Lycurgus, it is said, brought singers or manuscripts of your poems into Sparta; because, blind minstrel, he had a mind to make Sparta great-souled; and he knew that you were the man to do it, if done it could be.  Then for about two hundred and sixty years, without much fuss to come into history, you were having your way with your Greeks.  Your music was ringing in the ears of mothers; their unborn children were being molded to the long roll of your hexameters.  There came to be manuscripts of you in every city:  corrupt enough, many of them, forgeries, many of them; lays fudged up and fathered on you by venal Rhapsodoi, to chant in princely houses whose ancestors it was a good speculation to praise.  You were everywhere in Greece:  a great and vague tradition, a formless mass of literature:  by the time Solon was making laws for Athens, and Pisistratus was laying the foundations of her stable government and greatness.

And then you were officially canonized.  Solon, Pisistratus, or one of the Pisistratidae, determined that you should be, not a vague tradition and wandering songs any longer, but the Bible of the Hellenes.  From an obscure writer of the Alexandrian period we get a tale of Pisistratus sending to all the cities of Greece for copies of Homeric poems, paying for them well; collating them, editing them out of a vast confusion; and producing at last out of the matter thus obtained, a single more or less articulate Iliad.  From Plato and others we get hints leading to the supposition that an authorized state copy was prepared; that it was ordained that the whole poem should be recited at the Panathenaic Festivals by relays of Rhapsodoi; this state copy being in the hands of a prompter whose business it was to see there should be no transgression by the chanters.* The wandering songs of the old blind minstrel have become the familiar Sacred Book of the brightest-minded people in Greece.

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* For a detailed account of all this see De Quincey’s essay Homer
and the Homeridae.
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Some sixty years pass, and now look what happens.  A mighty Power in Asia arranges a punitive expedition against turbulent islanders and coast-dwellers on its western border.  But an old blind minstrel has been having his way with these:  and the punitive expedition is to be of the kind not where you punish, but where you are punished;—­has been suggesting to them, from the Olympus of his sacrosanct inspiration, the idea of great racial achievement, till it has become a familiar thing, ideally, in their hearts.—­The huge armies and the fleets come on; Egypt has gone down; Lydia has gone down; the whole world must go down before them.  But there is an old blind minstrel, long since grown Olympian in significance, and throned aloft beside Nephelegereta Zeus, chanting in every Greek ear and heart.  Greeks rise in some sort to repel the Persian:  Athens and Sparta, poles apart in every feeling and taste, find that under the urge of archaic hexameters