See the comment of Klausen, Agam. p. 143. seq.-Notice of the household interpreters of dreams δόμων ὀνειρόμαντες and again κριταὶ τῶν ὀνειράτων (Choep. 36. 39), is found in several parts of Æschylus, who loved to furnish traits of these old superstitions. In the Persians we find Atossa speaking of the τῶν ἐνυπνίων κριτὴς (226) as a person of supernatural powers. But those men of great original genius whose fame spread rapidly, and who probably found superior enjoyment in the independence of a wandering life, not content with the patronage of a single prince, or the admiration of a single people, moved perpetually from land to land, enhancing at once their glory and experience. We in fact discover in Homer, Pindar, and other original poets proofs that the flowers from which they collected the honey of their melodies grew not all on one spot. Odysseus was a type of the bard who sang his adventures, and looking still further back we find the Thracian Thamyris, whom the Muses were said to have punished for his vanity, penetrating into the obscurest parts of Peloponnesos, protected by the sanctity of his character and the reverence due to his profession.[986] With respect to Homer, both ancient tradition and the form and spirit of his poems, require us to consider him in this light, though there is no ground for supposing him with Payne Knight to have celebrated the different heroes of Greece for the purpose of ingratiating himself with their descendants. Footnote 986: Iliad β. 590. sqq. Payne Knight, Proleg. § 74. Those writers who imagine the works of Homer to have been composed fortuitously by a club of poets, all actuated by a blind instinct to produce a number of parts which, when completed, should fit as well together as the several members of a statue, are necessarily desirous to establish two points: first, that the Aoidoi recited their works from memory, and that because, secondly, the art of writing was unknown. By far too much ingenuity has already been expended on this question to allow it to be any longer tempting from its novelty. Wolff and Heyne have obtained all the credit they sought by their visionary hypothesis, and the echoes of their scepticism are not yet silenced in the academies and universities. The argument, derived from the practice of the Rhapsodists, of repeating from memory, is attended by two inconveniences: first, it cannot be shown that the order arose before the art of writing was common; second, these recitations were equally made from memory, not only in the age of Pericles, but down to the latest period of their flourishing. It may, therefore, without the slightest risk to the argument, be granted the academic sceptics that the Rhapsodists recited from memory, even when we know with certainty that they learned the poems from written copies.