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His verses were stuffed with fragments of it, even to a fault; and he himself believed, according to the Pythagorean opinion, that the soul of Homer was transfused into him, which Persius observes in his sixth satire postquam destertuit esse Maeonides.
. . . nor sometimes forget Those other two equal with me in fate, So were I equall'd with them in renown, Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides with this from Goethe: Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt.
When the Law designs to get tremendous things out of a race of men, it goes to work this way and that, making straight the road for an inrush of important and awakened souls. Having in mind to get from Greece a startling harvest presently, it called one Homer, surnamed Maeonides, into incarnation, and endowed him with high poetic genius.
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.
The singers with whom he would fain equal himself are not Dante, or Tasso, or, as Dryden would have it, Spenser, but Blind Thamyris, and blind Maeonides, And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old. As he in equalled with these in misfortune loss of sight he would emulate them in function. And the function of the poet is like that of the prophet in the old dispensation, not to invent, but to utter.
L'amor che muove il sole e le altre stelle, "The Love that moves the sun and the other Stars." Ah, glory to this Dante! Glory to the man who would end nothing but with the stars! Now to consider what this Blind Maeonides did for Greece. Sometime last Century a Black Potentate from Africa visited England, and was duly amazed at all he saw.
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.
Not sly Athenian Miltiades, but an old dead man who had only words for his wealth: blind Maeonides chanting; and with his chanting marshaling on the roll of his hexameters mightier heroes than ever a Persian eye could see: the host that fought at Ilion; the creatures of his brain; Polymechanos Odysseus, and Diomedes and Aias; Podargos Achilles; Anas andron Agamemnon.
So admonished, Annie read. Tibbie fidgeted about on her seat. It was impossible either should understand it. And the proper names were a great puzzle to them. "Tammy Riss!" said Tibbie; "I ken naething aboot him." "Na, neither do I," said Annie; and beginning the line again, she blundered over "blind Maeonides." "Ye're readin' 't wrang, bairn.
Which, too, had it source on spiritual planes; in the heart and on the lyre of blind Maeonides; and worked downward and outward, till it had wrought on this plane a stable firmness in Sparta, an alertness in Athens. It contacted then the crest of the Persian wave, and received from the impact huge accession of vigor.
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