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.  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.  Crete was nearer to Egypt; the Greeks of Asia Minor to Lydia; as for the islanders of the Cyclades and Sporades, the necessity of gadding about would have brought them into contact with their betters to the south and east, and so awakened them, much sooner than their fellow Greeks of Attica, Boeotia, and the Peloponnese.

Where did Homer live?  Naturally, as a wandering bard, all over the place.  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.  But De Quincey makes out an excellent case for supposing he knew Crete better than any other part of the world.  Many of the legends he records; many of the superstitions—­to call them that;—­many of the customs he describes:  have been, and are still, peculiar to Crete.  Neither the smaller islands, nor continental Greece, were very suitable countries for horse-breeding; and the horse does not figure greatly in their legends.  But in Crete the friendship of horse and man was traditional; in Cretan folk-lore, horses still foresee the doom of their masters, and weep.  So they do in Homer.

There is a certain wild goat found only in Crete, of which he give a detailed description; down the measurement of its horns; exact, as sportsmen have found in modern times.  He mentions the Kubizeteres, Cretan tumblers, who indulge in a ‘stunt’ unknown elsewhere.  They perform in couples; and when he mentions them, it is in the dual number.  Preternatural voices are an Homeric tradition:  Stentor “spoke loud as fifty other men”; when Achilles roared at the Trojans, their whole army was frightened.  In Crete such voices are said to be still common:  shepherds carry on conversations at incredible distances—­speak to, and are answered by, men not yet in sight.—­Dequincey gives several other such coincidences; none of them, by itself, might be very convincing; but taken all together, they rather incline one to the belief that Smith, or Brown, or Jones, alias Homer, must have spent a good deal of his time in Crete;—­say, was brought up there.