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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.
From an obscure writer of the Alexandrian period we get a tale of Pisistratus sending to all the cities of Greece for copies of Homeric poems, paying for them well; collating them, editing them out of a vast confusion; and producing at last out of the matter thus obtained, a single more or less articulate Iliad. * For a detailed account of all this see De Quincey's essay Homer and the Homeridae.
The hexameter took the place of the Saturnian verse; the ornate style of the Homeridae, striving after plastic vividness of delineation, took the place of the homely historic narrative.
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.
The hexameter took the place of the Saturnian verse; the ornate style of the Homeridae, striving after plastic vividness of delineation, took the place of the homely historic narrative.
They are marked by a simplicity and a nobleness, a refinement and a pathos, which have charmed all subsequent ages. Homer, far more than any other author, was the educator of the Greeks. There was a class called Homeridae, in Chios; but whether they were themselves poets, or reciters of Homer, or what else may have been their peculiar work, is not ascertained.
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.
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