only look at them as Moses looked. But with the example before our eyes of Thamyris in the ** Iliad,"* and still more that of Demodocus in the •* Odyssey,"— " Whom the Muses loved full dearly, And gave him both good and ill ; Of the sight of his eyes they bereaved him. But gave him sweet minstrel skill ; " \ and, most of all, that of the blind old man — Homer himself — in the hymn to ApolloJ to doubt, with Lucian and others, that our poet was blind at all, is altogether forbid- den by the canons of Homeric orthodoxy. And now being entirely blind, and having spent all his savings, partly on the neces- saries of life, partly on learned researches, and partly in vain appeals to the sons ♦ Iliad, ii. 594-600. f Odyssey, viii. 63, 64. \ Hymn, i. 172. The Complete Life of Homer, 41 of -^sculapius, at Smyrna, to avert the impending catastrophe of absolute loss of sight,— Oh. for the " very beautiful tripods and cauldrons, and gold and embroidered apparer* of the poet's dream,— finding himself without any means of subsistence, he determined to repair to Cyme. So, travelling through the plain of Hermus he arrived at Neonteichos {Anglice Newali), a colony of the Cymaeans. Now this place was founded eight years after Cyme, i.e. 1025 B.C. Here, it is said, he stood at the open door of a shoemaker's workshop, and sang as follows : — " Oh, do not, pray, deny me, But on my need have pity, Ye sons of deer-eyed Cyme, That dwell in this brave city. And where the lofty-tressed wood Of Same meets the plain. The Jove-born honey-luscious flood Of rippling Hermus drain." Sardene or Sardene, or Sardone,— it is spelt in so many ways, I have ventured, in my translation, to clip the dubious vowel altogether, — whichsoever it be, is a moun- 42 The Complete Life of Homer. tain that overhangs the river Hermus and the town of Neonteichos. It may, perhaps, interest readers to see how carefully our poet corrected and re- corrected all but his most hasty and worth- less productions. This the reader may see for himself in the** Iliad" and the ''Odyssey," but nowhere is it more conspicuous than in the epigrams that I have translated in this work. Thus the fourth line of Epi- gram I has the following variations : — ** Ye who dwell in the lofty city [laudable] The deer-eyed daughter of Cyme " [lovely-eyed] Or, Or, " Of Cyme the deer-eyed maiden '* [lovely-eyed] " Of the lovely-faced nymph of Juno :" [deer eyed] die last variation meaning, that when the Amazons had taken the heaven-detested city, Juno rewarded them with a century of empire over Asia Minor. Lastly : — " Ye who dwell in the lofty city, The deer-eyed daughter of the firmament : " [lovely-eyed] The Complete Life of Homer, 43 meaning much the same as the preceding variation, only much more prettily ex- pressed. Nor did the poet find it more easy to satisfy himself in the fourth line, of which the variations are as follow : — " Drinking the divine water of the river stream :" [of the god-like river] [of the divine river] the variations in the last line are ** Of eddying Hermus," &c. [fairly flowing] In his '' Lives of the Poets " Johnson has pronounced a similar exemplification of the laborious industry of Pope to be profoundly interesting. And the multitu- dinous readings of the first stanza of Ariosto are unquestionably amongst the best known curiosities of literature. Certainly it is worth mentioning in our poet s life that he altered so much, the more so that his altering his pieces so much is a sure proof that he wrote them down, else all these variations would surely not have been preserved even during his life-time, much less for 3,000 years afterwards. But I 44 The Complete Life of Homer. The Coynplete Life of Homer, 45 make something more than mere honest painstaking out of all these variations. I make out that Homer recited his epigram first at Neonteichos with line 2, as in the Life of Lives (p. 4) : — *' Ye who dwell in the lofty city, the deer-eyed daughter of Cyme." But when he got to Cyme he recited it in the form : — " Ye who dwell in deer-eyed Cyme, the lofty city of the blue vault of heaven." Or, " Ye who dwell in the much-lauded city of the lovely- eyed nymph of Juno." Now the shoemaker s name was Tychius. And when he had heard the above ditty, he determined to receive the stranger within his doors, for he pitied him, seeing that he was blind. So he bade him come into his workshop, and said he should share his havings. So he came inside. And, sitting in the shop, many persons being there, he showed them his last volume of poems, containing, *'The Rideof Amphiaraus,"and the hymns to the gods which he had written ; and, as seated in the shoemaker's room, he declaimed his views concerning what was said by those present, he appeared worthy of admiration to those that heard him. So, for a time, Homer maintained him- self at Neonteichos by his poetry. And the Neonteichites were in the habit of exhibiting, even to the time of Herodotus, the place in which he used to sit and exhibit his poems. And very greatly did they reverence it. And very greatly did they reverence the poplar, too, which, they say, grew up there after Homer came amongst them. But as time went on, and things went as ill as ever with him, he determined to try Cyme once more, to see if he could do any better there than at Neonteichos. Now, about this time died, probably miles from Cyme, one Midas, a considerable person in those parts, but no more king of Phrygia than Maeon was king of Lydia (these are both alike extravagant absurdities of the Cymaeans, as recorded, I presume, in the lost works of Ephorus), and no more to be confounded with the ass-eared owner of the Pactolian gold- mines, than the Ma^on that for a short 46 The Co7nplete Life of Horner, time, in Homer's boyhood, befriended the poor hapless orphan, with Mceon, the son of Haemon, the son of Creon, twice regent of Thebes ; but, doubtless, the Midas, of whose wife, Harmodice, Heraclides Ponticus tells us that she first made (I forget what) for the Cymeeans. So, on Homer's arrival at Cyme, his mother's native city, the kinsfolk of the deceased gentleman (Midas) begged the poet to oblige them with a copy of verses to put upon his tombstone. The poet complied, and dashed off the following quatrain, which is to be seen there, our author tells us, "even to this very day," engraved on the monu- ment, upon which a virgin of brass (some goddess, doubtless) is supposed to address the passers by as follows : — *' (I am a brazen virgin, and I lie on the tombstone of Midas.) As long as streams do flow, and trees do bloom, And sun and moon in turn illume the sky, Remaining on this much-lamented tomb, Midas lies here, I warn each passer by." That the above is Homeric there can be no doubt, whatever. It is read in (i) Plato, Phaedr., p. 264 D. ; (2) Dion Chrysost., Or., xxxvii. p. 465 ; (3) Diog. Laert., i. 89; The Complete Life of Homer, 47 (4) The Epigrams of Homer, No. 3 ; (5) Certam., Hom. et Hes., 15; (6) Anthol. Palat., i. p. 348. Longinus also quotes the first and second line as an instance of the true sublime ; Sextus Empiricus gives us the line as originally written, and Diog. Laert. gives us a third line, subsequently expunged by our poet. The lines as originally written being : — E 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-Homers 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 Phocaean, 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 Coynplcte 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 iEgean 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 Home7\ 75 their words, and was very anxious to be TOne. But considering that he had said many fine things of Argos, but of Athens nothmg, he set to work interpolating a few such verses as might prove acceptable there, e.g. : — ''The people of high-soul'd 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 lb., ii. 557. t Iliad, ii. 352. § Odyss., vii. 80. 76 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 /Eneas'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 lanoruacre of the other biographers, we naturally infer that Homer was now once more a homeless wanderer. But we kfiow positively nothing. 1 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 CoDiplete Life of Home7\ 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 los, we have the difficult task of extracting the honey of truth from more than one nettle of error. One author,* quoted by Allatius,! 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. t " De Patria Homeri," p. 177. ^8 The Complete Life of Homer, blunder for los, we obtain the interestin^r 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 flowers 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 — '* 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, — doubriess, 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 w^ere 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, • Tyanepsia, 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 Avith 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 yEolid. 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 Homer. 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 Codridee 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 '41iad" 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 H . of Russia ; for though immoral for a woman, i 86 The Complete Life of Homer, 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 sovereiofns. 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 vSeven 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. CHAPTER III. HIS SICKNESS, DEATH, AND BURIAL. Ax\i) having set sail from Samos with certain natives of the place, he was carried to los, 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, I suppose, to endure the rocking and smell of the vessel, he got out and slept for the 90 The Complete Life of Homer, 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 los 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, **\Vhat 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 very oldest riddle in the world. The taste of the most self-satisfied of all the centuries, with which wisdom will die The Complete 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 los 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 all the Lives of Homer, from Lesches to Tzetzes, omits Jt. 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. " 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. *' Brave lads, no piled-up gold is yours. Nor sheep that blanch the plains ; But better far the merry blood That danceth in your veins I " The first line of the above has, with a truly Boeotian stupidity, been altered from to whereby the gay, good-humoured plea- santry of the line has been half destroyed. Paros, the island immediately adjoining I OS, was inhabited originally by Cretans,* but Parus subsequently colonised it with Arcadians (in Faron iiisulam coloniam dedtcxit Paros addtuto populo ex A readid)A • Stephanus Byzantius. t Holstenii notae in Stephanura. The Complete Life of Homer. 93 whilst los, originally called Phoenike (that is, inhabited by Cretans), but subsequently los, from the Ionian (doubtless Arcado- lonians) colonists, had, we may be sure, a large Arcadian element. Now Phoenician or Lydian origin was discreditable, but Arcadian very honourable, the Arcadians being Awrop^flovg^, and, as they them- selves boasted, born before the moon itself. From whichever therefore of the two contiguous islands, Paros or los, the fisher-lads were, — and they may almost equally well have been from either, — the above lines are pleasantly complimentary. No craven, crouching, slavish Lydians were they from los in Lydia (for of that base origin were the lans half suspected) ; no lying Cretans ; no Phoenicians bent on amassing gold ; but bold, pre-lunar Arca- dians ; hunters too, not shepherds — that is, the creme de la ereme of all Hellas. The idea is well kepi up all through. Petty and vulgar as this incident may seem, it has many interesting points about it. It is the last incident recorded in the Life of Homer. It elicited the only flash of humour we have in all his works. It has kept alive even to this very hour the 94 The Complete Life of Homer, oldest riddle in the world. It gave rise to a Tptyspwu [x^Qos — Aiiglice (a right old saw), when any very puzzling question was put. " Even Homer could make nothing of t/iatr 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 "litde 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. T/ie Complete Life of Hom:7\ 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 pam, 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, t 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 los, and died after a short illness." Which proves that the accident cannot have been very severe * Lesches. t Proclus. 96 The Complete Life of Homer. anyhow. It appears from another account that he was ill three days. But how do the weak things of the earth confound the mighty ! The despised little insect that figures ahke 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 bHnd, 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 Samos, much less at los, as far as we have the slightest grounds for judging. But whether The Complete Life of Homer, 97 he breathed out his last sigh of relief at escapmg 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 m the house of some good Samaritan at los, the very centre of Ionian Greece, hence its name, at Phoenician los, 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, or less, of life were so absolutely m 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, II 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 Homerceum 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 : — " 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, Ihrough which aUve 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 defendino- 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 If 2 lOO 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 author's 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 The Complete Life of Homer. 10 1 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-minstre? 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 Creophylus in his day : — " Lame, scab-mark'd, old, in stroller's tatters came Knisokolax uncall'd, in search of porridge ;" t and that of Lucian in that most interesting piece, ** The Lapithae," we cannot think so of the Creoplylus, to whom the poet gave his daughter in his lifetime, and on his » ♦ Respublica, bk. x. p. 500. t Athenaeus. I02 The Complete Life of Horner, 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 Maeonidem." 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 Setde. 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 los. 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 ''happen 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 los, as it undoubtedly is in the preface of Stephanus Niger to Plutarch, and in the Solinus of Gyraldus Spondanus. Just so, conversely, los is found in some MSS. instead of Chios in the celebrated line : — *' Smyrna, Rhodus, Colophon, Salamis, Chios, Areos Athense." » 5 > I04 The Complete Life of Homer. In ancient manuscripts Chios and los were, it would seem, only too readily inter- changeable. Second, that Chios was the name of the port of los. There is no actual improbability in this supposition, for (i), as Chios was largely, so must los, 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 los was probably, and the neighbouring island Paros certainly, inhabited first by Cretans, so Chios, according to Ion of Chios, W2S colonised by ffinopion of Crete. Or, rather, the town of los 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 los, 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 HoJTier. 105 los. He, it is true, seems to have been seduced into the appalling blunder that Homer died on thecoast of Arcadia, parriy 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 * los 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 los 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 los, 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, i^hodon signifying in Greek a rose). The lans 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 yEgean, or Goat Sea, of which los was the sacred centre ; of goat-footed goat- horned iElgokeros (Pan), his father, and Goat's Bay (ifigina), from whence his Leo Allatius, p. 175, y 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 segis (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) ; andlasdy, of his life of utter contumely, and the nick- name (yExv^gos, 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 lo CLX. ante urbem conditam." * He departed from human affairs in the island of los, 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 "t (query, * Solinus, cap. 17. t Allatius, " De Patria 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 lans, 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 ^-^-^ ^^ 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. 1 09 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 Homer. 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 rem, — 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 litde impaired, to travel by sea and land for an indefinite number of years, and blind, too, over the whole civilised world, 1 have done, — verbicm non ajuplius adda7u. I admit with Aristode that Homer was born, say, 1043 ^•^'- ^^^ 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 ^-c., and that of Philostratus and Cyril 1015 B.C. But I think any reader that compares the life according to Aris- tode with that according to Herodotus, will admit the latter's age at death, even if it were no\.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, 1 1 1 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, nota be7ie, 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 los 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 Homers." No, not our Homer's. But Proclus says : '* It is Homers." ''Yes," adds Herodotus, *' the pseudo-Homer's." The pseudo- Homer wrote it when he came to los about 885 B.C. Till then the poet's grave was that of 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 Minerv^a) 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 Euphron, 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 Homer's 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 mne generations or three hundred years after the fall of Troy when he landed at los, and the lans on their part must have known how long it was since the poet's death. So he (and they) had only to do an easy 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 los. For argument's sake, however, suppose I yield this point, and only insist that, as long as 114 The Complete Life of Homer. the tombstone survived, the date of our poet's death was well known at los, 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 long after 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 los, and an oracle afterwards obtained, los secured his body for ever, which his attendant should have burnt, and sent the ashes to Chios, seeing that los 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- I 2 ii6 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 mande he had dropped. The finest soul God ever breathed forth they had with their cold- blooded heardessness 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 Heaven's 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 ii8 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 £^^0 to ;^50 ! How rich then his master must have been ! How comes it then that his master went about singing a litde 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, I20 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 enoucrh 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 Imsteron 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, lo, and Danaus, that of Prometheus and Deucalion, The Complete Life of Homer. 121 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. ENGADE TENIERENKEFA LENK ATAGAIAKALUP( SE ) ANDRONEROONKOSMETO RABEIONOMERON 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 1 2 2 The Complete L ife of Homer, up the stone added the date to it ; all the letters therefore beincr capitals and having no stops, and the GEG being capable of being taken for GEGONE, the great ApoUodorus misread the inscription : " Here lies Homer. He was born {^egone) 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 Aristode and Herodotus will, of course, be gready 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 Ma^on, 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 Maeon, Homers father by adoption. Mceon, 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 Pherae, 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 Co7nplete 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., 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.t He was the father of Diodes, the father of two sons, (i) 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., 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, Hom.er idolized. It * Odyss., iii. 489; xv. 187; xx. 176. t 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 orrandson of the Krethon of the '' Iliad" (book V. 542). The proof is as follows : — The yEneadce had now reigned in peace over the Troad, after the departure of the Greeks, for three generations, in accordance with the prophecy of Poseidon ('Tliad," V. 307, 308), but now ^neas II. (not the itneas 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 yEneadae reigned three generations at Troy and no more), and founds Alba. Virgil, "^^neid," iv. 340-346, ^' Mesi . . . pat via est,'' read between the lines, points, I think, this way ; and Creusas words (^n., ii. 785-6), '^ Non . . . /^(?," and^neas's *'///^r/ . . . mami'' (^n., ii. 431-4), most distinctly refer to the same old legend. The Stemma The Complete Life of Homer. 127 i^neadum establishes the truth of the point I here contend for beyond all possibility of further controversy. (i) ^neas 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 him by right of descent from whom he did so; (3) yEneas 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 (i), that the ^neades reigned in the Troad long even after the departure of yEneas ; (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 vEneas 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, -bolides, that is, Sisyphus the son of ^olus, the son of the Glaucus of the '* IHad," as a companion of his yEneas. 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 ^neas two after Homer s ^neas. And from this Kreth^//j II. (Herodotus's Y^x^xkion II.) Homer doubtless derived his eift of sonp- : — '* Crethea Musarum Comitem cui carmina semper, Et citharne 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 mothers 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, 1 29 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 Pherie, 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 Demasaeoras,* — 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 Ma^onides ; the more so, as Demodocus seems merely a slight modi- fication of Deino-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 K I30 The Complete Life of Homer. corrupted, like so many other Hellenic names, to Kritheis (the Wheat-nymph), and as such she received homage from the SmyrnDeans, 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. ( i ) 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, bora on the banks of the Simois. (5) Exactly similar was the birth of Satnius : — '* Whom to GEnops, 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" t was plainly seen from the first, as we see by that strange variation on his name, Melesi^«^.r, a combination of Scamandrius and Ks\,ya7iax. But this is not all. I • II., xiv. 444, 445. f II., xxii. 484-507. K 2 132 The Complete Life of Horner. read in Strabo the following quotation from Mimncrmus : — *» 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-crowrid river, By Heaven's will we took ^olid Smyrna." The word here to which I would direct attention is city-crowrid (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- Coiophonians 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 " los. 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 132 The Complete Life of Homer. read in Strabo the following quotation from Mimncrmus : — ** 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-croivri d river, By Heaven's will we took ^Eolid Smyrna." The word here to which I would direct attention is city-crownd (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- Coiophonians 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 " los. The scene when Ulysses arrives at Ithaca, and the intercourse between him and Eumeeus, 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 '^^^ 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 iEolid with lonid, — 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 i^ — " 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? " Than the poor wanderer's life, there is no curse Afflicts the suffering race of mortals worse." f Or this, in reference to his premature old age:— " For soon in misery man grows old."{ Or this, referring to the kind friend, Eumaeus by name, who introduced him so unavailingly to the favourable notice of the Cymaean Dogberries : — ** Rascal Eumaeus, why hast left thy swine And brought this fellow ? Had we not, low beast,. Vagrants enough before with the dull whine Of squalid poverty to spoil our feast ? " § * Odyss., viii. 136-139. t Odyss., xv. 343. X Odyss., xix. 360. § Odyss., xvii, 375-7. 136 The Complete Life of Homer. Again, our ill-fated poet must have had his own life of want in view when he w;-ote, — " Him over God's wide earth fell ravenous hunger pursueth." * And,— " The most piteous fate is by hunger to die." And of his doubtful paternity in that celebrated dialogue between Mentor and Telemachus : — Mentor, ** Hail thou, the son of Odyseus the wise ; You're shrewdly like him with those fearless eyes." Telemachus. " My mother says J am : it may be so ; But 'tis a wise child that his sire doth know." t A most inappropriate reply as regards Telemachus's, but most appropriate as regards Homer's paternity. And still the poet harps upon the one cruel thought when he makes Telemachus pursue the theme, as follows : — " Yet would I were some other father's boy, Who did in peaceful age his wealth enjoy ; But now the veriest wretch beneath the sky They say 's my father ; such is my reply." { * OJyss., xvii . 342. f Odyss., i. 20,-: 16, J Odyss., i. 217-220. The Coinplete Life of Homer, 137 These lines give me the impression that Homer s reputed father, Demasagoras, was a homeless wanderer, of whose fate, after he parted from poor Kretheis, the gentle poet speculated often and tenderly, but knew absolutely litde or nothing. Perhaps, even as Telemachus left Ithaca in search of his father, Ulysses, one main motive of Homer's leaving home was yearning after his long-lost father, Demasagoras, and if he might not recover him in life, — To close his dying eyes with decent care. Or dead to shed warm tears upon his tomb. Again,when our poor blind martyr says — " Gods, in the likeness of wandering strangers, Shrouded in manifold forms, go roaming from city to city," * he makes the self-same appeal to the sympathy of his auditors as Saint Paul to his correspondents. Again, when Ulysses tells us he was left an orphan with very litde provision, but he could not stay at home for his heart was in foreign lands, etc., is not this plainly Homer.'* * Odyss., xviii. 485. 138 The Complete Life of Homer. Again, in his made-up stories, Ulysses is doubly apt to project Homer, as in the following account of Maeon, his adopted father : — " I am the son of a rich lord of Crete, Castor, the son of Hylax, was his name. And many other sons were born to him In lawful wedlock. But me a concubine, A slave that he had purchased bare, yet me He honoured like the rest until he died. And then his haughty children shared his substance, But very little did they give to me." * Note in //)'/ax a trace of //y/e, a suburb of Smyrna. Only supposing Mseon really Homer's father, this is a perfectly accurate account of many interesting points in our poet's life. Whether Maeon was really his father, but, being married, and if not his uncle, next of kin, was afraid and ashamed to own him, at this distance of time we shall never know. It is probable enough, however, and accounts for the rough usage he encountered from M aeon's vindictively jealous widow, and her savage domineering boy ; and it is * Odyss., xiv. 199-210. The Complete Life of Homer, 139 further confirmed by what we read of Laertes about Euryclea, — " And her he honour'd no less than his wife, But that fierce beldame's jealous wrath he fear'd."* That elsewhere he leans to a less discredit- able parentage, and that the legends of his own countrymen ignore Maeon altogether, hardly do more than leave the balance of probability even. Where the great Aristotle is in doubt we may well be so ; and the great Aris- totle is unable to decide whether Maeon was his actual father or only his step- father, — in other words, whether Demasa- goras was his actual father according to Callicles, Herodorus,iEthiopion, and Alex- ander of Paphos, and Maeon only married his mother after his birth, or whether, ac- cording to the more weighty authority of Ephorus, Proclus, Hellanicus, Cleanthes, and Charax, Maeon was his actual father, and not his stepfather, or father by adoption only. It is a singular fact that Aristotle holds a different view here from what he does in his '' Poetica." In his '* Poetica" * Odyss., xi. 432, 433. I40 The Cojnplete Life of Hofner. he says that a demon was his father, and Mseon only adopted him after hi? mother's death ; but here he gives us, no doubt, his true opinion, that either Meeon or Demasa- goras was his father : at any rate, that Maeon was either his father or his step- father, which comes to much the same thing. But how does our poet proceed with the theme of his own true story under the ingenious mask of Ulysses's false one ? *' And then I wed a wife of wealthy parents, That loved me for my merits." * Here we learn that Homer married, as we should quite have imagined, not be- cause he had enough, as the pseudo-Hero- dotus, with the lues Boswelliana strongly upon him, erroneously states, but because she had something. I gather, indeed, that she first loved him, partly from admiration of his genius and partly from the pity that is akin to love and womanly disgust at the unworthy treatment the inoffensive wan- derer had undergone at the hands of the sottish Virros of Chios. She invites him * Odyss., xiv. 211-213. \ The Complete Life of Homer, 141 to her side by Euma^us, whom she ad- dresses on the subject as follows : — ** Go, bid the stranger stand before my chair, And tell me all about my lord he knows ; And if the tale prove true, oh, passing rare Shall be his cheer, and fine shall be his clothes." • And he replies discreetly : — «* I'll tell her all the truth, for all I know ; Good reason why, — myself have suffer'd so. But, 'las ! I fear yon drink-besotted crowd. Whose insolence to heaven doth cry aloud. Yon fool, as she hath seen this very day, Struck me for nothing, and none said him nay. So bid your gentle lady wait at home Till sunset for me, then be sure I'll come ; And all about her lord she shall inquire, As we sit tete-^-tete beside the fire ; And let it be a good one, for you see These are the rags of sorry penuree." * Here we have the story of Othello and Desdemona once again : — " She loved me for what I had undergone. And I loved her that she did pity me." Beginning with an assignation under the convenient cloak — not altogether un- * Odyss., XV. 544-573. 142 The Complete Life of Ho7ner. precedented, as I understand, amongst incipient lovers — of anxious inquiries about a dear mutual friend, and ending with a charming interview between a perplexed wife and a masked husband. Again, still harping on the treatment he was exposed to in his premature old age, he says : — ** With blows and kicks I am right well acquainted, My soul is tough — so many ills I've borne." * And again : — " Lady, why scold because thus foully drest ? I beg my bread by poverty opprest." f ^ I fancy our poet's audience got a little sick of so much of the same wearisome tale of woe. Also, if Ulysses was the only son of only children, so was Homer. And so we read in Moore's Life was Byron ; and so have ever been the most conspicuous of the children of genius— the Voltaires, the Goethes, the Miltons, the Shakespeares, and the Dantes — only sons. * Odyss., xvii. 2§3-84. X Odyss., xvi. 11 7-1 20. t Odyss., xix. 71-72. The Complete Life of Homer. 143 Then we have Homer's personal ap- pearance towards the close of his stay at Chios, — his once auburn hair all gone, his very beautiful and fearless eyes dim and dark, his once fair skin withered and wrinkled, and his shabby tattered garment that pleased no Ephesian matron, as we have already seen, no wanton wife of Ibycus to look upon,* — " a visage and a form more marred than any man," less by age than by sorrow and hardship, as the prince of prophets informs us, like the Phineus in the satirical drama of Sopho- cles : — " Eyeless, with clean'd-out sockets — An Egyptian mummy to look upon : His eyes shut, like an inn-door." t Or Phineus, in the ''Argonautica " of Apol- lonius : — ** His skin parch'd, shrivell'd, and squalid, And his nostrils enclosing bone only. "^ J In this guise we see the Venerable One going round at the luxurious banquet from * Odyss., xiii. 397-401, and 430-437. t Athenaeus, iii. p. 119. j Argon., ii. 200. 144 The Complete Life of Horner, chair to chair, holding out his hand for food.* And again, here also lOne single phrase lets the cat out of the bag, — that it is the poet, and not the hero, that is begging, where the wretched wanderer promises to " glorify Antinous " through- out the boundless world if he will only relieve his necessities,t a thing as entirely out of the power of the true U lysses as it was in that of the false one ; and that it is the poet that begs, appears yet more indisput- ably from the list previously given of those who alone, according to our poet's system of political economy, are entitled to be main- tained at the public charge, albeit the ves- trymen of Cyme thought otherwise, not mere voracious drones, but ''true workers for the people, the priest and the artisan," and above all ''the sacred minstrel that delights with song " : — *' These all invite throughout earth's boundless plain, But none the canker-worms their means that drain." { Whilst thus sadly occupied in the de- ♦ Odyss., xvii. 365. t Odyss., xvii. 417, 418. X Odyss., xvii. 382-387. The Complete Life of Homer, 145 grading task of begging his bread and enduring all the vile spurns " That patient merit from the unworthy takes," the thought naturally springs up in the poor^ wanderers soul of other and far happier days, when he kept school at Smyrna : — " 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, where 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 tvere gone, alone was left to take care of him — his un- avowed fathers 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 **01d Mortality," earnesdy 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^rom 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 JekyI 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 nesded a tiny infant amongst the rushes, Artemis had moistened with soul-sustaining nectar the pale lips of his dying mother) those litde innocents would throw it into the water, crying, '' Hey, Argy! hey, then, Argy!" {lo, Argidion / To, Argid707t I), and play at hare and hounds, fox and geese, bloody Tom, and catch-who- can,on the soft green turf, 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 hds 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 commencementof the twenty- first book of the '' Iliad " is an exactly similar adaptation of the sports of Homer s *' little wanton boys," and as such I have retranslated it in the ninth idyll of my " Reign of Love," entided ** Frolics on the Eld," where I have depicted the boys of Rabyand their angel prince, Master Eddie Middleton, sporting about on the banks of the Eld, just as our gende 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, Homer's would-be stepfather's 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- legoriae Iliadeae," is the same as Bruchon, />., the brayer. a word used by the Lydians and Ephesian lonians 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 Complete 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 : I. Argeios is a real name, which Arnaios is not. 2. Arnaios, as a corruption of Argeios, signifying " of Arne,'* may v^xy 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 Co7nplcte 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," (i) because 152 The Complete Life of Homer. Homer was, on his mother's side, a Kretheid ; (2) because his and Nestor's kinsmen, the Codridse, 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 derivinjr Erectheid blood (i) through the ancestor from whom he took his name — Homer of Smyrna ; and (2) from the colony which went out from Athens to Smyrna on the occasion of the usurpation of ^geus ; he speaks of Erechtheid Athens, and mentions Menes- theus, the son of Peteus, the son of Orneus, the son of Erechtheus, with distinguished honour, but never once «nentions Demophon, or Acamas, or ^geus, and only once Theseus, and then ^thout one applauding epithet. Even, granting that Theseus was the true and not the supposititious son of vEgeus (albeit, ♦believing as I do in an all-pervading law ^of Nemesis, I regard the singular barren- fiess 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 ^^geus, ^geus, 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. And what do we read in the "Odyssey " ? — Then they sold me to a stranger, Whom they met upon the way, Dmetor the son of lasus, Cyprus who did firmly sway " f Plut., Thes, t Odyss., xvii. 442-43- (( 154 Tf^^ Complete Life of Ho7ner. (** at the death of Cinyras," II., xL 20). Dmetor is, of course, 'the same as X)xVi^^agoras, just as Homer is called in- differently Melesigenes, Melesianax, and Meles^^^r^j". 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 lasus. lasus, the father of lo, was really a poor faineant prince : how then comes Homer to speak of lasian Argos ? Why, of course, because his father was the son of lasus. 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 Hoyner, 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 lasus (so named from his celebrated ancestor), by Euryclea, the daughter of Ops, the son of Peisenor, the son of Telemachus H., 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 (/.^., 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 /Egeus, and be- cause of the Codrid princes of 1 onia, H omer's inimical silence concerning yEgeus,Theseus, and Demophon. Hence partly the inhospi- table first reception of the** I Had "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 thelwo islands that figure so conspicuously in Homeric biography ? Our poet's references to Creophylus are not very plain. Perhaps 4>*Xo*tv, Love-till-death, Leaderof men, being a fair enough reading of xf>sa)(pij7iog, Lord of the Tribe. Ritt- meister and tribe-lord sound to me much the same thing ; and the **X in 4>*Xo/r*o^ is an unmistakable echo of the 4>t>X in xpsco^uTiog. But who was Creophylus ? The son, Eudocia tells us in her Violarium, of Astycles. A grand name, surely, this,— Laird-of-the-clan, son of Glory-of- the-City. If fine feathers make fine birds, he must have come of a family of some consideration at Samos. ^ And he came to Chios to be our poet's humble companion out of the great love he bore to literature, just as Boswell, who, like Creo- phylus, was a great man in his own country, came to Fleet-street to bow before Johnson. Loving in death, and loved till death, he married our poet's daughter, and took 158 The Complete Life of Homer. charge, we may suppose, of his distressed family when he left Chios. And not long after he received the deceased poet's MSS. from the hands of the weeping Bucco. After this we hear no more of him till the birth of the younger Homer, who, we have some reason to believe, was his countryman, and who was baptised at his request, in the name of his ever-honoured father-in-law. In due time the child came to his house to be educated, and he, though now very aged, superintended till he died the (I presume) little orphan's studies, and trained him in the utmost possible reverence for the departed Vene- rable One. At any rate, if he did not his son did. I fear that, as he resembled Boswell in his great qualities, so also he did in his infirmities. Plato speaks of him as addicted to the pleasures of the table to a degree unseemly in a teacher of youth. But Plato's Creophylus was possibly not Homer's, but his son. An Astycles, the son of Euthymus, presumably an ancestor, was the lord of Temesa, and the hero of an interesting ghost story recorded by Pausanias.* From this source our poet * Paus., vi. 6, § 3, 4. Cf. Od., i. 182-4. The Complete Life of LLomer, 159 may have drawn some authentic informa- tion on the subject of the wanderings of the Woeful One ; for a record of the whole matter, professing to be drawn up at the time, was committed to writing. This Astycles, being a Locrian, if Creophylus, the son of Astycles, was his descendant, it follows that he was a countryman of the son of Euphron, and, therefore, all the more likely to have his education en- trusted to him. His grandson, Creophylus the younger, as I infer, wrote the " Heraclea" (Adventures of Hercules), in a portion of which, — apparendy the only surviving portion, the ^^chalia, — he would seem to have been largely aided by the pseudo-Homer during the period that elapsed between his return from Greece in 882 to his death in 876 B.C. ^ And sub- sequenriy to this Lycurgus visited him, and found the poet's works in his pos- session, and caused a copy of them to be transcribed, which, I gather from Dio- medes, was lost or stolen at the time of the great earthquake in the second Messenian War. Suidas speaks of Creo- phylus of Chios, or Samos, from which I infer there were two. Indeed, there must i6o The Complete Life of Homer, have been ; Homer I.'s Son-in-law may have been Homer W'^ aged instructor when he was ** a Httle tiny boy," but he cannot have been his colla- borateur. But to return. In the year 1003 B.C., the Lydo-Amazons were compelled tc leave Smyrna with their great leade*" Maeon. "They then," as we learn fron. Strabo, '' took refuge at Colophon." But Homer's mother did not go with them, still less was Homer born on or shortly after their arrival at Colophon. All Homer rises up in arms against this view, as we shall see in our next chapter when dis- cussing his date. On the contrary, Homer, then a boy of twelve, uttered his divinely- inspired '' And me, too," on this celebrated occasion. Some twenty years now elapsed, — twenty tranquil and happy years. And then the Lydo-Amazons essayed once more to recover the capital of their race from the detested yEolids. As Strabo says, — ** And having sallied out with the people from thence" {i,e,, from Colophon), ''they recovered their own city." Homer would now, according to the true date, be about thirty. He is said in the '* Lives " to The Complete Life of Homer, 161 have left Smyrna at this time from the pure spirit of adventure and travel. And so, indeed, he tells us in his '* Odyssey." But what if he were driven thence in consequence of the treacherous seizure of his native city by the Lydo- Amazonian refugees ? We certainly gather from our poet's own *' Odyssey " and '' Hymn to Apollo," and from the Greek epigram, that the treachery that put his native city into the power of Colophon led to his exile. And now a few words concerning our poet's parentage, as ascertained from his works. That Dmasagoras, Damasagoras, or Demagoras was most probably Homer s father appears both directly (i) from the epigram, (2) from the *' Lives"; and indi- rectly (i) from our poet's own '' Demo- docus," (2) from his alias Meles^^^r^i- = Meles (Dem)agoras. It appears also from the name of his descendant Hermo- damas, — ix., Demasagoras of the Her- mus, a river near Smyrna sacred in our poet's song. This man, we are told, was a descendant of Creophylus, and the teacher of Pythagoras, being, like Melissus the philosopher, the son of Ithagenes, and, like Creophylus himself, a Samian, as the 1 62 The Complete Life of Homer,' teacher of Pythagoras of Samos would natu- rally be. And note how, just as the stemma of the pseudo- Homer down to Terpander shows at every step the strongest traces of Euphron, the Phocian, the pseudo- Homer's father, so do the descendants of Homer through Creophylus show the strongest traces of our poet, — viz., Melisstis, the son of Ithagenes and Hermo-Da7nas. These, however, are not the only traces we have of his descendants. The poet Melanopus of Cyme and Terpander of Phocaea (not the Terpander) so named from the Terp in Phemius 7>;^iades, and Polymnestor, the musician, the son of Meles of Colo- phon, who flourished 675 B.C., Bion (= Maion), the celebrated poet of Smyrna, and Parthenius of Chios, all certainly were, or at least may very well have been, his descendants, as their names alone irre- sistibly tend to indicate. And next of Cretheis. Lucian calls her Melanope,* because she was the daughter of Melanopus, proving thereby that he regarded the story of the Father of History as the only one of any valid authority. Again, concerning what we are told that * Demosth., Encom., 9. The Complete Life of HofJier. 163 the name of Homer's mother was Clymene, and that her tomb was at los. As re- marked already, Melanope or Melanippe and Kretheis being only patronymics, Clymene may very probably have been her proper name. And if, by her grave being at los, we understand that Homer the younger erected her cenotaph there, this is also highly probable. But what does Homer say } We find the name Clymene three times: first, as an attendant of Helen ;* second, as a Minyid ;t third, as a nymph. J Of course, she was a nymph after death, as being wedded to Meles, and a Minyid as being a descendant of Cretheus, and an attendant of Helen as being the homonym of the bride of Mela- nippus of Percote, who, highly esteemed as he was at Court, may well have enjoyed the high distinction of having his bride thus employed. Indeed, Homer's words that he was honoured as a son harmonise admiraJDly with this view, and are hardly intelligible otherwise : — " And in the house of Priam did he dwell, Who just hke his own children loved him well."§ • II., iii. 144. f Odyss., xi. 326. X Il-» xvhi. 47. § II., XV. 551. M 2 1 64 The Complete Life of Homer. Again, from the Daemon of Democritus of Trezene* and the obviously identical Daemon of Aristotlet I get a further con- firmation of my view that ^aw[asagorasJ was Homer's father. And I further learn that he viii. 276. t I^-» XV' 547-550. 1 66 The Complete Life of Homer. For Percote read Magnesia, and for Troy, Cyme, and understand by the Greek fleet the mixed Hellenic expedition, and the Life is a mere translation of the Homeric cypher. Melanippus, Homer's grandfather, was a herdsman, and the Melanopus of Percote was doubtless the husband of the Clymene that was Helen's attendant. Clymene and Melanippus, it must be recollected, are both eminently family names among the Neleids. Aeain, we are told that Mceon and Hyrnetho were father and mother to Homer. So they were, but only by adop- tion. As a Melanopid * he was probably next of kin, and as such, naturally adopted our poet. But what shall we say of his other would-be parents ? Some say that he was the son of Apollo and Calliope, and some of Telemachus and Polycaste, the daughter of Nestor. Of these the one is obviously mere allegory, and the other mere mythology. Again, some say that his father was Daemon (knowing), and his mother Metis (wisdom) ; and some that his father was Metias (Mr. Wiseman), and his mother Eumetis (Mrs. Wise- • Lives, p. 32. The Complete Life of Homer. 167 woman), after the fashion of Bunyan's ** Pilgrim's Progress." And others say that his father was the river Meles, and others the celebrated poet Thamyras. More mythology. And others one of the gods that dance and play with the nymphs (Kretheis is often called a nymph). More mythology. Pan was especially the god of fishermen (Sophocles, Ajax, ii. 675-7 J Oppian, Hal., iii. 16; Pind., Fragm., Ixv. 594; Auson., Mosell, 172 ; Nonnus, xliii. 214; Theocrit., v. 14 ; Agath., Ep., xxviii.). Hence the legend told by Aristotle about his being the son of Pan would of course be that of los, with its fisher-lads, — los, whose especial epithet was " Fishy." Of course that Homer should have one god, and a river, and one or two mortals assigned as his fathers, is quite the regular thing* And some say that his mother was Themisto. This error I have set right elsewhere. And some, Eugnetho, obviously a mere mis-spelling of Hyrnetho. (N.B. Hyrnetho is spelt in a multitude of ways, — Ornetho, Ornitho, Ornito, Myrnetho, Myryntho, the last two plainly Amazonid.) And his father, Menemachus, — obviously, again, a mere Egyptian bar- 1 68 The Cofuplete Life of Hojner. barous mismouthing of Telemachus, with a dash of Meles in it. And some say his mother was a woman of Ithaca. Again mere mythology. The only mother not mythological or allegorical or emblematical, or a mere blunder in spelling, or pronunciation, or genealogy, we find, therefore, was Klymene, surnamed Kretheis, as being a Kretheid, and Melanope as being the daughter of Melanopus, and having a paternal grand- mother of the same name. And next, as regards our sweet poet's race. Plainly he had Erechtheid blood in his veins, through the Athenian colony to Sipylus, in the time of the usurpation of iEgeus, Kretheid blood through his mother, Melampid through his father, and Codrid through both. But why is he called Maeonides ? Because Mseon was either his adopted or his real father. And he is called Mceonius because he was born in Maeonia, and Lydus because of his flute- playing, and both because Smyrna is situated in both. As Plutarch says (Life^ bk. ii., chap. xii.). " And most of all he used the Attic dialect because he was of mixed race." The Co7nplete Life of Homer, 169 And last, of his Chian wife and chil- dren. Of these we have only one single w^^r^^/^ of Homeric cypher: — "The nymph, Abarbaree, bore twin boys to blameless Bucolion, — ^sepus and Pedasus. And Bucolion was son of illustrious Lao- medon, his eldest, but illegitimate* child. Laomedon, ruler of the people, is obviously the same as Demagoras, adviser of the people. And I have already shown that Melanopus was a yeoman of Cyme, there- fore was Homer Bucolion, — that is, of yeo- man origin on the mother's side. And it appears from the next line that he com- bined a few sheep with his teaching, as in those simple days he may well have done. And his lady love was Abarbaree, that is, of the blood, not of the barbarous Autoch- thons of Chios, but of the Hellenic immi- grants of the Ionic Apcecia. t Even so Trusts foolish mother christened her son Argeios (of Argos). And Homer was certainly a son of D masagoras, his eldest but illegitimate : his eldest, note, for we are told that he afterwards had a lawfully be- gotten Priam by yEthra. Lastly, ^sepus * II., vi. 22-24. t For the word abarbaros, see Soph., "Frag.," 336. 1 70 T/ie Complete Life of Homer. and Pedasus were the Theolaus and Euryphon that he hoped to have by his future wife, but unfortunately they proved girls only. And this passage it is that doubtless misled Suidas, Tzetzes, and others concerning the sex of his children. Lastly, this passage shows that the '' Iliad " was written before the **Odyssey," and that the first six books, at least, were written be- fore his marriage, or at latest very early in his married life. I have reserved to the last the most interesting autobiographical bit of all. In theeleventh book of the *^Odyssey," 11. 1 19- 137, we have a prophecy of Ulysses's sub- sequent adventures after the murder of the Suitors. This on the first perusal I merely regarded as a promise of a Tele- gonia, which never got itself written in consequence of our poet's demise. But when I came carefully to study the parallel passage in 11. 241-287 of the twenty-third book an entirely new light broke in. Here the poet is obviously making a per- sonal application of the story of Ulysses. He is telling his dearly-beloved one of his own intended departure. He is telling her how he is about to travel on and on The Co7nplete Life of Homer, 171 and on till he comes to a place where the use of oars is unknown, and what should that be but that Mecca of Meccas, the spot upon earth which of all others the poet of poets would most wish to see, — Delphi .^ The editor of the '' Life by Herodotus," with his strong Attlcising tendency, represents Athens as the ultimate object of his journey, represents him even as most un- worthily doctoring his poem to curry favour at Athens. But he is wholly mistaken. Athens in Homer's time was neither the literary nor the political capital of Greece ; and our poet only meant to touch there,just as Cadmus did, on his way to the cradle of letters. Even as the Pseudo- Plutarch says in that mass of atrocious blunders, his ** Life of Homer," *' after consulting the oracle at Delphi he sailed {\ ! !) to Thebes, to the Kronia, a musical contest held there, and on his way thither he arrived at los."* Nothing could be more in harmony with what I have just been saying than that had the true Homer lived to reach the mainland, as his namesake the Pseudo- Homer did, he would have been delighted to take part in the celebration of the * Lives, p. 23. 172 The Complete Life of Homer, triumph of Learning over Time achieved by Cadmus s great invention. But he certainly did not die at los on his way from Delphi to Thebes, but before he got to either one or the other. But to return to the above most interesting passage, we learn from it that I have atrociously slandered our poet's wife on page 117, that he died in perfect harmony with her. But this is not all. It appears from the Scholia that both Aristarchus and Aristo- phanes regarded this as the final passage of the '^ Odyssey." And rightly so. After Ulysses had conveyed the melancholy prophecy of Teiresias to his weeping Penelope, they retire to rest, and, as he gives her a brief resumd of his adventures, fall asleep in each other's arms. ^^ What follows is no part of the '' Odyssey,'' but is the commencement of the '*Telegonia,"and as I judge from its broken and disjointed character, was written after our poet had for ever left his wife and family behind him at Chios, in the miserable hurry and confusion of his subsequent wanderings. Here he breaks off his story, but Dictys concludes it in the following amazing words : *' He died three days after, an old The Complete Life of Homer. 173 man and full of years " : * exactly what Homer did — three days after (see page 96, 11. 1-2). And now at last I under- stand why the riddle of the Ian fisher-lads proved the death of Homer. He him- self had prophesied it : his last words to his Eurydice had been that 'Meath should come to him from the sea." But Apollo forbid that aught I have said here or elsewhere should be urged against our poet's absolute veracity. Strabo says it, and all antiquity was convinced, that the '* Iliad " was genuinely historical. And why ? We may ignore all the poetry that was ever written and we shall hardly lose one grain of ore from the sacred mine of knowledge ; but if we ignore the poems of Homer we lose five whole centuries of the fascinating dawn of history. I applaud the deceitful seeming truthfulness of *' Gulli- ver's Travels " and '' Robinson Crusoe" ; I do not blame the fictitious prefaces of Zanoni and Otranto ; I do not greatly censure the forgeries of Chatterton, Ireland, and Macpherson, but when Homer solemnly assures us, again and again, that * Diet. Cret. Bell. Troj., bk. vi. chap. xv. 174 The Complete Life of Homer, he is telling God*s own sacred truth, I should very greatly blame him if he poisoned the waters of our only well of the knowledge of those early times by piling fiction upon fiction, and the moral sense of all antiquity would, I am con- vinced, have been horrified. Homer had, then, sinned more deeply than Balaam, for Baalam desecrated not his inspiration with perjury, after all. And for a far poorer bribe, not a " house full of silver and gold" ; no, nor even '' 7i savoury mess," like Esau's was. But were Homer the mere inventor of fictions the Negative School of History believes him to be, he would offend, not only against the canons of Positive History and MoraUty, but also against those of true Poetry. As Lactan- tius most wisely says, " The true poet in- vents not : he only colours and adorns. To invent what we relate is not to be a true poet, but a mere metrical novelist." In modern days, owing to the vast spread of knowledge, history is wholly dissociated from poetry ; still, considered as poetry only, the ** Orlando Furioso" would have been a far greater performance had Ariosto abode by his original plan, as The Complete Life of Homer. 175 announced in his magnificent Proce- mium : — " The dames, the knights, the arms, and the amours, The courtesies, the doughty feats, I sing Of the immortal time when past the Moors The Afric sea, of Agramante their king Following the youthful wrath and haughty doom, Sworn to avenge the death of Troiano Upon King Charles, the Emperor of Room, And wrought on France and suffer'd so much woe." But are we therefore to believe every syllable in our poet's works ^ Far, very far from it. Look at Shakespeare and Scott. They also give us genuine his- tory, and we should esteem them so far greatly less if they deliberately adulterated the pure stream thereof. But there is a large obviously non-historical element in them ; and even so there is much in Homer that we cannot for a moment sup- pose Homer to have derived from any acquaintance, however abnormally vast, with tradition, and that we may legiti- mately suppose him to have filled in from his own personal history or from such tombs and memorials and so forth as he may have had access to. Take a parallel case, — the character of Polonius and the 176 The Complete Life of Homer, scenes with Master Slender and Justice Shallow. Here Shakespeare is not his- torical, but plainly autobiographical. Even so Homer in his Simoeisius, his Bu- colion, and his Satnius. And in his picture of Thersites, the peace-at-all-price Lydo-Amazonisingdemagogue,Melanthius, the vile insulter of the blind poet's misery, Antinous, that called him an old grampus and threw a stool at him, Arna^us, the lazy He- Iris society poetaster humbug of his day, and Echetus.* N.B. I. — Thersites, the son o{ Agrius, Does not this confirm the view propounded pp. 150, 151 ? N.B. 2.— The Thersites of history was a cripple, it is true, but neither squint- eyed, nor-sugar-loaf-headed, nor woolly- bald, like the worthy offspring of Homer's literary rival. But in his *' Odyssey " our poet makes a great advance. That poem, though never once violating the venerable sancti- ties of history, is nevertheless as autobio- graphical as Dickens's '* David Copper- field." As in Dryden's •* Absalom and Achitophel " the characters run double, * Eustath. Odyss., bk. i. The Complete Life of Homer. 177 and as in Stevenson s ** Mystery of J ekyl and Hyde," the poet projects the dwarf from the giant, and Melesigenes from Ulysses. But let me not go too far here. It is only in the Ta zv BoX, — 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 no farther is Glaucus. Ulysses in rags is Homer, but Ulysses in rags 07tly, 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 Hoiuer. 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, 'ncath 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 age as he could have been to influ- 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 uiow, 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. Ei/vrTTc (tell) is a strong contrast to ae/Ss (singX 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 telling his own tale, as well as that of Ulysses, where he says : — " Tell me, O 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."! 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. \ 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- gendy 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 i82 The Complete Life of Horner, 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 not one 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. 85-1 10, 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 Kretheiswas 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 1 84 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 litde Tommy Merton, crying for a sword to run through these Thrasonical braggarts of the iEolian 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 litde child's mouth, and drive her to the very verge of dishonesty to her employers, and the streets of Smyrna I • 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), t 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. 1 86 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 ;t 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. t 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 1 88 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 iEneas 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 1 127 B.C. under the rule, say, of the third and last i^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 1 127 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 ^neadae 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 Homers. 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 iQO The Complete Life of Ho77icr. 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. Homers time, long after the capture of Trov 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 Myie of Priam disappeared, and was replaced by Neonteichos {1007 B.C.) ; 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 11 53 B.C. ; but it is clear from Thucydides that they migrated from Thessaly 1123 B.C. This glarmg 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 Apoecia, as does also his use of demos and archoi, as applied to Athens. Besides, towards the close of the " Odyssey," that is, the end of his lite, when his knowledge of European Greece had become much enlarged, he speaks ot the Dorian immigrants as opposed to the native Cretans, and calls them the three- The CojHplete 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 Palsephatus 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 Scsean gate, zvhere there was a horse s head carved outside, and o 194 The Complete Life of Homer, there keep watch/' &c.* Still there Is an element of truth, no doubt, in the account of Paleephatus 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 ( 1 056 b.c. ), that of SoHnus, Tatian, Clemens Alexandrinus, and Alla- tius (1003 B.C.), or that of Cassius, Philo- stratus, Philochorus, and Cyril (10 15 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. I, and therefore, a foi^tiori, 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 :— (i.) 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 ot 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 ^olic 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 followinor : (i) 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 earned oti by Tlie Complete Life of Horner , 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 Phcenice [los] with its two cities, los and Aigina (and, again, why not .'^ Recollect, to an Ithacan los 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, ^'^'^11 i^ the boy and girl memory of Homer s maternal grandmother, Clymene, and great-uncle and namesake, Homer of Smyrna. N.B., of Smyr^ia, 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 : — (i.) 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 Cohans, under Penthilus, Cyme in iEolis,— in ^olis, mind, not Cumce 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.* 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, '* Whittaker 's Almanack," p. 80; 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 alo7ie rests tipon a well-made-out series of historical events, which fione of the rest even pretend 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 m the reign of Gyges, 500 years after the Fall of Troy, confounds him with some msigni- ficant Homerid of Chios, —the eighth Homer of the pseudo-Archilochus, — of whom we know nothing whatever. ^ (2.) As the lans must have known their own great date of dates, if not by the tombstone that Homer H. 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 nourished (TjxjDiaxs) in the archon- ship of Archippus, forty years after the Ionic Apoecia, 180 years after the Fall of Troy." However we interpret the word r^xfjLaxs^ 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. H^joiaxs — 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 i^-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 : (i.) In that it rests on a reasonable, but that on a most 7^;^reasonable, interpretation of r^xfjiaxs ; 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 Solids 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 age of seventeen (10 16 B.C.), than at the ripe age of thirty (1004 e.g.), 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. T/ie 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 born during the minority of Labotas.f Hence two fright- ful blunders of his : (i) that the Lycurgus was guardian of Labotas,J— 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. X Paus., iii. 2, § 3. 204 The Complete Life of Ho7ne7\ of Eusebius,* Labotas's nominal reign began 102 1, and Homer was born in his minority, — 10 15, 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 10 15 or 10 1 4 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 11 84 B.C. But Krethon left a boy, Ithagenes, who, as we know from the etymon of his name, as already explained, was born 1 192 B.C., in the first year of the war. His son, Kretheus (mentioned in Virgil as a companion of -^Eneas, z.^., as already explained of ^neas H.), 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- grandfather's 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 yEolion of Lesbos, the descendant of ^olus), — Krethon H., the great-grandson of Krethon L, who, in his turn, was the great-grandson of Kretheus himself. This Kretheus may reasonably be supposed to have been born about 1 135, and to have had a son, Ithagenes, born in his father's 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 lasus r. 2o6 The Complete Life of Homer, I 2 3 4 5 6 Deucalion * Hellent iEolus I. Mimas:!: Hippotes A\o\m% II.§ Neleus I Kretheus I. had by . • Orsilochus Diodes Krethon I. Ithagenes I. (born 1 192) Kretheus II. (went with ^neas II. to Italy 1127) 7 Krethon 11. 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 lo Epaphus Libya Belus Danaus Philodameia Pharis Telegone Homer I. (of Smyrna born according to Crates, about 1104 r..c.) O my res ** (i) Homer II. (of C>'me, born according to Ephorus, 1056 B.C., and plainly identical with the pseudo- Archilochus's Homer). (2) Clymene H. Clymene II. ♦ Odyss., xix. 181. t 11-. "• 683, &c. X Odyss., iii. 172, § Odyss,, X. 2, 36, II Great-grand-daughter of Danaus, \ See Paus., iv. 30, s. 2. ** " Lives," p, i. The Complete Life of Home7\ 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 Phoccca) 14 Gnotor (of Cyme) 15 Arsiphone II. married , . 16 Euryphon, or Euphron and Theolaus Homer IV. (the son of Euphron the Phocian),f N.B. — The intricate stemvia of Homer II, ivill be found in a subsequent chapter^ STEMMA HOMERICUM A PATRE. Amythaon 1 Melampus 2 Abas (surnamed Mantius) 3 Cceranus 4 Polypheides % 5 Theoclymenus (unmarried 1173) 6 Telemachus § 7 Peisenor 8 Ops II (Cleitus)"^ 9 Euryclea, marries . . . lasus II. (an Inachid) 10 Dmasagoras (unmarried 1015 h.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? f The ** Lives," p. 47. X Cf Odyss., XV. 249. § See p. 253. II Odyss,, i. 429, and elsewhere. nr Paus., i. 43. § 5 ; II- , XV. 445, with which cf Odyss., xv. 250, 251. 2o8 The Complete Life of Homer, II Homer I. 15 Homer H., flourished 884 B.C. lb 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,t so-called from his ancestor of Phocxa, 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., CalHnus, a httle before, Cinsethon 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. t Suidas, art. "Terpander." T/ic 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 'i 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 touchino- 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 RESUM6 Troy taken ... . • • • • • •■ yEolic emigration under Pcnthilus Final colonisation of Lesbos Ionic Apoecia Foundation of Cyme Foundation of Smyrna Birth of Homer Archippus succeeds Acastus as Archon . II83 II23 . 1053 . 1044 • 1033 . IOI5 . IOI5- 14 1014 The Co7nplete Life of Homer, 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 los 211 1008 1004 1003 1003 988 986 986 985 983 983 975 965 963 944 P 2 CHAPTER VI. HIS BIRTH-PLACE. " Seven cities claim'd great Homer dead Through which ahve 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, Athense." Smyrna, Rhodes, Colophon, Salamis, Chios, Argos, Athens. Of this line there were three other versions : — (i) Smyrna, Rhodus, Colophon, Salamis,Ios,* Argos, Athense. (2) Cyme, Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Pylos, Argos, Athence. (3) Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Ithace, Pylos, Argos, Athenae. * Here los takes the place of Chios as the place of his birth, even as Chios takes the place elsewhere The Complete Life of Ho7ner, 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 Smyrnaean, 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 Cuma?, 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 Cumeean 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 los 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 calami. 214 '^f^^ 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 /Eolians. 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." Cenchreee in the Troad, because it was inferred from the prophecy of Poseidon (II., vi. 307, 30S) that he was born under the sway of the ^neadae. 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 los ; 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 Athenceus, quoting from Meleager of Gadara. But 1 do not quite see how this is reconcileable with Homers 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." \ * Odyss., xii. 330, 331. f Odyss., iv. 368-9. 2i6 The Complete Life of Home 7\ 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, whose 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 the Thebaid,* — 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 com.mon in that island even to this day. Lasdy, the Dorians claimed him (i) "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. 2i8 The Complete Life of Ho7ncr, 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. " 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 los is the fatherland of your mother ; In it shall you be buried, but beware of the young men's riddle." The claim of los 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 tied 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 H., 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 los, or that of the mother of Homer the Younger, supposing him to have been 2 20 The Co7nplctc Life of Homer, born at los ; 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 " IHad." 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 bo7m at Smyrna.) " Oh, glory of Greece, And Colophon thy fatherhuid.'''' 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 Mceon must have been a Colophonian in the opinion of the Epigrammatist, as it is clear T/ie Complete Life of Homer, 221 from " The Lives " he w^as, 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 Mceon, not Demagoras ; my mother Cretheis, not Themisto." But the people of Cyprus said that The- 222 The Covtplete Life of Homer, misto, one of the maidens of their land, was his mother, and that the birth of Homer was predicted in the followinij lines : — " And then in sea-girt Cyprus a mighty bard shall be, A\hom 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,}: 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 Athenaeus, xv. p. 682 ; Epic. Gr. Fr., p. 2. i K''}^ !^^ immediate neighbourhood of Salamis, ^ a babbath-day s journey therefrom'" (Epiphanius). m the fields as you go from Salamis " (Pausanias) The Complete Life oj Lfomer. 22 *> J 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 do7^n at Smyrna. He was, undoubtedly, a citizen of Chios, and as such, Pindar, Simonides,* and Theocritus t 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. J ^ He says he was a Smyr- niote a7id ^. 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. X "Lives," p. 28; Find. Fr., 189. § Plut. "Life"(Works, vol. vi.). i* 5 2 24 The Complete Life of Homer. of writers, from the pseudo- Herodotus downwards, that Homer was an ^Eolic, not an Ionic, Greek. Look at the nume- rous episodes devoted to Nestor, Bellero- phon, Krethon, and other i^oHds, and to none else, save Typhon and Niobe of Smyrniotis — certainly to no Dorian or Amphictyonid ; and can you doubt it ? And if an ^olid, 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. " II.," i. 265, and *'Odyss.,"^i. 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 ^geus, 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-^oreus. And thence I The Complete Life of Homer, 225 came the Pelopida^. 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, t 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,J points clearly to the final disappearance of the Lydo- Amazons before the Argive-^olians 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- * I1-, ii. 547- t *' Epic, Gr. Fragm.," p. 4. j II., xxi. 480-493. § Westermann's " Lives," p. 22. 2 26 The Complete Life of Homer, reptolis,* as being the tutelary deity of Pherae.t (4.) In the hymn to Artemis we read : — ''Sing, Artemis, O 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. 385), 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 Il-» 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 Smyrnaeensi, 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 //Jy/ax, and further that Hyl^ was a suburb of Smyrna. Q2 2 28 The Complete Life of Horner, (7.) Lastly, in the '' Lives/' we have him saying : — *' iEolid 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 egeiieto 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 yEolians. Yet, he plainly calls himself a Colophonian : — " By the will of the gods 7i'e took ^olid Smyrna.'* But he does not claim Homer as a fellow- citizen, whilst Homer himself tells us that he is heart and soul an yEolid. 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 Hojuer. Aristotle proves that he was from the Isle of los, 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 Mseon, for Maeon 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,t and four the * The "Lives," p. 113. t Ibid., p. III. The Complete Life of Homer, 231 Sibyl of Erythrae.* 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."t Thus, four birthplaces claim Stesichorus. three Mimnermus, six Aristophanes, and eight or nine the Sibyl. J 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 los, 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 /Egeus, or on the subsequent Ionic Apoccia 1044-3 ^-C-' ^^ * The " Lives," p. 83. f Ibid., p. 84. % 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 iEschylus 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. t They show that he was born after, but not very long after, the Neleid Apoecia. 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 Arlma, 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 ^^^^ Complete Life of Ho7ner. confounded the great poet with some local Homer (No. 6 in Archilochus's list of the tiicrht 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 Smyrnojus, by his very name, the fifth Smyrna^an (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 Ho7ner. he wrote his poems. So Alca^us 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 Homeridae there lasting till * Lives, p. 30. X Ibid., pp. 21, 22. § MoraUa., vol. vi. (Tauchnitz). t Ibid., p. 28. 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 gnerre of a patriotess of Smyrna, of whom Homer was absurdly supposed to be ipris. 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 ; f 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 ^olis. X Baletta, '' Life of Homer," p. 30. § Odyss., iii. 267-271. 238 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 Has 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. t Lives, p. 3i. The Complete Life of Home7\ 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 Phoibus 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 Meeonius, or M^eonides, 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, w^as the capital of both. Hence it was called The Complete Life of Horner. 241 Lydian Smyrna, even as the learned Scy- lax says, — ** Lydia Smyrna ubi Homerus erat."* As, then, neither Colophon nor los, 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 (i) 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 ^, if not the Herodotus), or most lyingly concocted by Hermogenes, of Smyrna, author of * Scylax, cap. 89. 242 The Complete Life of Ho7ner. " 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 mimphe 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 ^olid, 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 Kritlieis, and cheese {turos) in honour of Tu7'o, Then Conon tells us how Orpheus's head was found at the rnouth of the Meles still all alive and singing,* — a legend reminding us very ♦ << Muthographoi " (VVestermann), p. 147. R 2 244 ^^^^ Complete Life of Horner. 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 ^olis 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 '* Larissseus 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 is Naulochus ? 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 Smyrneeus, 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 Homer's tomb was the duly signed and dated one the reader has already seen at the end of Chapter HI.) Atalanta, so named from his beloved * Quoted from Homer's tomb. See supra, t Hitherto absurdly misread A.U.R.E.L. As iT 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 : — KvTi\ de ^da^aKrj TrarvnepraTrj ew aXi Keirai *' And it lies at the bottom of a hill rising to its highest elevation as you get close to the seaboard." t I will not weary the reader with dis- cussing the tedious performance of Aris- * Quintus Smyrnaeus, " 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 Mason'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 Smyrnseus, *' 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 ^olus 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 Homer. 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 Smyrnseus. 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 Ho7ner, 251 immortal poems there, and that he died at los, 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 world, 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 los Dumbfoundered the Maeonian bard, With the help of his own Muses, Having set him a conundrum." This is, 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 Timaeus 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 H. 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 Ltfe of Horner, 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 i^thra, who either was or, after his fashion, gave herself out to be, a lineal descendant of the ^thra, 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/^oiaiv) read Daemon (AaTjjaaiv), 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, "Lives," p. 34. The Complete Life of Ho77zer, 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 ' ' I Had " 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 Hves, 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 jusdy) 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 Co7nplctc 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." Lasdy, 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 progresswithhis ''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 Phocaea, 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, "Heroica." The Complete Life of Ho7ner. 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. : (i) " 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. for Tzetzes, P. for Proclus, PI. for Plutarch, S. for Suidas, and A. for Anonymous. "Life" (Westermann, p. 29) :— s 2 26o The Complete Life of Hoyner. 1 Cypria Kolophon, 976 S. (Also Pindar, Fr. 189; Aristophanes; Polybius, xxiv. 8; Aristotle, '' Rhet.," i. 15 ; and Plato, *' Euthyphr.," p. 12a, quote it. Herodotus niani- fests an inclination to dispute its authenticity, on the authority of Demodamas ; but his argu- ments are singulady weak.) 2 Aix Smyrna, 975 T. P. 3 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. 8b Kerkopes Bolissus, 967 H. P. T. 8c lamboi 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. Pl.A.L. 13 Epigrams Chios, 944 All. I The Complete Life of Ho7ner, 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 '' Ilias 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 Cofuplcte 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, bookiii. odexxix. I ; 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 Athenseus 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, wuth the laconic in- * Athenaeus, xv. p. 682 e. The Complete Life of Horner. 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. : — *^H>' C7£ /iupta ^vXa K-ara \Ooru TrXai^o/Jii^ arcpijjv Ytti'woit' 6/3aov)'f )'," &C. — I unhesitatingly complete line 2 with the surely exquisitely beautiful " uttvcoovt.' 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 T/ie Complete Life of Homer. 265 for the destruction of the heroic race through the instrumentality of Cypriaa 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 Jai'e 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 dauahter 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 ^^/V-bearing Jove, the prime mover of all the woes, whose mere tool Cyprian Venus was. The '' Ilias 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 ''Ilias Mikra" of Lesches was <]uite a different thing. It was not an epitome, indeed, at all. Homer refers to his ** Ilias 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 good hurnour 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 king 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 t/ie '' Cypria " of Stasinus. For, firsdy, we have an allusion to it in the *' Death of Hector,"* and an extract from it, — the "Wooden Horse,"t — 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. X Aristoph., " Equit." t Odyssey. § iEschin., ** Oratt." T/ie 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, Maeon's widow, was Eriphyle. An unworthy second husband, at once Polynices and i^gysthus. 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 orenerations, 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 I The Complete Life of Homer, 271 suggestive 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 *' Alcmceonis.'* Of the '' Phocais" (Story of Phocaea) 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- caean Colony, perhaps both. Its genuineness 2^2 The Co7nplete Life of Homer. is proved not only on the authority of Herodotus, but also of the Phocaeans, 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 Phocaeus," being thereby distinguished from the Ter- pander. The story told by Menelaus in "Odyssey" v. is manifestly a passage from the lost " Phocais." The followincf seems to be a fraQfment of the '' Nostoi " (the Return of the Heroes from Troy) : — *' Oh, fool, to slay the father And leave the child behind." -^gysthus 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 that poem. And now we come to the Bolissus The Complete Life of Homer, 273 poems, — the " Batrachomyomachia," the ** Kerkopes," and the '' lamboi." The ''Kerkopes" (or Apes) may be dis- missed in a few words. The tide 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 : — V.v^ av ctiva Tradoireg araaOaXijjaiy erjmv ll()iooQ rtoroiai KnnoKapa PVffTa^orreg ^ErTflOinil ' KfOfJCUTTfC ailK{\lOL(TL ^t^EVTat. (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 P>ogs and the Mice), 2 74 ^^^^ 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. '' My 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 yEschylus, twice^ at least, and Aristophanes — ; as if H omer 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 2 276 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- 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, €.g., "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 278 The Complete Life of Home7\ " Butterfly's Ball " as the author also of '*The Fishes' Gala" and ''The Peacock's Banquet." The ''lamboi" contained the *' Hept^i- 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 ' (Poolings) " ; as if *'The Fieldfares" and ''The Seven Shearino;s " were not one as much as the other a portion of his " Iambics," and a portion of the " Paignia," or as 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 ''lamboi" 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 beinof seven times shorn } Turn we to *' 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 28o 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 annavit 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 sane; 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 Athenaius, in which he tells us The Complete Life of Homer, 281 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- : — <« \z . Kat vvv aoiCrjQ eyeKEP lo Ttaicer (piXoi Tv(pXo> yepoyri Cor^ f.tot rag ¥j7rit:i^Xtcac." ** 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 ? *'Athen3eus obviously refers to the " Heptapaktion," which formed the solid pieee 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 captam Bolissi Scripsit Bucco." * Athenaeus, xiv. 4. 282 The Complete Life of Homer, « « We come now to the poems written durinor the few remaininof months of our poet's Hfe 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 havincr wasted his talents and made no better provision for his old age, to say nothino- of his wife and children, and wanderlnof 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, 285 Plutarch, Anon. ('' Lives," p. 29), Lesches, Aristotle, Plato, Hepha^stion, 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 Gra^corum Frag- menta," 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 : — " Oh, Caledonia, stern and wild ! " As will plainly appear from the following •outline of the Death-note of the Wild Swan of the Meles that Piores travestied some four centuries after into obstreperous cacklings : — 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 my judgment 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 ridicules 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 w^e 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 bawlinof 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 world. 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 thinir, 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, — e.g., " Who is the true begetter of a man, The Complete Life of Hojiier, 287 who has the greater part in the child, — his father or his mother ? " As we all know, a favourite doubt amonirst 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 Frag- menta," pp. 67-69, and summon his utmost power of clairvoyance to bear upon it. Can he reconcile what he finds there ? Thoucfh 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 Mar^rites of Eustathius, his Socratic irony becomes drivelling folly, and the divine minstrel becomes the lauQ^hincr-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 P2udocia, and those who looked rather at the gro- tesque and plainly unhomeric elements, as unhesitatingly pronounced it the work of Homer's 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 pardy 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. Ihne observes, it bears internal marks of not being Homer's, and we have four reasons for assigning it to 7>rpan- der: (i) 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 los, 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): — i, Aigina ; 2, Euboia; 3, Aigai ; 4, Peiresiai ; 5, Pe- parethos ; 6, Samothrace ; 7, Skuros ; 8, Phokaia ; 9, Imbros ; 10, Lemnos ; II, 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, Erythrae, at the foot of Mount Mimas, by implication. Now, which of these is unworthy of mention ? Aigina, the native seat of the -^acidae, 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 ^gean, howling beneath its crust } Lemnos, the seat of Vulcan and the love- tryst of Hupnos ? Lesbos, the first home of the yEolian emigrants 'i Chios, Homer's own home ? Erythrce, 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 Nympha.^ ? 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 Asclepiadce, 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 Diodes, married Machaon, the son of yEsculapius, and by him became the ancestress of the Asclepiada^ : 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 Llomer. 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 meirble on which was inscribed our poet's ambiguous epitaph ? Or, lastly, little Rhensea, a chain's length only from Delos, — weasel-less, guineafowl-less Rhe- ncea, 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, to us, but little interest or significance, e.g.^ * Hor., Od., III. xxviii. 12, 13. 294 ^'^^ Co77tplete Life of Ho7}ier. Akrokane, Aigageai, and Mycale, when he reflects what a prominent figure moun- tains make in the habitat of the gods 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 durinof 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 .-^^olus," 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 Horner, 295 Lesbians called themselves .^oliots or .^oliones, from their ancestor, Aiolos or Piebald, the ^olian beinor a mixed race. The phrase, Makar ^^olion, 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 w^as also called Makar, but to dis- tinguish him from Makar L with the addi- tion ^olion, double-edged, Graeco more, that is, signifying both son of Aiolos, his father, and descendant of Aiolos, as being an ^oliot. 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 294 ^^^^ Co77iplete Life of Ho7ncr. Akrokane, Aigageai, and Mycale, when he reflects what a prominent figure moun- tains make in the habitat of the gods 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 .'!^:olus," 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 ^oliots or yEoliones, from their ancestor, Aiolos or Piebald, the ^olian being a mixed race. The phrase, Makar yEolion, 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 L with the addi- tion ^olion, double-edged, Grseco more, that is, signifying both son of Aiolos, his father, and descendant of Aiolos, as being an ^oliot. 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." Phocaea is here and they are not ; Phocaea 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 los js even more remarkable still. It could have been brought in so easily in a thousand ways. Thus, for instance : — '* And Astypalsea, and los, and inventive Amorgos " — which would have been all the more The Complete Life of Homer, 297 natural, as the two islands were originally named from two sisters of Cadmus and Europa — AstypaL-ea and Phcenike. 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 lans. 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 1 have interpolated, must have been found in the hymn. Or had Homer consulted the Oracle as alleged, and learned he was to die at los, 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 — *' And fish-abounding los " — 298 The Co7nplete Life of Hoiner, would have formed the commencement of the last Hne 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 reofret to see that the ^[ifted and venerable author of ** Homeric Synchro- nisms "t 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 yEgean and the cities, and islands in it, between Athens and Crete, beloved by Apollo. * Westermann's " Lives," p. 44. t Pages loi, 102. The Co77tplete Life of Homer. 299 Homeric Map of the IslaxNds, 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. Lcmnos. Tf'oy, Peparethus. Lesbos. Peiresiae. ^gce. [Scyros]. Eubcea. Athens. Scyros nova. Cuma, Phocoea. Chios. Erythrae. Smyrna. Corycus. Colophon. Claros. Sgina. Delos. Rhencea. Ephesus. Samos. Miletus. Naxos. Paros. los. Cos. Cnidus. Rhodes. Carpathus. Crete. ♦ ♦ 1) , Places conspicuous by their absence are printed \xi italics. 300 The Complete Life oj 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 los, 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, excluding that one line about Scyros, where is the want of ** topical continuity " .'^ If we only transpose — '* S/cupoc (cat <^w«:om c«t Akpoka»»;c opoc atTri; ' — " Scyros and Phoc?ea 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 Llomer. 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 Erythrce 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 } * * * But why should ^gce be especially sacred to Apollo, even though it did give name to the ^gean 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 T/ie 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 yEgai be sacred, not so much because it gave name to the ^gean 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 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 J 04 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., i-79r formed originally no part of it, nor the first 27 lines of Book V., nor much, if any, after Book XII. My reasons are— (i) 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 **0d." 1. 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 got 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, jOi 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 of the " Odyssey " are little short of proof positive that Homerwrote. Even to us moderns they are much less interestino- than his former poems; to his contem- poraries they must have been immeasur- ably so. The demand for them, therefore, must have been so limited that they must necessarily have perished if not written. They must always, of course, have pleased in the study ; but for recitation in those rude times they must surely have been less, much less, attractive than others of his poems, of w^hich not a line is left, e.g., the •• Aix" and the *' Amphiaraus," or but a few disputed lines, c.g,, the '' Cypria," the " Ilias Mikra," and the *' Nostoi." So much for his writings. Next, briefly, for the editions and translations thereof. ' Zenodotus brought out the first anno- tated edition, 280 B.C. Aristophanes of Byzantium first devised the present sys- tem of accentuation, 200 B.C. Aristarchus divided the '' Iliad " into x 3o6 The Complete Life of Homer, 24, and the ** Odyssey" into 24 books,* 156 15.C. The oldest MS. (an Egyptian papyrus), containing a certain portion of Homer, was written about the same time. The oldest MS. of the -Iliad" (Vcnetus A.) was written in the 14th century. The works of Homer were first printed at Florence, 14S8 a.d., that is to say, just four centuries ago. This was the first book ever printed, except one psalm, and, strange to say, the ''Batrachomyomachia." The best English translation of both *' Iliad " and *' Odyssey," in verse, are those of Chapman, Pope, and Cowper ; in prose, that in Bohn s " Classical Library" : of the *^ Iliad" only, those of Derby and Long- fellow in verse, and Lang and others in prose ; of the *' Odyssey," those of Worsley in verse, and Butcher in prose. The Cyclic poets are Arctinus, Lesches, Agias, and Eugammon. It is not quite certain whether they wrote, Arctinus the **^thiopis," Lesches the ''IliasParva," and Agias the ''Nostoi,"on the basisof Homer s works on those subjects, or not. But, anyhow, their writing on those subjects is ♦ Plutarch. The Complete Life of Homer, 307 no proof that he did not write on them. It only proves that his previous works had perished. These lasted till the time of Pausanias. Ultimately, however, they too disappeared, and were replaced by the works, in Latin prose, of Septimius and Probus, and in Greek verse of Coluthus, Tryphiodorus, and Alcibiades of Smyrna, commonly known as Ouintus Smyrn^us. Homer is probably the very first writer that enjoyed the distinction of being trans- lated from one language into another. In consequence of the conquests of Alexander the Great, his works were translated, as i^lian informs us, into all the Oriental languages. Livius Andronicus wrote an *'Odyssey," supposed to be a free translation of Homer's, in the third century before Christ. Homer has been translated into almost all the modern European languages. The best translation is in German, by Voss. The most valuable scholia to the *' Iliad" were edited by Bekker, Berlin, 1825, in two vols. 4to. The most valuable scholia to the ** Odyssey" were published by Buttmann, Berlin, 1821. ^ X 2 o 08 77/^ Complete Life of Homer. The most celebrated commentary ever written on any author is that by Eusta- thius on Homer, in two huge folio volumes. The best edition of the *' Iliad" is by Heyne ; the best of the " Odyssey " is by Nitzch. ^ IV 1 M The best English edition of the '' Iliad is Paley's; of the '^Odyssey," Haysman's. Buttmanns '^ Lexilogus," and Damm's ** Lexicon Homericum," are the best Ho- meric word-books; the latter as being written in the last century of the positive, the former as being written in the present century of the negative school. Homer shares with the Bible, Shake- speare, Milton, and Tennyson, the highest of all possible literary honours,— a Con- cordance. C J] The only complete translation ol all his works— the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Hymns, Epigrams, and Batrachomyo- machia,— is that in Bohn's Library, and even this does not contain the Fragments. CHAPTER VIII DID HE WRITE .'' And now we come to the great question of questions. '* Did Homer write ?" We have a thousand reasons for think- ing he did. All antiquity believed in the primeval discovery of writing. It was theopneustos, Adam scrawled love-songs to Eve on the fig-leaves he afterwards made breeches of. Jove himself wrote oa sheepskins. From his brain sprang, long before Cecrops, the bottled wisdom (Metis) of literature, the " dear child " of his weary travels over the then known world. Tritogeneia was seen on the banks of Lake Tritonis, 1796 B.C., in the reign of Ogyges, i, e,, writing was discovered in Egypt about that time. Hephaestus begot Apollo upon Minerva — that is, great deeds 3IO The Co77iplete Life of Homer, were immortalised on brass at the birth of the Higher Speech. It is an idea of which all Ancient Theogony is eloquent. Jupiter, that is, the Higher Speech, bound his father Saturn, /. e.. Time, in chains. And when we are told that Rhea gave Saturn a stone to eat, it means that the record of great deeds was carved on stone. Even as Shakespeare has it — ■ *^ If I could find example Of thousands that had struck anointed kings, And flourish'd after, I'd not do 't : but since Nor brass, nor stone, nor parchment bears not one, Let villany itself forswear 't." ^' Moyses primus Hebrceas exaravit litteras Abraham Syras et olim protulit Chaldaicas Isis arte non minore condidit /Egyptias." * Abraham wrote I know not what, but presume ** My Calling and my Covenant," which the venerable author of the Penta- teuch doubtless made use of in his "Genesis" 1921 B.C. Isis published, after her hus- band's death, " Travels and Adventures in the Mulberry Leaf" 1528 B.C. * Anthologia Latina. T/ie Coup let e Life of Homer. 311 Moses wrote his '' Laws " 1491 b.c. „ '"Pentateuch"... 145 1 b.c. When Adam was now a comparatively young man of only 230 years of age, Seth invented Hebrew letters, and, with their help (for otherwise he could not), *'The Wisdom of the Egyptians, and the Signs of the Zodiac, emd the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, the sun, the moon, and the five planets, and the Septentrions. And to the planets, also, he gave their present names, Saturn, Jupiter, &c."* So says the venerable John Malala of Antioch. And the Chaldaeans, also, from times indefinitely remote, assert that writ- ing was discovered before the First Flood, viz., that of Noah, or Xisuthrus, for which Usher and the Vulgate give the date 2348 B.C., but the immeasurably higher authority of the Septuagint gives the much earlier date of 3246 B.C. *' And Old Father Time (Kronos) warned King Xisuthrus to put his books away in a safe place before the rain came down and spoilt them."* Of course this means the study of the heavenly bodies, the principal of * Malala, 12 The Complete Life of Homer. whom his orreat ancestor had named Saturnus, which, I presume, is Sethese for Time, and the next Zeus, Sethese for the art of writing, by which the dull, leaden tyranny of Time is dethroned. And this is the meaning of the strange saying among the Greeks, above referred to, — • "Jove wrote on sheepskins." Of courser the reader will understand that this is the Chaldc^an way of putting the thing. Ac- cording to them, Noah foresaw the flood by study of the stars under divine inspiration. And obviously any celestial observations worthy of the name were clean impossible without writing. Obviously the greater involves the less. And the poet distincdy informs us that the first astronomers wrote " They first with figured charts mappt out the pole." But, to say nothing of the star-gazing, sky-supporting house of Atlas, celestial observations were taken as early as 2234 B.C. There must, therefore, have been writing long before then — if we credit the fairly harmonious account of the Chal- T/ie Complete Life of Homer, 31 •d:eansand ofMalala, long before the flood. Even if Adam did not write love-songs to Eve on the fig-leaves that were afterwards the outward and visible sign of his shame- ful fall from innocence, yet did Seth, ac- cording to Malala, invent writing some 3600 B.C., according to our date ; some 3500 before Homer, according to the date of the Septuagint. All this may seem, at first sight, mere trifling, but indeed it is a primary object with me to show, wholly irrespective of the truth of this or that world-old legend, that mankind have in all ages been pervaded with a strong instinc- tive conviction of the extreme antiquity of writing ; that just as man, as he develops from the brute, requires speech, so, as he develops from the savage, he requires writing. And it is an objection beyond all words grovellingly contemptible to urge that the proof is undocumentary. The name of God is not written in yonder sky, yet, nevertheless, absolute Atheists are few. The letters of no alphabet are written on the brain, as " ai " w^as fabled by the poets to be written on the hyacinth, yet the innate love of knowledge, and the lofty aspirations of the super-animal instinct of 312 The Complete Life of Homer. whom his orreat ancestor had named Saturnus, which, I presume, is Sethese for Time, and the next Zeus, Sethese for the art of writing", by which the dull, leaden tyranny of Time is dethroned. And this is the meaning of the strange saying among the Greeks, above referred to, — ''Jove wrote on sheepskins." Of course the reader will understand that this is the Chaldc^an way of putting the thing. Ac- cording to them, Noah foresaw the flood by study of the stars under divine inspiration. And obviously any celestial observations worthy of the name were clean impossible without writing. Obviously the greater involves the less. And the poet distinctly informs us that the first astronomers wrote *' llowrot Cf yocifi fiiim ttoXov ttt/££r()?;