What the ... how the...
Did some young boys really kill Homer? Well ... sort of ... they didn’t actually KILL him ... they just presented him with a riddle that caused his fine tuned brain to go into fugue ... you know ... a feedback loop ... a spiral regression ... a fatal confusion overload.
Okay ... here’s what they say happened:
Presumably, Homer was told by an oracle at an early stage of his life that he would die on the island of Ios from an illness caused by a riddle posed to him by some boys ... as strange as this may seem, it was “common knowledge” in Classical times that when Homer was on the island of Ios he encountered some Acadian boys returning from a day of fishing ... when Homer inquired as to how their luck had been; the boys replied, “The ones we caught we left behind, the ones we missed we carry” ... the boys were jokingly referring to the fact that the fishing had been unproductive and that they had spent their idle time removing lice from their clothing ... Homer was so distraught by the incomprehensible answer the boys had given him to a seemingly simple question that he fell into a depression so deep that he could not eat or sleep and finally died ... the people of Ios erected a grave marker that said, “Here the earth conceals that sacred head, adorner of warrior heroes, the godly Homer.”