Lycurgus, it is said, brought singers or manuscripts of your
poems into Sparta; because, blind minstrel, he had a mind to
make Sparta great-souled; and he knew that you were the man to
do it, if done it could be. Then for about two hundred and sixty
years, without much fuss to come into history, you were having
your way with your Greeks. Your music was ringing in the ears of
mothers; their unborn children were being molded to the long
roll of your hexameters. There came to be manuscripts of you in
every city: corrupt enough, many of them, forgeries, many of
them; lays fudged up and fathered on you by venal Rhapsodoi,
to chant in princely houses whose ancestors it was a good
speculation to praise. You were everywhere in Greece: a great
and vague tradition, a formless mass of literature: by the time
Solon was making laws for Athens, and Pisistratus was laying the
foundations of her stable government and greatness.

And then you were officially canonized. Solon, Pisistratus, or
one of the Pisistratidae, determined that you should be, not a
vague tradition and wandering songs any longer, but the Bible of
the Hellenes. From an obscure writer of the Alexandrian period
we get a tale of Pisistratus sending to all the cities of Greece
for copies of Homeric poems, paying for them well; collating
them, editing them out of a vast confusion; and producing at
last out of the matter thus obtained, a single more or less
articulate Iliad. From Plato and others we get hints leading to
the supposition that an authorized state copy was prepared; that
it was ordained that the whole poem should be recited at the
Panathenaic Festivals by relays of Rhapsodoi; this state copy
being in the hands of a prompter whose business it was to see