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Updated: July 19, 2025
Seven places contended for the honor of having given birth to the blind bard. But nothing is known of Homer's birthplace or history. It is doubtful whether the art of writing was much, if at all, in use among the Greeks at the time of the composition of the Iliad and Odyssey. We know that the custom existed of repeating poems orally by minstrels or rhapsodists at popular festivals.
In the later age, in the Asiatic colonies and in Greece, the rhapsodists, competing for prizes at feasts, or reciting to a civic crowd, were limited in time and gave but snatches of poetry. It is in this later civic age that a poet without readers would have little motive for building Wolfs great ship of song, and scant chance of launching it to any profitable purpose.
The right of force and the right of artifice glorified by the rhapsodists in the poems of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" inspired the legislation of the Greeks and Romans, from which they passed into our morals and codes. Christianity has not changed at all. The Gospel should not be blamed, because the priests, as stupid as the legists, have been unable either to expound or to understand it.
To manage the great house of Hobson Brothers and Newcome; to attend to the interests of the enslaved negro; to awaken the benighted Hottentot to a sense of the truth; to convert Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Papists; to arouse the indifferent and often blasphemous mariner; to guide the washerwoman in the right way; to head all the public charities of her sect, and do a thousand secret kindnesses that none knew of; to answer myriads of letters, pension endless ministers, and supply their teeming wives with continuous baby-linen; to hear preachers daily bawling for hours, and listen untired on her knees after a long day's labour, while florid rhapsodists belaboured cushions above her with wearisome benedictions; all these things had this woman to do, and for near fourscore years she fought her fight womanfully: imperious but deserving to rule, hard but doing her duty, severe but charitable, and untiring in generosity as in labour; unforgiving in one instance in that of her husband's eldest son, Thomas Newcome; the little boy who had played on the hay, and whom at first she had loved very sternly and fondly.
Some will perhaps think that they detect in the first quatrain an indication of a lost line, which later rhapsodists, failing in imaginative vigour, have supplied by the feeble device of iteration; others, however, may rather maintain that this very iteration is an original felicity to which none but the most prosaic minds can be insensible.
From casual strollers like the rhapsodists and chanters at festivals, we look for nothing of the sort. The strollers, it might be thought, would also be the very men to introduce fairy tales, freaks of primitive Ionian myth, discreditable anecdotes of the princely heroes, and references to the Ionian colonies.
Some will perhaps think that they detect in the first quatrain an indication of a lost line, which later rhapsodists, failing in imaginative vigour, have supplied by the feeble device of iteration. Others, however, may rather maintain that this very iteration is an original felicity, to which none but the most prosaic minds can be insensible.
Men will judge and compare; but they will not create. They will talk about the old poets, and comment on them, and to a certain degree enjoy them. But they will scarcely be able to conceive the effect which poetry produced on their ruder ancestors, the agony, the ecstasy, the plenitude of belief. The Greek rhapsodists, according to Plato, could scarce recite Homer without falling into convulsions.
Thus, in our way of looking at these things, interpolations by rhapsodists are not often needed as explanations of difficulties. Still, granted that the rhapsodists, like the jongleurs, had texts, and that these were studied by the makers of the Vulgate, interpolations and errors might creep in by this way.
The Greeks preferred to listen to recitations, but my hypothesis is that the rhapsodists who recited had texts, like the jongleurs' books of their epics in France, and that they occasionally, for definite purposes, interpolated matter into their texts.
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