Well, he wandered the islands, singing; “laying the nexus of his songs,” as Hesiod says in the passage from which I quoted just now, “in the ancient sacred hymns.”  As Shakespeare was first an actor, then a tinkerer of other men’s plays, then a playwright on his own account; so perhaps Homer, from a singer of the old hymns, became an improver and restorer of them, then a maker of new ones.  He saw the wretched condition of his people, contrasted it with the traditions he found in the old days, and was spurred up to create a glory for them in his imagination.  His feelings were hugely wrought upon by compassion working as yoke-fellow with race-pride.  You shall see presently how the intensity of his pity made him bitter; how there must have been something Dantesque of grim sadness in his expression:  he had seen suffering, not I think all his own, till he could allow to fate no quality but cruelty.  Impassioned by what we may call patriotism, he attacked again and again the natural theme for Greek epic:  the story of a Greek contest with and victory over West Asians; but he was too great not to handle even his West Asians with pity, and moves us to sympathy with Hector and Andromache often, because against them too was stretched forth the hand of the great enemy, fate.  In different moods and at different times, never thinking to make an epic, he produced a large number of different poems about the siege of Troy.

And the Odyssey?  Well, the tradition was that he wrote it in his old age.  Its mood is very different from that of the Iliad; and many words used in it are used with a different meaning; and there are words that are not used in the Iliad at all.  Someone says, it comes from the old age of the Greek epic, rather than from that of Homer.  I do not know.  It is a better story than the Iliad; as if more nearly cast at one throe of a mind.  Yet it, too, must be said not to hang together; here also are discrepant and incompatible parts.

There is all tradition for it that the Homeric poems were handed down unwritten for several centuries.  Well; I can imagine the Aoidoi and Citharaoidoi and the rest learning poems from the verbal instruction of other Aoidoi and Citharaoidoi, and so preserving them from generation to generation to generation.  But I cannot imagine, and I do think it is past the wit of man to imagine, long poems being composed by memory; it seems to me Homer must have written or dictated them at first.  Writing in Greece may have been an esoteric science in those times.  It is now, anywhere, to illiterates.  In Caesar’s day, as he tells us, it was an esoteric science among the Druids; they used it, but the people did not.  It seems probable that writing was not in general use among the Greeks until long after Homer; but, to me, certain that Homer used it himself, or could command the services to those who did.  But there was writing in Crete long before the Greco-Phoenician alphabet was invented; from the time of the first