As he was liberal to the bards, they did not forget his merits.
Moreover, he wrote an article in the Edinburgh Review of July 1805 criticizing Sir William Gill's Topography of Troy, and these circumstances led Lord Byron to refer to him in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers as "the travell'd thane, Athenian Aberdeen."
It was also used by a class of bards or itinerant soothsayers known by the name of vates, of whom the most famous was one Marcius, and in the "Fescennine verses," as sung at harvest-homes and weddings, which gave expression to the coarse gaiety of the people and to their strong tendency to personal raillery and satiric comment.
The philological analysis of Wolf and his successors had raised doubts as to the very existence of Homer, and at one time the main current of scholarly opinion had set strongly in the direction of the belief that the Iliad and the Odyssey were in reality but latter-day collections of divers recitals that had been handed down by word of mouth from one generation to another of bards through ages of illiteracy.
If it were sung by bards, it is unlikely it would have stayed as it was.
