The traditionary story is that he was a wandering
minstrel, blind and old, who travelled from place to place singing
his lays to the music of his harp, in the courts of princes or the
cottages of peasants, and dependent upon the voluntary offerings
of his hearers for support. Byron calls him "The blind old man of
Scio's rocky isle," and a well-known epigram, alluding to the
uncertainty of the fact of his birthplace, says:
"Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead,
Through which the living Homer begged his bread."
These seven were Smyrna, Scio, Rhodes, Colophon, Salamis, Argos,
and Athens.
Modern scholars have doubted whether the Homeric poems are the
work of any single mind. This arises from the difficulty of
believing that poems of such length could have been committed to
writing at so early an age as that usually assigned to these, an
age earlier than the date of any remaining inscriptions or coins,
and when no materials capable of containing such long productions
were yet introduced into use. On the other hand it is asked how
poems of such length could have been handed down from age to age
by means of the memory alone. This is answered by the statement
that there was a professional body of men, called Rhapsodists, who
recited the poems of others, and whose business it was to commit
to memory and rehearse for pay the national and patriotic legends.
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