It would be curious to ascertain in what state Homer found the poetry of Greece when he commenced his ca reer ; but the question is involved in almost impenetrable obscurity. 1Vhile he is hailed as the father, he was certain ly not the inventor of poetry. According to the Greek library of Fabricius, there were seventy Greek poets ante rior to him. The greater part of them were musicians. Among these Linus is cited, who, it is said, rehearsed the first expedition of Bacchus and Orpheus, who sung the Ar gonautic expedition. The assertion of Suidas, that Homer drew his story of the Iliad from that of Corinnos, who com posed it during the Trojan war, seems to be only the dream of a lexicographer. Tzetzes, a versifier of the 12th century, who made a commentary upon Lycophron, and a bad poem called the Chiliade, would have us believe that Homer bor rowed his Iliad from Dictys Cretensis, a writer to whom a manuscript, certainly most ancient, but not original, was ascribed, which was found in the reign of one of the Caesars, in a tomb that was thrown open by an earthquake. When we are told that Dictys followed Idomeneus to the seige of Troy, and wrote a history of it in prose, we have • quite enough of this phantom gazetteer. The story of Homer's purloining a manuscript poem from the priestess of Del phi, which is gravely repeated by Ptolemy Ephaestion, is almost too ridiculous to be worth noticing ; and we are al most ashamed to mention another hypothesis, which has found an advocate in the absurdity of modern times, viz. the theory of Bryant, which supposes flamer to have found the materials of his Iliad in a temple of Egypt, and to have allegorized the contents under the fiction of Grecian names. According to this reverie, for it merits not the name of a theory, Menelaus, Agamemnon, Helen, &c. were all fan tastic personages drawn from Egyptian theogony, and na turalized in Greece. Menelaus is evidently the Pharaoh Menes ; Agamemnon is the Turkish word Aga prefixed to Memnon, whose harp resounded at the touch of the rising day. The wealthy Mycene never existed but in the vanity of Thucydidcs, and the credulity of Hcrodotus. Troy never existed but on the shores of the Nile. The historical part of this hypothesis is quite upon a par with its etymology, which, with its Agas and Memnons is nut so diverting, but equally credible with Swift's derivation of Hector, Ajax, and Alexander.
The epoch of Homer has been not less a subject of dispu tation than his country. Het odotus says in his Euterpe, that he lived 400 years before his own (the historian's) time. In the chronicle of the Parian mat Wes, Homer is said to have been in his highest renown at the year of the chronicle 675, which would place the date of the Iliad 2707 years from the beginning- of the present century ; but venerable as the authority of the Parian marbles may ap pear, they seem to assign a later date to the great poet than his writings, and the manners of society which he de scribes, render probable. It is more consistent with his writings to suppose, that he was born not long after the siege of Troy, and that lie had finished both his poems half a century after the town was taken. As the first interest ing stories he heard when a boy were those of the exploits performed in the Trojan war, in his riper years he had still an opportunity of conversing with the old men who had been engaged in it. Their immediate descendants would, according to this supposition, be his contemporaries ; he might know their grandchildren, and live to see the birth of the fourth generation. It is true, that this hypothesis makes the birth of Homer prior to the Ionian migration, which Thucydides places 80 years after the siege of Troy ; but in this there is no solid objection, as we know that there were Ionians in Asia prior to the colony of that name being brought thither. The circumstance of Homer ascribing double the strength of modern men to one of the heroes of the Iliad, is no decisive proof that he looked back to a very distant period. Such fanciful exaggera tions of the strength of men's immediate ancestors may be found in many romances of the middle ages, that must have been composed within fifty years of the lifetime of those personages to whom the poet ascribes a size and strength surpassing sober belief. The account which Homer gives
of the family of Lneas continuing to reign over the Tro jans after the Greeks had demolished Troy, though at va riance with Virgil's fable, (a circumstance of no great con sequence as to its credibility,) has all the air of having been drawn from contemporary information. Such an account of the family of E.neas it would have been difficult, as well as useless, for Homer to have forged. Now the succession of Lucas's great-grandchildren to the kingdom of Troy is the latest fact which the poet has left on record. The Lolian migration most probably disturbed that very generation in their possessions ; and from Homer, who is ever minute in his historical accounts, being silent respecting such a dis turbance, it may be inferred, that he did not live to be ac quainted with it. The other and later era which has been assigned to our poet, makes him contemporary with Ly curgus ; and, connected with it, there is a tradition of Ho mer and the law-giver having met in the island of Chios. But the picture of society which Homer exhibits, does not accord with this tradition. When we look to the verisi militude of his descriptions, we must believe that he paint ed the natural world and all its manners from the life. There is no trace of his affecting to give it an antiquated air, or of wishing, as a modern poet would probably be in clined to do, to study simplicity of objects for picturesque effect ; on the contrary, whenever he luxuriates in descrip tion, it is in painting artificial objects. Those who bring down Homer, therefore, so low as the time of Lycurgus, seem to forget that such a poet and such a legislator belong to different states of society. It has been questioned, and indeed it appears more than questionable, if the art of writ bug was known in the days of Homer. If we consult the poet himself upon this question, we shall find that in all his comprehensive picture of civil society, there is nothing that decidedly conveys an idea of letters, or of reading. The words Ditharce Auna, it is true, in the letter mentioned in the Iliad, which Bellerophon carries to the king of Lycia, have been quoted as a proof of alphabetical writing ; but the generality of the term has much more the appearance of merely symbolical signs, or hieroglyphics, than of what we call writing. That such symbolical mat ks of thought were known in the rudest ages, there can be no doubt ; and what has been already alluded to in the travels of the poet as a possible and even probable fact, namely, his con sulting the records of different temples, must be taken with this understanding, that such records were, in all probabili ty, also symbolical or hieroglyphical. The introduction of prose writing into Greece took place at so late a period, as to leave it by much the more probable supposition, that alphabetical writing was unknown to Homer ; for when prose writing is of recent date, the alphabet cannot have been long in use. Homer, therefore, there is every reason to think, could neither read nor write ; he recited his own works from memory, and hence it is little wonderful that he addresses the Muses as the daughters of that faculty of the mind. In modern times, when the memory is at once distracted by so many pursuits, and obliged to lean on so many artificial assistances, we are apt to under-rate its pow ers when employed upon a single object, and trained by ha bitual exercise upon that object. To an ancient poet like Homer, his memory was not only the mother of his muse, but his constant and indispensable guardian. The rhapso dists also preserved his works by oral tradition ; and if their subsistence depended in a profession where there were ri vals to detect the errors of each other, upon the accuracy with which they recited those poems, they were perhaps more safe from corruptions and interpolations, or at all events from omissions in recitation, than we might be apt to imagine, by ascribing the same lax exertions of memory to those reciters, which arise in modern times from the constant reliance upon writing. It may be doubt ed whether the rhapsodists made such havock in the sense of Homer, as the perverted ingenuity of writing commentators has made in that of Shakespeare.