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Bouguereau paints the eyes open and useless under a white fillet, with the arm of a lyre against the shoulder. The Homeric Hymn to Apollo gives its singer no name, only a blind man who lives on rocky Chios.

An old man comes up the hill road at evening, one hand on a boy's shoulder, the other on a staff. The dogs reach him first. That is how a singer arrived in eighth-century Greece: on foot, blind or half blind as often as not, owning a lyre and a memory, trading verse for supper and a bed. The towns knew the trade. A good singer could take a wedding, a funeral, or a king's feast and hang the right song on it. The best carried something larger, a war at Troy from four centuries back, and could sing any hour of it on request, the way a ferryman knows any bend of his river. The war itself sits at the edge of history. There was a Troy; it burned more than once; a Greek raid in the late Bronze Age is not unlikely and not proven. What is certain is what the singers built on it: the Iliad, 15,000 lines about 52 days of the war's tenth year, and the Odyssey, one soldier's 10-year commute home. The verse is engineered for memory. Fixed phrases snap in where the meter needs them, the wine-dark sea, swift-footed Achilles, rosy-fingered dawn, spare parts a performer reaches for without thinking while the next line assembles itself. Nobody composes like that on paper. It is the fingerprint of an art built entirely out of breath. The scale of what memory carried is worth stopping on. The Odyssey adds another 12,000 lines to the Iliad's tally; recited straight through, either poem fills days. Athens eventually regulated the matter like a public utility. At the great Panathenaic festival the poems were performed complete, by relays of professional reciters, each man picking up the line where the last stopped, in fixed order, by law. Schoolboys got them whole. A character in Xenophon mentions, without drama, that his father made him memorize all of Homer, and gentlemen at dinner could be tested on it the way a later age tested scripture. A civilization ran its memory through two poems, and the poems ran through everyone. Then, around 750 BC, breath met the alphabet. The Greeks had just refitted Phoenician letters with vowels, and someone, somewhere, used the new tool to pin down the two great poems. Who that someone was, nobody could say even then. Seven cities claimed Homer's birth; an old hymn offers only a blind man from rocky Chios; the name may have belonged to one poet, or to a guild of them, or to the trade itself. The Greeks did not much care. They made the poems their schoolbook, their scripture and their case law. Cities in border disputes cited the Iliad's catalog of ships as evidence. Alexander slept with a copy under his pillow, in a jeweled casket taken from Darius' baggage. Bouguereau painted the trade, not the legend, and sent it to the Salon of 1874. The picture shows an old singer between towns, and a hired boy with an empty basket and a fist of stones. Two half-naked youths sit on the rocks with a pack of dogs at their feet, and one of those dogs barks up at the singer's robe. Bouguereau had read his Odyssey, where dogs meet every stranger first and beggars are tested at the door. In 1870 a German businessman named Schliemann, who had believed the poems since childhood, dug into a mound in Turkey and found nine cities stacked like plates, one of them burned. The argument about which layer, if any, was Homer's Troy has run ever since. The basket in the painting is empty. The head above it holds Greece.