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.

------
* For a detailed account of all this see De Quincey's essay Homer
and the Homeridae.
------

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 and in the face of this common
danger, they can co-operate after a fashion. The world is in a
tumult and threatens to fall; but behind all the noise and
ominous thunder, by heaven, you can hear the roll of hexameters,
and an old blind sorrow-stricken bard chanting. The soul of a
nation is rising, the beat of her wings keeping time to the music
of olden proud resounding lines. Who led the Grecian fleet at
Salamis?--Not Spartan Eurygiades, but an old blind man dead these
centuries. Who led the victors at Marathon? Not sly Athenian
Miltiades, but an old dead man who had only words for his wealth:
blind Maeonides chanting; and with his chanting marshaling on
the roll of his hexameters mightier heroes than ever a Persian
eye could see: the host that fought at Ilion; the creatures of
his brain; Polymechanos Odysseus, and Diomedes and Aias;
Podargos Achilles; Anas andron Agamemnon.

The story of the Persian Wars comes to