Homer. HOMER. Bef. Ch. 920. THE ILIAD, THE ODYSSEY, HYMNS. English Translators: CHAPMAN, POPE, COWPER. HOMERUS has been surnamed Mæonides, from Mæonia, or Lydia, in the Lesser Asia; and Melesigenes, from the river Meles, in the contiguous region of Ionia. As to the seven places which disputed his birth, the wandering profession of bardism might have diffused the rhapsodies of Homer; and wherever his poems were traditionally known, there probably it was said that he had been born. In a fragment of Simonides Homer is called "the man of Chios," an island on the Ionian coast: a passage in one of the Homeric Hymns bears similar testimony. The manner in which Homer describes countries and winds renders it probable that he was an Ionian. The knowledge of different regions, of shipping, and of the business of war, implies that the author of these poems was a traveller, as indeed his very office sufficiently testifies, and that he had a practical experience of what he describes. * His blindness may be plausibly inferred from a passage in the eighth canto of the Odyssey; which, although ostensibly applied to a nameless bard in the story, betrays a pathetic personal consciousness: but, like Milton, he must have lost his sight late in life, as his descriptions of the works of nature and art indicate the freshness of ocular observation. The foolish tale of * The Pseudo-Herodotus, in the Life of Homer, derives the name itself from in ipv, one who cannot see; but this is probably one of those fantastic etymologies of which the Greeks were so fond. his begging his bread and singing his poems about the streets, discovers a deplorable inattention to ancient manners and usages. In the early history of every nation we find the bard a personage of high dignity; his presence was equally welcomed in courts and camps, in the feast and the battle. The supposititious lives of Homer need not detain our attention. His biographical romance may rest on the same shelf with the "Lay of Aristotle," in the old French Fabliaux. Whether such an individual ever existed may be a reasonable doubt: yet we are told of a cave on the river Meles, in which he composed his poems; as if poetry had been in those ages a retired and sedentary occupation; and the islanders of Chios talk, to this day, of the school of Homer among the rocks, and point to the identical seats of his scholars. When we have sufficiently wondered at the genius of Homer as the father of poetry, we may have leisure to discover that he himself alludes to the profession of the bard as of |