Again, comparing the epigrams with the legends and anecdotes told in the "Lives of Homer," one can hardly doubt that they were the chief source from which these "Lives" were derived. Thus Epigram 4 mentions a blind poet, a native of Aeolian Smyrna, through which flows the water of the sacred Meles. Here is doubtless the source of the chief incident of the Herodotean "Life," the birth of Homer, named Son of the Meles to conceal a scandalous affair between his mother and an older man who had been appointed her guardian. The epithet "Aeolian" implies high antiquity, inasmuch as according to Herodotus and Pausanias, Smyrna became Ionian not too long before 688 BC. Naturally the Ionians had their own version of the story, a version which made Homer come out with the first Athenian colonists.