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with money, as part of a dowry. One presumes that this means that Homer had a daughter.
The Cypria,
however, was also sometimes thought to be the work of Hegesias of Troezen; little of it survives, and it is thus impossible to confirm the conjectural daughter.
    Accounts agree, however, on one important feature. The Poet was blind. The birthplace claim of Smyrna is bolstered by the contention that
homer,
in their dialect, means “blind” (though not, as in the description of the Cyclops, in
The Odyssey
). A section in the
Hymn to Delian
Apollo
is taken, by vague tradition, to be a self-description of Homer—or Melesigenes, as he was called before the Smyrnans christened him “Blindy”:
    â€œWho think ye, girls, is the sweetest singer that comes here, and in whom do you most delight?” Then answer, each and all, with one voice: “He is a blind man, and dwells in rocky Chios: his lays are evermore supreme.” As for me, I will carry your renown as far as I roam over the earth to the well-placed cities of man, and they will believe also; for indeed this thing is true.
    It seems that, rather than being born sightless, Homer went blind: cataracts, diabetic glaucoma, infection by the nematode
Toxocara.
The later poet Stesichorus was struck blind by the gods for slandering Helen, and only had his sight miraculously restored when he rewrote his work, insisting that Helen had not eloped. Instead, she had been spirited away to Egypt and replaced with a phantom fashioned of clouds. Stesichorus blamed Homer, and Homer’s version of events, for his temporary loss of sight. Presumably Homer’s blindness was occasioned by a similar infraction. If, after
The Iliad,
he was struck blind, then the blinding of Polyphemus the Cyclops in
The Odyssey
must supposedly be drawn from personal experience.
    The place of Homer’s death, thankfully, is barely in dispute: the island of Ios. Indeed, Homer himself was informed by a Pythian Sibyl that he would die on Ios, after hearing a children’s riddle. She referred to the island as the homeplace of his mother (but Nestor’s daughter came from Pylos, a good 150 miles away! One of the priestesses must be mistaken). Eventually Homer went to Ios, to stay with Creophylus. What qualities or creature comforts this Creophylus possessed that would make the bard travel to exactly the place where he had been warned that he would die must be left to the imagination. On the beach he met with some children who had been fishing. When he asked them if they had caught anything, they replied, “All that we caught we left behind and we are carrying all that we did not catch.” Nonplussed, he asked for an explanation, and was rewarded with the information that they were talking about their fleas. Suddenly remembering the oracle and its dire warning about riddling kids, Homer composed his epitaph, and died three days later.
    At least we have the texts; the 27,803 lines that are “Homer.” But even these are susceptible to error. Despite the best efforts of the Homeridae, the texts were unstable, misremembered, interpolated. The librarians of Alexandria—Zenodotus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and Aristarchus—all later endeavored to fix the text, to stanch the ebb of letters. The two poems were divided into books, each poem into twenty-four books, exactly the number of letters in the Greek alphabet. No other recorded epics had such an elegant numerology. Earlier, Aristotle himself prepared an edition for Alexander, who placed it in a jewel-encrusted golden casket despoiled from King Darius at the battle of Arbela, with the words “But one thing in the world is worthy of so costly a repository.” But opulent boxes cannot preserve, nor can locks and keys keep back, the depredations of error. Before any of these scholars tried to secure
The
Iliad
and
The Odyssey,
less reverent hands had handled the manuscripts.
    The sixth-century B.C.E. Athenian