First, what kind of person Homer was, saith Spondanus, his statue teacheth, which Cedrenus describeth. The whole place we will describe that our relation may hold the better coherence, as Xylander converts it. “Then was the Octagonon at Constantinople consumed with fire; and the bath of Severus, that bore the name of Zeuxippus, in which there was much variety of spectacle, and splendour of arts; the works of all ages being conferred and preserved there, of marble, rocks, stones, and images of brass; to which this only wanted, that the souls of the persons they presented were not in them. Amongst these master-pieces and all-wit-exceeding workmanships stood Homer, as he was in his age, thoughtful and musing, his hands folded beneath his bosom, his beard untrimm’d and hanging down, the hair of his head in like sort thin on both sides before, his face with age and cares of the world, as these imagine, wrinkled and austere, his nose proportioned to his other parts, his eyes fixed or turned up to his eyebrows, like one blind, as it is reported he was.” (Not born blind, saith Vell. Paterculus, which he that imagines, saith he, is blind of all senses.) “Upon his under-coat he was attired with a loose robe, and at the base beneath his feet a brazen chain hung.” This was the statue of Homer, which in that conflagration perished. Another renowned statue of his, saith Lucian in his Encomion of Demosthenes, stood in the temple of Ptolemy, on the upper hand of his own statue. Cedrenus likewise remembereth a library in the palace of the king, at Constantinople, that contained a thousand a hundred and twenty books, amongst which there was the gut of a dragon of an hundred and twenty foot long, in which, in letters of gold, the Iliads and Odysseys of Homer were inscribed; which miracle, in Basiliscus the Emperor’s time, was consumed with fire.