In the Homeric poems a somewhat vague tradition seems to come down of the achievements of one of the European peoples in that ancient cycle. Sometime then Greece had her last Pre-periclean age of greatness. What form it took, the details of it, were probably as much lost to the historic Greeks as the details of the Celtic Age are to us. But Homer caught an echo and preserved the atmosphere of it. As the Celtic Age bequeaths to us, in the Irish and Welsh stories, a sense of style—which thing is the impress of the human spirit triumphant over all hindrances to its expression;—so that long past period bequeathed through Homer a sense of style to the later Greeks. It rings majestically through his lines. His history is perhaps not actual history in any recognizable shape.
Legends of a long lost glory drifted down to a poet of mightiest genius; and he embodied them, amplified them, told his message through them; perhaps reinvented half of them. Even so Geoffrey of Monmouth (without genius, however) did with the rumors that came down to him anent the ancient story of his own people; and Spenser followed him in the Faery Queen, Malory in his book, and Tennyson in the Idylls of the King. Even in that last, from the one poem Morte D'Arthur we should get a sense of the old stylish magnificence of the Celtic epoch; for the sake of a score of lines in it, we can forgive Tennyson the rest of the Idylls. But Tennyson was no Celt himself; only, like Spenser and Malory, an anglicizer of things Celtic. How much more of the true spirit would have come down to Homer, a Greek of genius, writing of traditional Greek glory, and thrilled with racial uplift.
Where did he live? Oh, Goodness knows! When? Goodness knows again. (Though we others may guess a little, I hope.) We have Herodotus for it, that Homer lived about four hundred years before his own time; that is to say, to give a date, in 850; and I like the figure well; for if Dante came in as soon as possible after the opening of this present manvantara, why not Homer as soon as possible after the opening of the last one? At such times great souls do come in; or a little before or a little after; because they have a work of preparation to do; and between Dante and Homer there is much parallelism in aims and aspirations: what the one sought to do for Italy, the other sought to do for Greece. But this is to treat Homer as if he had been one real man; whereas everybody knows 'it has been proved' (a) that there was no such person; (b) that there were dozens of him; (c) that black is white, man an ape, and the soul a fiction. Admitted. A school of critics has cleaned poor old blind Maeonides up very tidily, and left not a vestige of him on God's earth—just as they have, or their like have, cleaned up the Human Soul. But there is another school, who have preserved for him some shreds at least of identity. Briefly put, you can 'prove up what may be classed as brain-mind evidence—grammar, microscopic examination of text and forms and so on—that Homer is a mere airy myth; but to do so you must be totally oblivious of the spiritual facts of style and poetry. Take these into account, and he rises with wonderful individuality from the grave and nothingness into which you have relegated him. The Illiad does not read like a single poem; there are incompatibilities between its parts. On the other hand, there is, generally speaking, the impress of a single creative genius. One master made the Homeric style. The Iliad, as we know it, may contain passages not his; but—he wrote the Iliad.
What does not follow is, that he ever sat down and said: "Now let us write an epic." Conditions would be against it. A wandering minstrel makes ballads, not epics; for him Poe's law applies: that is a poem which can be read or recited at a single sitting. The unity of the Iliad is one not of structure, but of spirit; and the chances are that the complete works of any great poet will be a unity of spirit.
Why should we not suppose that in the course of a long life a great poet—whose name may not have been Homer—that may have been only what he was called—his real name may have been (if the critics will have it so) the Greek for Smith, or Jones, or Brown, or Robinson—but he was called Homer anyhow—why should we not suppose that he, filled and fascinated always with one great traditionary subject, wrote now one incident as a complete poem; ten years later another incident; and again, after an interval, another? Each time with the intention to make a complete and separate poem; each time going to it influenced by the natural changes of his mood; now preoccupied with one hero or god, now with another. The Tennyson in his twenties, who wrote the fairylike Lady of Shalott, was a very different man in mood and outlook from the Mid-Victorian Tennyson who wrote the execrable Merlin and Vivien; but both were possessed with the Arthurian legend. At thirty and at fifty you may easily take different views of the same men and incidents. The Iliad, I suggest, may be explained as the imperfect fusion of many poems and many moods and periods of life of a single poet. It was not until the time of Pisistratus, remember, that it was edited into a single epic.
Now these many poems, before Pisistratus took them in hand, had been in the keeping for perhaps three centuries of wandering minstrels—Rhapsodoi, Aoidoi, Citharaedi and Homeridae, as they were called—who drifted about the Isles of Greece and Asiatic mainland during the long period of Greek insignificance and unculture. The first three orders were doubtless in existence long before Homer was born; they were the bards, trouveurs and minnesingers of their time; their like are the instruments of culture in any race during its pralayas. So you find the professional story-tellers in the East today. But the Homeridae may well have been—as De Quincey suggests—an order specially trained in the chanting of Homeric poems; perhaps a single school founded in some single island by or for the sake of Homer. We hear that Lycurgus was the first who brought Homer—the works, not the man—into continental Greece; importing them from Crete. That means, probably, that he induced Homeridae to settle in Sparta. European continental Greece would in any case have been much behind the rest of the Greek world in culture; because furthest from and the least in touch with West Asian civilization. Crete was nearer to Egypt; the Greeks of Asia Minor to Lydia; as for the islanders of the Cyclades and Sporades, the necessity of gadding about would have brought them into contact with their betters to the south and east, and so awakened them, much sooner than their fellow Greeks of Attica, Boeotia, and the Peloponnese.
Where did Homer live? Naturally, as a wandering bard, all over the place. We know of the seven cities that claimed to be his birthplace:
Smyrna, Chias, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodos, Argos, Athenae Orbis de patria certat, Homere, Tua.
Of these Smyrna probably has the best chance of it; for he was Maeonides, the son of Maeon, and Maeon was the son of Meles; and the Maeon and the Meles are rivers by Smyrna. But De Quincey makes out an excellent case for supposing he knew Crete better than any other part of the world. Many of the legends he records; many of the superstitions—to call them that;—many of the customs he describes: have been, and are still, peculiar to Crete. Neither the smaller islands, nor continental Greece, were very suitable countries for horse-breeding; and the horse does not figure greatly in their legends. But in Crete the friendship of horse and man was traditional; in Cretan folk-lore, horses still foresee the doom of their masters, and weep. So they do in Homer.
There is a certain wild goat found only in Crete, of which he give a detailed description; down the measurement of its horns; exact, as sportsmen have found in modern times. He mentions the Kubizeteres, Cretan tumblers, who indulge in a 'stunt' unknown elsewhere. They perform in couples; and when he mentions them, it is in the dual number. Preternatural voices are an Homeric tradition: Stentor "spoke loud as fifty other men"; when Achilles roared at the Trojans, their whole army was frightened. In Crete such voices are said to be still common: shepherds carry on conversations at incredible distances—speak to, and are answered by, men not yet in sight.—Dequincey gives several other such coincidences; none of them, by itself, might be very convincing; but taken all together, they rather incline one to the belief that Smith, or Brown, or Jones, alias Homer, must have spent a good deal of his time in Crete;—say, was brought up there.