Thus conflicting would have been the answers returned in different portions of the Grecian world to any questions respecting the person of Homer. But there were a poetical gens (fraternity or guild) in the Ionic island of Chios, who, if the question had been put to them, would have answered in another manner. To them, Homer was not a mere antecedent man, of kindred nature with themselves, but a divine or semi-divine eponymus and progenitor, whom they worshipped in their gentile sacrifices, and in whose ascendent name and glory the individuality of every member of the gens was merged. The compositions of each separate Homêrid, or the combined efforts of many of them in conjunction, were the works of Homer: the name of the individual bard perishes and his authorship is forgotten, but the common gentile father lives and grows in renown, from generation to generation, by the genius of his self-renewing sons. Such was the conception entertained of Homer by the poetical gens called Homêridæ, or Homêrids; and in the general obscurity of the whole case, I lean towards it as the most plausible conception. Homer is not only the reputed author of the various compositions emanating from the gentile members, but also the recipient of the many different legends and of the divine genealogy, which it pleases their imagination to confer upon him. Such manufacture of fictitious personality, and such perfect incorporation of the entities of religion and fancy with the real world, is a process familiar, and even habitual, in the retrospective vision of the Greeks.[236] [236] Even Aristotle ascribed to Homer a divine parentage: a damsel of the isle of Ios, pregnant by some god, was carried off by pirates to Smyrna, at the time of the Ionic emigration, and there gave birth to the poet (Aristotel. ap. Plutarch. Vit. Homer. p. 1059). Plato seems to have considered Homer as having been an itinerant rhapsode, poor and almost friendless (Republ. p. 600). It is to be remarked, that the poetical gens here brought to view, the Homêrids, are of indisputable authenticity. Their existence and their considerations were maintained down to the historical times in the island of Chios.[237] If the Homêrids were still conspicuous, even in the days of Akusilaus, Pindar, Hellanikus, and Plato, when their productive invention had ceased, and when they had become only guardians and distributors, in common with others, of the treasures bequeathed by their predecessors,—far more exalted must their position have been three centuries before, while they were still the inspired creators of epic novelty, and when the absence of writing assured to them the undisputed monopoly of their own compositions.[238] [237] Pindar, Nem. ii. 1, and Scholia; Akusilaus, Fragm. 31, Didot; Harpokration, v. Ὁμήριδαι; Hellanic. Fr. 55, Didot; Strabo, xiv. p. 645.