procured him an audience in the council. Having made the speech, with the

purport of which our author has forgotten to acquaint us, he retired, and

left them to debate respecting the answer to be given to his proposal.

The greater part of the assembly seemed favourable to the poet's demand,

but one man observed that "if they were to feed Homers, they would be

encumbered with a multitude of useless people." "From this circumstance,"

says the writer, "Melesigenes acquired the name of Homer, for the Cumans

call blind men Homers."(7) With a love of economy, which shows how

similar the world has always been in its treatment of literary men, the

pension was denied, and the poet vented his disappointment in a wish that

Cumoea might never produce a poet capable of giving it renown and glory.

At Phocoea, Homer was destined to experience another literary distress.

One Thestorides, who aimed at the reputation of poetical genius, kept

Homer in his own house, and allowed him a pittance, on condition of the

verses of the poet passing in his name. Having collected sufficient poetry

to be profitable, Thestorides, like some would-be-literary publishers,

neglected the man whose brains he had sucked, and left him. At his

departure, Homer is said to have observed: "O Thestorides, of the many

things hidden from the knowledge of man, nothing is more unintelligible

than the human heart."(8)

Homer continued his career of difficulty and distress, until some Chian

merchants, struck by the similarity of the verses they heard him recite,

acquainted him with the fact that Thestorides was pursuing a profitable

The Iliad of Homer