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Those who maintain the Homeric poems to have been written from the beginning, rest their case, not upon positive proofs, nor yet upon the existing habits of society with regard to poetry-for they admit generally that the Iliad and Odyssey were not read, but recited and heard,-but upon the supposed necessity that there must have been manuscripts to ensure the preservation of the poems-the unassisted memory of reciters being neither sufficient nor trustworthy.
. . .Moreover, there is a strong positive reason for believing that the bard was under no necessity of refreshing his memory by consulting a manuscript; for if such had been the fact, blindness would have been a disqualification for the profession, which we know that it was not, as well from the example of Demodokus, in the Odyssey, as from that of the blind bard of Chios, in the Hymn to the Delian Apollo, whom Thucydides, as well as the general tenor of Grecian legend, identifies with Homer himself.
. . .There seems, therefore, ground for conjecturing that (for the use of this newly-formed and important, but very narrow class), manuscripts of the Homeric poems and other old epics,-the Thebais and the Cypria, as well as the Iliad and the Odyssey,-began to be compiled towards the middle of the seventh century (B.C. 1); and the opening of Egypt to Grecian commerce,