The Blind Man Who Dwells in Rocky Chios

We come now to the claim that has done more for the island's reputation than mastic, wine, and shipping combined, and which cannot be proved.

There existed on Chios, certainly by the sixth century BC and probably a good deal earlier, a guild or clan called the Homeridae — the sons of Homer. They were professional rhapsodes: reciters, performers, and to some degree custodians and editors of the Homeric poems. They claimed literal descent from the poet. They performed at festivals across the Greek world. They appear to have enjoyed some recognised authority in matters Homeric, in the way that a family of hereditary priests enjoys authority over a cult. And they were based on Chios.

That the Homeridae existed is not in dispute. Pindar mentions them, in a passage where he compares his own art to theirs. Plato mentions them, with the faint dryness he reserves for professional interpreters of poetry. Later scholars discussed them at length. Strabo, listing the reasons why Chios might claim Homer, puts them first.

What is in dispute is what their existence proves. A guild claiming descent from a poet is evidence that the guild existed and made the claim. It is not evidence that the claim is true.

The strongest single piece of evidence is a passage in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. Near the end of the Delian portion of that poem, the singer breaks off and addresses the girls of Delos directly. If ever, he says, a stranger comes here and asks you who is the sweetest of the singers who visit you, and in whom you delight most — answer him, all of you, with one voice, and speak well of me:

Thucydides quotes these lines and takes them, without hesitation, as Homer speaking about himself. The passage is certainly early — seventh or sixth century BC on most reckonings — which means that by that date, somebody composing in the full Homeric manner, at the greatest religious gathering of the Ionian world, was claiming a Chian identity, or was understood to be claiming one, and expected the claim to be believed.

That is genuinely something. It is not proof, because "Homer" in modern scholarship is understood less as a biography than as the name attached to a tradition, and because the singer of the Hymn may have been making an artful gesture rather than a factual statement. But the surrounding circumstances are suggestive. The Homeric dialect is predominantly Ionic with an Aeolic substratum, which fits the Chios–Smyrna region very well and fits Rhodes, Argos, and Athens rather badly. The Homeridae were a real institution and no comparable institution is attested anywhere else. And the seven cities that claimed the poet — Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodes, Argos and Athens, in the usual version of the epigram — resolve, when you weigh them, into a real contest between the first two, which happen to be neighbours. The most economical ancient reconciliation, still occasionally floated, was that Homer was born at Smyrna and worked on Chios.

Chios has never been troubled by any of this.

At Vrontados, on the coast a few kilometres north of the town, there is an ancient monument cut from the living rock: a squared platform with a carved seat, traces of relief decoration at its sides, and a view over the sea toward Asia Minor. It is called the Daskalopetra, the Teacher's Rock, and local tradition holds it to be the seat from which Homer taught his pupils.

It is almost certainly nothing of the kind. The surviving traces of flanking lions, the form of the seat, and the sixth-century date indicated by the workmanship all point to a rock-cut shrine of Cybele, the great mother goddess of Anatolia, whose cult crossed to the islands early and whose iconography always includes the lions. The Homeric monument of Chios is, in all probability, an Anatolian goddess's throne.

This has changed nothing. People sit on it and are photographed. Schoolchildren are taken there. And there is something so exactly right about the whole situation — a Greek island's Homeric shrine turning out on inspection to be a piece of Asia Minor — that one is tempted to let it stand.

The association had hard consequences. Prestige in the Greek world was convertible into influence, into alliances, into the right to speak first at a festival, and Chios spent centuries converting it. The island put a sphinx on its coinage, the riddling beast being associated both with Anatolian art and with the enigmatic authority of poetry, and kept it there, with remarkable consistency, for the better part of five hundred years. Chian delegations arrived at Delphi and Olympia trailing the reputation of the poet's island. And in the Hellenistic period the island produced its own contribution to the argument: the marble relief known as the Apotheosis of Homer, signed by Archelaus of Priene and now in the British Museum, in which Homer sits enthroned like a god, crowned by Time and the World, attended by the personified Iliad and Odyssey kneeling at his feet, while the whole apparatus of literature — History, Poetry, Tragedy, Comedy, Nature, Virtue, Memory, Faith and Wisdom — arranges itself in adoration on the tiers above.

Whether or not Chios produced Homer, Chios understood what it had, and marketed it for a thousand years.