er; but every one of these are mere conjectures, and some of them very unhappy ones. The stories proceed in general to state that Homer himself became a school-master and poet of great celebrity, at Smyrna, and remained there till Mentes, a foreign merchant, induced him to travel. That the author or authors of the Iliad and Odyssey must have travelled pretty extensively, for those times, is unquestionable; for besides the accurate knowledge of Greece Proper, displayed in the Catalogue, it is clear that the Poet had a familiar acquaintance with the islands both in the Ægean and the Ionian seas,* the coasts of Asia Minor from the Hellespont indefinitely southward, Crete, Cyprus, and Egypt; and possessed also distinct information with respect to Libya, Ethiopia, Phoenicia, Caria, and Phyrgia. In his travels, Homer visited Ithaca, and there became subject to a disease in his eyes, which afterwards terminated in total blindness. From this * The late Mr. Bryant was induced by the extreme particularity of the local description of Ithica, in the Odyssey, to contend for that island's being the birth-place of Homer, and he imagined that the poet's own adventures are related under the name of those of Ulysses. But do these descriptions correspond with the actual face of the island? Can any one find the famous cavern of the Nymphs? As to mere particularity of detail, Peter Wilkins and Robinson Crusoe cannot be surpassed. It may be mentioned here that Joshua Barnes wrote a book to prove that King Solomon was the author of the Iliad; and that Constantine Koliades maintains that the real Homer was no other than Ulysses himself. * island he is said to have gone to Italy, and even to Spain; but there is no sign in either of the two poems, of any knowledge westward of the Ionian Sea. Wherever he went, Homer recited his verses, which were universally admired, except at Smyrna, where he was a prophet in his own country. At Phocæa, a school-master of the name of Thestorides obtained from Homer a copy of his poetry, and then sailed to Chios, and recited the Homeric verses as his own. Homer followed, was rescued by Glaucus, a goatherd, from the attack of his dogs, and brought by him to Bolissus, a town in Chios, where he resided a long time, in the possession of wealth and a splendid reputation. Thestorides left the island upon Homer's arrival. According to Herodotus, he died at Io, on his way to Athens, and was buried near the sea-shore. Proclus says he died in consequence of falling over a stone. Plutarch tells a very different story. He preserves two responses of an oracle to Homer, in both of which he was cautioned to beware of the young men's riddle, and relates that the Poet, being on his voyage to Thebes, to attend a musical or poetical contest at the feast of Saturn, in that city, landed in the island of Io, and whilst sitting on a rock by the sea-shore, observed some young fishermen in a boat; that Homer asked * An incident supposed to be recorded in that passage of the Odyssey (='. xiv. 29.) where Ulysses is in danger of being torn by the dogs at the porch of the house of Eumeus. them if they had any thing, (tử ti izoler,) and that the young wags who, having had no sport, had been diligently catching, and killing as many as they could catch, of certain personal companions of a race not even yet extinct, answered," as many as we caught, we left; as many as we could not catch, we carry with us." “Οσσ ̓ ἕλομεν, λιπόμεσθα· ὅσ ̓ οὐχ ἵλομεν, φερόμεσθα. The catastrophe is, that Homer, being utterly unable to guess the meaning of this riddle, broke his heart out of pure vexation, and that the inhabitants of the island buried him with great magnificence, and put the following inscription on his tomb: Ενθάδε τὴν ἱερὰν κεφαλὴν κατὰ γαῖα καλύπτει Here Homer the divine, in earthly bed, Poet of Heroes, rests his sacred head. There has been as much doubt and controversy about the age of Homer, as about himself and his poems. According to the argument of Wood,* Haller, and Mitford,‡ he lived about the middle of the ninth century before Christ; which date agrees exactly with the conjecture of Herodotus, who wrote B. C. 444, and is founded on the as • Essay on the Original Genius, &c. sumption that Homer must have lived before the return of the Heraclidæ into Peloponnesus, an event which took place within eighty years after the Trojan war. The Newtonian calculation is also adopted, which fixes the capture of Troy as low as B. C. 904. The argument is, that it is extremely improbable that Homer, so minute as he is in his descriptions of Greece, and so full of the histories of the reigning dynasties in its various districts, should never notice so very remarkable an occurrence as the almost total abolition of the kingly government throughout Greece, and the substitution of the republican form in its stead. Now this national revolution was coincident with, or immediately consequent on, the return of the descendants of Hercules. It is said, also, that the Poet mentions the grandchildren of Æneas as reigning in Troy, in the Prophecy of Neptune, in the Iliad,* and that in another speecht of Juno's Νῦν δὲ δὴ Αἰνείαο βίη Τρώεσσιν ἀνάξει Καὶ παῖδες παίδων, τοί κεν μετόπισθε γένωνται. Il. T. xx. 308. Then shall Æneas o'er the Trojans reign, And children's children his great line maintain. Almost the same words occur in the Hymn to Venus, v. 197, 198; and they destroy the very foundation of the Roman claim to Trojan descent through Virgil's hero. The Augustan poet, either on his own authority, or under shelter of an old reading of wávrier, for Τρώεσσι, writes, — Nunc domus Æneæ cunctis dominabitur oris, † A. iv. 51-54. he seems to intimate the insecure state of the chief existing dynasties of the race of Pelops; and it is inferred from this, that he flourished during the third generation, or upwards of sixty years after the destruction of Troy. Upon this argument Heyne* remarks, that in the first place, a poet, who was celebrating heroes of the Pelopid race, had no occasion to notice a revolution by which their families were expatriated, and their kingdoms abolished; and next, which seems an insurmountable objection, that the Ionic migration took place sixty years later than the return of the Heraclidæ, yet that Homer was an Ionian, and a resident in, or, at least, perfectly conversant with, Ionian Asia, is admitted on all hands, and is, indeed, incontestable; and as he never notices this migration, though it was certainly a very remarkable event, and one which he must have known, he may just as well, for other or the same reasons, have been silent on the subject of a revolution by which that migration was caused. The Arundelian Marble places Homer B. C. 907, the Ionian Migration B. C. 1044, the return of the Heraclidæ B. C. 1104, and the Capture of Troy B. C. 1184. Heyne approves this calculation as, upon the whole, the most consistent with all the authorities : but it is at variance with Newton's chronology, Excurs. ad II. . xxiv. |