II. HOMER AND TRADITIONS

T

IN HOMER

HOUGHTFUL as tradition has been

of the poems, the poet himself it has almost neglected. His name is found in no early writings and on no old inscriptions, and he is first mentioned as Homer in the writings of Xenophanes of Colophon, that is near the end of the sixth century B.C., while the words Iliad and Odyssey first appear in the history of Herodotus, that is in the second half of the following century.

Although the name of Homer was so late in appearing in extant literature, no writer of early Greece threw any suspicion on the existence of a real poet or upon that poet as the creator of both the Iliad and the Odyssey. All the early Greeks took him as much for granted and as familiar as their own mountains and streams, so that they seemed to feel no mystery concerning him and rarely made a conjecture regarding his age, his nativity, or his genius.

We have no definite facts upon which to base a life of Homer but must rely on vague inferences drawn from the poems themselves, and, as these poems never contain the name Homer and seemingly never refer to the place of his birth, his age, or his contemporaries, even these vague inferences are largely a matter of conjecture. It seems strange that Homer did not try to win favor for himself by adding to his poems the praise of some living potentate, a trait so pronounced in the poetry of Virgil, Horace, and Tennyson.

The absence of definite local descriptions regarding the place of his nativity and the great reputation of his poems led many cities to claim him as their own. Among the various cities claiming this honor Smyrna's claim has been most widely accepted, since the radiation of the knowledge of his poems seems to have had its center in that city.

Homer was also called Melesigenes, a name evidently derived from the river Meles, a river of Smyrna, on whose banks he is said to have been born.

Poets often refer to him as Maeonides, a word beautifully adapted for poetry. The origin of this name is doubtful; it is sometimes

derived from Maeonia, an early name for Lydia, but it is more likely a true patronymic, as his father was supposed to be Maeon, who was said to have been both the uncle and the father of the poet.

Next to Smyrna the neighboring island of Chios has the best claim for the birthplace of the poet, and, even if it be denied this honor, it is generally believed to have been the site of much of his labors.

The date of Homer's birth is most uncertain, since the first known attempt to fix it was made by Herodotus who argued that Homer had lived about four-hundred years before his own time, that is, he assigned Homer to about 850 B.C.

The recent discoveries in pre-Homeric civilizations in and near the Aegean basin, as well as the results of linguistic investigations, strengthen the ancient belief that Homer was a native of Smyrna, also that he lived not far from the beginning of the ninth century. There is great disagreement among scholars in both of these matters, but while it is possible that Homer may have lived as early as the eleventh century it is hardly possible for him to have been later than the ninth.

Although archaeology in recent years has done much to illuminate Homeric poetry, the poet himself is as remote and elusive as ever.

66

Many attempts have been made to explain the name Homer as that of some trait or character and not the proper name of an individual, asserting that it was a common noun and meant a "blind man," a "hostage," or a joiner." The last assumption was made in the attempt to prove that Homer was not regarded as a creative poet, but was simply the "joiner" who arranged into one the poetry already existing. Now it is asserted by those who wish to give a Babylonian origin to the Iliad and the Odyssey that this is not a Greek word at all, but a true Babylonian common noun meaning a person who sings." It is the beauty of all such theories that the derivation of the name Homer so often supplies just the needed support. The name of the poet is so evasive that this very fact may prove that it is a true proper name, since most Greek proper names do not easily reveal their origin.

The extreme skepticism which marked all phases of Homeric criticism during the last century is now changing to the belief that Homer is the name of a real person, that the

8

Iliad is the poetic description of a real war fought in a real place, and that this war was a struggle between the Greeks and the Trojans. The story of the Odyssey is so interwoven with the mythical and the impossible that its historical residuum must be almost negligible.

Back of all early Greek literature there lay an indistinct mass of tradition to which poets went for plots and suggestions, and which they interpreted with the greatest freedom. Paris in Homer seems to have had no other wife than Helen and his amours seem the escapade of impetuous youth; yet there was another tradition that he had deserted an affectionate and noble wife, Oenone. There is not a hint of this earlier marriage in Homer, since this would have utterly ruined that gentility and courtesy which dignified the portrait of Helen. She could not have seemed so attractive and so humble if there had been a wronged and a jealous wife in the background. Hesiod, the poet nearest in time to Homer, says that Helen bore to Menelaus a daughter, Hermione, and a son, Nicostratus; while Homer distinctly stresses the fact that Helen bore but one child, Hermione.