later it became a main channel
through which Europe received enlightenment. May not Crete
have played a like part in ancient times? I mean, is it
not highly probable? May it not have been--as Sicily was
to be--a mainly European country under Egyptian influence,
and a seat of Egyptianized culture?

Let us, then, suppose Homer a Greek, born early in the ninth
century B.C., taken in childhood to Crete, and brought up there
in contact with cultural conditions higher than any that obtained
elsewhere among his own people.

But genius stirs in him, and he is Greek altogether in the deep
enthusiasms proper to genius: so presently he leaves Crete and
culture, to wander forth among the islands singing.--

_En delo tote Proton ego Kai Homeros aoidoi
Melpomen,_

says Hesiod: "Then first in Delos did I and Homer, two Aoidoi,
perform as musical reciters." Delos, of course, is a small island
in the Cyclades.

He would have had some training, it is likely, as an Aoidos: a
good founding in the old stories which were their stock in trade,
and which all pointed to the past glory of his race. In Crete he
had seen the culture of the Egyptians; in Asia Minor, the
strength and culture of the Lydians; now in his wanderings
through the isles he saw the disunion and rudeness of the Greeks.
But the old traditions told him of a time when Greeks acted
together and were glorious: when they went against, and
overthrew, a great West Asian Power strong and cultured like the
Lydians and Egyptians. Why should not he create again the glory
that once was Greece?

_Menin aeide, Thea, Peleiadeo Achileos!_

--Goddess, aid me to sing the wrath (and grandeur) of a Greek
hero!--Let the Muses help him, and he will remind his people of
an ancient greatness of their own: of a time when they were
united, and triumphed over these now so much stronger peoples!
So Dante, remembering ancient Rome, evoked out of the past and
future a vision of United Italy; so in the twelfth century a
hundred Welsh bards sand of Arthur.

I think he would have created out of his own imagination
the life he pictures for his brazen-coated Achaeans. It
does not follow, with any great poet, that he is bothering
much with historical or other accuracies, or sticking very
closely even to tradition. Enough that the latter should give
him a direction; as Poet-creator, he can make the details
for himself. Homer's imagination would have been guided,
I take it,