(3) The Poets of Mythology. Homer, from whose poems of the Iliad and Odyssey we have taken the chief part of our chapters on the Trojan War and the return of the Grecians, is almost as mythical a personage as the heroes he celebrates. The traditionary story is that he was a wandering minstrel, blind and old, who traveled from place to place singing his lays to the music of his harp, in the courts of princes or the cottages of peasants,—a dependent upon the voluntary offerings of his hearers. 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, runs:
Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead,
Through which the living Homer begged his bread.
These seven places were Smyrna, Chios (now Scio), Colophon, Ithaca, Pylos, Argos, and Athens.
Modern scholars have doubted whether the Homeric poems are the work of any single mind. This uncertainty arises, in part, from the difficulty of believing that poems of such length could have been committed to writing in the age usually assigned to these, when materials capable of transmitting long productions were not yet in 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 question is answered by the statement that there was a professional body of men whose business it was to commit to memory and rehearse for pay the national and patriotic legends.
Pisistratus of Athens ordered a commission of scholars (about 537 B.C.) to collect and revise the Homeric poems; and it is probable that at that time certain passages of the Iliad and Odyssey, as we now have them, were interpolated. Beside the Iliad and the Odyssey, many other epics passed in antiquity under Homer's name. The so-called Homeric Hymns to the gods, which were composed by various poets after the death of Homer, are a source of valuable information concerning the attributes of the divinities addressed.
The date assigned to Homer, on the authority of Herodotus, is 850 B.C. The preservation and further fashioning of myths fell, after Homer's time, into the hands of the Rhapsodists, who chanted epic songs, and of the Cyclic poets, who elaborated into various epic circles, or completed wholes, neglected traditions of the Trojan War. Among these cyclic poems were the Cyprian Lays, which related the beginnings of the Trojan War and the first nine years of the siege, thus leading up to the Iliad; the Æthiopis, which continued the Iliad and told of the death of Achilles; the Little Iliad and the Iliupersis, which narrated the fall of Troy and magnified the exploits of Ajax and Philoctetes; and the Nostoi, or Home-Comings, which told the adventures of various Greek heroes during the period of ten years between the end of the Iliad and the beginning of the Odyssey. Most of these poems were once attributed to Homer. They are all lost, but the names of some of their authors survive. There was also a cycle which told of the two wars against Thebes.
Hesiod is, like Homer, one of the most important sources of our knowledge of Greek mythology. He is thought by some to have been a contemporary of Homer, but concerning the relative dates of the two poets there is no certainty. Hesiod was born in Ascra in Bœotia; he spent his youth as a shepherd on Mount Helicon, his manhood in the neighborhood of Corinth, and wrote two great poems, the Works and Days, and the Theogony, or Genealogy of the Gods. From the former we obtain a connected account of Greek traditions concerning the primitive commodities of life, the arts of agriculture and navigation, the sacred calendar, and the various prehistoric ages. From the latter poem we learn the Greek mythology of the creation of the world, the family of the gods, their wars, and their attitude toward primeval man. While Hesiod may have composed his works at a somewhat later period than Homer, it is noteworthy that his stories of the gods have more of the savage or senseless element than those attributed to Homer. The artist, or artists, of the Iliad and the Odyssey seem to have refined the stories into poetic gold; Hesiod has gathered them in the ore, like so many specimens for a museum.
A company of Lyric Poets, of whom Stesichorus (620 B.C.), Alcæus (611 B.C.), Sappho (610 B.C.), Arion (600 B.C.), Simonides of Ceos (556 B.C.), Ibycus (540 B.C.), Anacreon (530 B.C.), and Pindar (522 B.C.) are the most prominent, have contributed much to our knowledge of mythology. They have left us hymns to the gods, references to mythical heroes, and accounts of more or less pathetic legendary adventures.
Of the works of Sappho few fragments remain, but they establish her claim to eminent poetical genius. Her story is frequently alluded to. Being passionately in love with a beautiful youth named Phaon, and failing to obtain a return of affection, she is said to have thrown herself from the promontory of Leucadia into the sea, under a superstition that those who should take that "Lover's Leap" would, if not destroyed, be cured of their love.
Of Arion the greatest work was a dithyramb or choral hymn to the god of wine. It is said that his music and song were of such sweetness as to charm the monsters of the sea; and that when thrown overboard on one occasion by avaricious seamen, he was borne safely to land by an admiring dolphin. Spenser represents Arion, mounted on his dolphin, accompanying the train of Neptune and Amphitrite: