These two poems were handed down for centuries without being committed
to writing; the rhapsodists, wandering singers, knew long passages
from them by heart and recited them at feasts. It is not till the
sixth century that Pisistratus, a prince of Athens, had them collected
and edited.[48] The two poems became from that time and always
remained the most admired works of Greek literature.
The Greeks said that the author of these poems was Homer, a Greek of
Ionia, who lived about the tenth or the ninth century B.C. They
represented him as a blind old man, poor and a wanderer. Seven towns
disputed the honor of being his birth-place. This tradition was
received without hesitation. But at the end of the eighteenth century
a German scholar, Wolf, noticed certain contradictions in these poems,
and at last asserted that they were not the work of a single poet, but
a collection of fragments from several different poets. This theory
has been attacked and supported with great energy: for a half century
men have flown into a passion for or against the existence of Homer.
Today we begin to think the problem insoluble.
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