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.

Now Crete is much nearer Egypt than the rest of Greece is; and
may very likely have shared in a measure of Egyptian culture at
the very beginning of the European manvantara, and even before.
Of course, in past cycles it had been a great center of culture
itself; but that was long ago, and I am not speaking of it. In
the tenth century A.D., three hundred years before civilization,
in our own cycle, had made its way from the West Asian Moslem
world into Christendom, Sicily belonged to Egypt and shared in
its refinement--was Moslem and highly civilized, while Europe
was Christian and barbarous;