. A smaller history of Greece, from the earliest times to the Roman conquest. escriptionsof the ordinary pursuits of life. The poems of the former classpassed under the name of Homer; while those of the latterwere in the same general >vay ascribed to Hesiod. The formerwere the productions of the Ionic and JEolic minstrels in AsiaMinor, among whom Homer stood pre-eminent and eclipsed thebrightness of the rest: the latter were the compositions of a schoolof bards in the neighbourhood of Mount Helicon in Beeotia, amongwhom in like manner Hesiod enjoyed the greatest celebrity. Thepoems of both
. A smaller history of Greece, from the earliest times to the Roman conquest. escriptionsof the ordinary pursuits of life. The poems of the former classpassed under the name of Homer; while those of the latterwere in the same general >vay ascribed to Hesiod. The formerwere the productions of the Ionic and JEolic minstrels in AsiaMinor, among whom Homer stood pre-eminent and eclipsed thebrightness of the rest: the latter were the compositions of a schoolof bards in the neighbourhood of Mount Helicon in Beeotia, amongwhom in like manner Hesiod enjoyed the greatest celebrity. Thepoems of both schools were composed in the hexameter metre andin a similar dialect; but they differed widely in almost everyother feature. Of the Homeric poems the Iliad and the Odyssey vere the mostdistinguished and have alone come down to us. The subject of theIliad was the exploits of Achilles and of the other Grecian heroesbefore Ilium or Troy: that of the Odyssey was the wanderings andadventures of Odysseus or Ulysses after the capture of Troy on his Chap. XXII. POEMS OF HOMER. 223. return to his native island. Throughout the flourishing period ofGreek literature these unrivalled works were universally regardedas the productions of a single mind ; but there was very little agree-ment respecting the place of the poets birth, the details of his life,or the time in which he lived. Seven cities laid claim to Homersbirth, and most of them had legends to tellrespecting his romantic parentage, his allegedblindness, and his life of an itinerant bard ac-quainted with poverty and sorrow. It cannot bedisputed that he was an Asiatic Greek ; but thisis the only fact in his life which can be regardedas certain. Several of the best writers of antiquitysupposed him to have been a native of the islandof Chios; but most modern scholars believeSmyrna to have been his birthplace. His mostprobable date is about 850. The mode in which these poems were preserved Homer,has occasioned great controversy in
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