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76 ANCIENT GREECE. [OHAP.YI.of their power lay in this very circumstance. They enteredand the soul of the nation. If we were betterthe memoryacquainted with the forms of social life, which were prevalent in the cities of Ionia, and with which poetry necessarilystood in the closest union, we should be able to judge moredefinitely of its effects. The nature of things seems to show,the mother country, they must have beenthat there, as insung at festivals and assemblies, whether publicor private.This custom was so deeply fixed in the nation, that it continued longafter these poems were committed to writing,and were thus accessible to a reader, and in fact, that it wasdeclamation which continued to give them their full effect.We need but call to mind the remark, which Ion 3the rhapsodist,makes to Socrates; 1 "I see the hearers now weepand now rise in passion, and appearas if deprived of sensation." If the rhapsodists,in an age when all that was divinein their art had passed away, and when they sung only formoney, could produce such effects, how great must havebeen their influence in the period of their greatest glory!Since the time of Homer, and chiefly through him,great changesin the relations of the class of bards necessarily took place and the traces of such changes are still;distinct Originally they sang only their own compositions,but now it became the custom to sing those of others, whichthey had committed to memory. In that part of Asia whichwas inhabited by Greeks, and especially at Chios, whereHomer is said to have 2 lived, a particularschool of bardswas formed which, even among the ancients, were knownby the name of the Homeridse. Whether these consistedoriginally of the family relations of the poet, is a question ofno interest ; it became the name of those rhapsodists, whosang the poems of Homer, or those attributed to him. Theyare therefore distinguished from the earlier rhapsodists bythis, that they sangliot their own works, but those of an-1Plat iv. Op. p. 190.2According tp the well-known passage in the hymn to Apollo, cited byThucydides, iii. 104. "A blind man he;dwells on the rocky Chios ; and hisso-ngs are the first among^ men/' Eyen if this hymn be not by Homer, (the ageof Thueydides esteemed it certainly his,) it must hare been composed in anage which approached that of Homer. That Homer was an inhabitant ofChios, is an account, for the truth of which we have no guaranty but tradition*But that tradition is a very ancient one, and the account contains nothingwhich is in itself improbable, or which should induce us to doubt its accuracy.