where the blind harper Demodocus is introduced as singing his lays in the halls of King Alcinous:—
"Whom the Muse loved, and gave him good and ill—
Ill, that of light she did his eyes deprive;
Good, that sweet minstrelsies divine at will
She lent him, and a voice men’s ears to thrill.” (W.)
So, in the same poem, the only other bard who appears is also blind—Phemius, who is compelled to exercise his art for the diversion of the dissolute suitors of Penelope. The fact of blindness is in itself by no means incompatible with the notion of Homer’s having constructed and recited even two such long poems as the Iliad and the Odyssey. The blind have very frequently remarkable memories, together with a ready ear and passionate love for music.
For the rest of his life, Homer is said to have roamed from city to city as a wandering minstrel, singing his lays through the towns of Asia Minor, in the islands of the Archipelago, and even in the streets of Athens itself, and drawing crowds of eager listeners wherever he went by the wondrous charm of his song. This wandering life has been assumed to imply that he was an outcast and poor. The uncertainty of his birthplace, and the disputes to which it gave rise in after times, were the subject of an epigram whose pungency passed for truth—
"Seven rival towns contend for Homer dead,
Through which the living Homer begged his bread.”
But the begging is not in the original lines at all, and a wandering minstrel was no dishonoured guest, wherever he appeared, in days much later than Homer’s. Somewhere on the coast of the Levant he
