ii. 498) to designate one of the numerous Bœotian towns, we have an

isolated indication of the existence in the heroic times of the germ of the names _Greece_ and _Greek_, which afterwards ascended to, and still retain, such extraordinary fame.

The Homeric text will afford us means of investigation, more or less, for the greater part of these names, but the main thread of the inquiry runs with these five; Pelasgians, Hellenes, Danaans, Argeians, Achæans.

In conjunction with the present subject, I shall consider what light is thrown by Homer on the relations of the Greeks with other races not properly Greek: the Lycians, the Phœnicians, the Sicels, the Egyptians, the people of Cyprus, and finally the Persians. The name of the Leleges will be considered in conjunction with that of the Caucones.

FOOTNOTES:

[122] Cic. de Nat. Deor. i. 4.

[123] Grote’s Hist. vol. ii. pp. 349-51, part ii. ch. 2.

[124] Preface p. ix.

[125] Preface p. xvii.

SECT. II.

_The Pelasgians; and with these_,

_a._ Arcadians. _b._ Γραικοὶ or Græci. _c._ Ionians. _d._ Athenians. _e._ Egyptians. _f._ Thraces. _g._ Caucones. _h._ Leleges.

It will be most convenient to begin with the case of the Pelasgians: and the questions we shall have to investigate will be substantially reducible to the following heads:

1. Are the Pelasgians essentially Greek?

2. If so, what is their relation to the Hellenes, and to the integral Greek nation?

3. What elements did they contribute to the formation of the composite body thus called?

4. What was their language?

5. What was the derivation of their name?

6. By what route did they come into Greece?

The direct evidence of the Homeric poems with respect to the Pelasgians is scattered and faint. It derives however material aid from various branches of tradition, partly conveyed in the Homeric poems, and partly extraneous to them, particularly religion, language, and pursuits. Evidence legitimately drawn from these latter sources, wherever it is in the nature of circumstantial proof, is far superior in authority to such literary traditions as are surrounded, at their visible source, with circumstances of uncertainty.

_The Pelasgians._

I. The first passage, with which we have to deal, is that portion of the Catalogue of the Greek armament, where Homer introduces us to the contingent of Achilles in the following lines:

Νῦν αὖ τοὺς ὅσσοι τὸ Πελασγικὸν Ἄργος ἔναιον, Οἵ τ’ Ἄλον οἵ τ’ Ἀλόπην οἵ τε Τρηχῖν’ ἐνέμοντο, Οἵ τ’ εἶχον Φθίην ἠδ’ Ἑλλάδα καλλιγύναικα, Μυρμιδόνες δὲ καλεῦντο καὶ Ἕλληνες καὶ Ἀχαιοὶ, Τῶν αὖ πεντήκοντα νεῶν ἦν ἀρχὸς Ἀχιλλεύς[126].

All evidence goes to show, that Thessaly stood in a most important relation to the infant life of the Greek races; whether we consider it as the seat of many most ancient legends; as dignified by the presence of Dodona, the highest seat of religious tradition and authority to the Greeks; as connected with the two ancient names of Helli and Pelasgi: or lastly in regard to the prominence it retained even down to and during the historic age in the constitution of the Amphictyonic Council[127]. All these indications are in harmony with the course of Greek ethnological tradition.

Now the Catalogue of the Greek armament is divided into three great sections.

The first comprises Continental Greece, with the islands immediately adjacent to the coast, and lying south of Thessaly. The second consists of the Greek islands of the Ægean. The third is wholly Thessalian: and it begins with the lines which have been quoted.

_The Pelasgians: Pelasgic Argos._

What then does Homer mean us to understand by the phrase τὸ Πελασγικὸν Ἄργος in this passage? Is it

1. A mere town, or town and district, like Alos, Alope, and others which follow; or is it

2. A country comprising several or many such?

And if the latter, does it describe

1. That country only over which Peleus reigned, and which supplied the Myrmidon division; or

2. A more extended country?

First let us remark the use of the article. It is not the manner of Homer to employ the article with the proper names of places. We may be sure that it carries with it a distinctive force: as in the Trojan Catalogue he employs it to indicate a particular race or body of Pelasgians[128] apart from others. Now the distinctive force of the article here may have either or both of two bearings.

1. It may mark off the Argos of the Pelasgians from one or more other countries or places bearing the name of Argos.

2. Even independently of the epithet, the article may be rightly employed, if Argos itself be not strictly a proper name, but rather a descriptive word indicating the physical character of a given region. Thus ‘Scotland’ is strictly a proper name, ‘Lowlands’ a descriptive word of this nature: and the latter takes the article where the former does not require or even admit it. And now let us proceed to make our selection between the various alternatives before us.

Whichever of the two bearings we give to the article, it seems of itself to preclude the supposition that a mere town or single settlement can be here intended: for nowhere does Homer give the article to a name of that class.

Secondly, in almost every place where Homer speaks of an Argos, he makes it plain that he does not mean a mere town or single settlement, but a country including towns or settlements within it. The exceptions to this rule are rare. In Il. iv. 52 we have one of them, where he combines Argos with Sparta and Mycenæ, and calls all three by the name of cities. The line Il. ii. 559 probably supplies another. But in a later Section[129] the general rule will be fully illustrated.

It will also clearly appear, that the name Argos is in fact a descriptive word, not a proper name, and is nearly equivalent to our ‘Lowlands’ or to the Italian ‘campagna.’

Thirdly: in many other places of the Catalogue, Homer begins by placing in the front, as it were, the comprehensive name which overrides and includes the particular names that are to follow; and then, without any other distinctive mark than the use of the faint enclitic copulative τε, proceeds to enumerate parts included within the whole which he has previously named. Thus for instance

οἱ δ’ Εὔβοιαν ἔχον ... Χαλκίδα τ’ Εἰρετρίαν τε κ.τ.λ.

v. 535, 6.

‘Those who held Eubœa, both Chalcis and Eretria’.... Or in the English idiom we may perhaps write more correctly, ‘Those who held Eubœa, that is to say Chalcis, and Eretria’ ... and the rest.

Again,

οἱ δ’ εἶχον κοιλὴν Λακεδαίμονα κητώεσσαν Φᾶρίν τε Σπάρτην τε ...

v. 581, 2.

‘Those who held channelled Laconia, abounding in wild beasts, namely, the several settlements of Pharis and Sparta,’ and the rest.

So with Arcadia, v. 603, and Ithaca, v. 631.

We may therefore consider the verse 681,

Νῦν αὖ τοὺς, ὅσσοι τὸ Πελασγικὸν Ἄργος ἔναιον·

as prefatory, and I print it, accordingly, so as to mark a pause.

But, again, is it prefatory only to the division of Achilles, and is it simply the integer expressing the whole territory from which his contingent was drawn, or is it prefatory to the whole remainder of the Catalogue, ending at v. 759, and does it include all the nine territorial divisions described therein? There is no grammatical or other reason for the former alternative, while various considerations recommend the latter.

There is no sign in the poems of any connection between Achilles with his Myrmidons, or between the kingdom of his father Peleus, and any particular part of Thessaly under the name of Argos, or Pelasgic Argos. Although the division of Achilles did not embrace the whole of the Phthians[130], yet Phthia appears to be the proper description of his territory, so far as it has a collective name: and there are signs, which will be hereafter considered, that the name of Phthia itself was embraced and included within the wider range of another name.

Again, the Pelasgic name, as will be further observed, is not in Homer specially connected with the South of Thessaly, where the realm of Peleus lay, but rather with the North, the towns and settlements of which are enumerated, not in the first, but in the later paragraphs of this portion of the Catalogue.

In the invocation of the Sixteenth Book, to which reference will shortly be made, Achilles at once addresses Jupiter as Pelasgic, and as dwelling afar (τηλόθι ναίων): therefore, the special Thessalian seat of the god could not be in the dominions of Peleus.

We have observed, again, in the earlier parts of the catalogue various collective names, afterwards explained distributively, for the various contingents: but there is not one of this class of names employed for any of the Eight Divisions which follow that of Achilles. They all seem to bear the form of particular distributive enumerations, belonging to the comprehensive head of Pelasgic Argos or Thessaly.

There is also something in the obvious break in the Catalogue, signified by the words

νῦν αὖ τοὺς ὅσσοι ...

which indicate, as it were, a completely new starting point. There is nothing else resembling them. They form the introduction to a new chapter of the lists, after a geographical transition from the islands: and there is no reason for these marked words, if Pelasgic Argos was either a mere town district, or a local sovereignty, but a very good reason, if Pelasgic Argos meant that great integral portion of the Greek territory, the vale of Thessaly, the particular parts of which the Poet was about to set forth in so much detail.

It may therefore be inferred, that the epithet Πελασγικὸν is applied by Homer to the Thessalian vale collectively, as it is contained between the mountains of Pindus to the west, Œta and Olympus to the north, Othrys to the south, and Ossa or the sea to the east. We might, without geographical error, translate the phrase τὸ Πελασγικὸν Ἄργος of the second Iliad by that name of Thessaly[131], which the country afterwards acquired: but the idea which it properly indicates to us, is, _that Argos which had been settled by the Pelasgians_.

It is the only geographical epithet which, applied to the name Argos, belongs to the north of Greece: and it is so applied by way of distinction and opposition to other uses of the name Argos in other parts of the poems, which we shall hereafter have to examine, namely, the Achaic and the Iasian Argos.

_The Pelasgians: Dodona._

II. Perhaps the most solemn invocation of Jupiter as the great deity of the Greeks in the whole of the Poems is where Achilles, sending forth Patroclus to battle, prays that glory may be given him. It runs thus (Il. xvi. 233-5):

Ζεῦ ἄνα, Δωδωναῖε, Πελασγικὲ, τηλόθι ναίων, Δωδώνης μεδέων δυσχειμέρου· ἀμφὶ δέ σ’ Ἕλλοι σοὶ ναίουσ’ ὑποφῆται ἀνιπτόποδες χαμαιεῦναι.

It seems not too much to say upon this remarkable passage, that it shows us, as it were, the nation pitching its first altar upon its first arrival in the country. It bears witness that those who brought the worship of Dodonæan Jupiter were Pelasgians, as well as that the spot, which they chose for the principal seat of their worship, was Dodona. For the appeal of Achilles on this occasion is evidently the most forcible that he has it in his power to make, and is addressed to the highest source of Divine power that he knew.

It has been debated, but apparently without any conclusive result, what was the site of the Dodona so famous in the after-times of Greece[132]. It seems clear, however, that it was a Dodona to the westward of Pindus, and belonging to Thesprotia or Molossia. But this plainly was not the position of the Dodona we have now before us. For in a passage of the Catalogue Homer distinctly places this Dodona in Thessaly, giving it the same epithet, δυσχείμερος, as Achilles applies to it in Il. xvi. Gouneus, he says, was followed by the Enienes and Perrhæbi,

οἱ περὶ Δωδώνην δυσχείμερον οἴκι’ ἔθεντο, οἵ τ’ ἀμφ’ ἱμερτὸν Τιταρήσιον ἔργ’ ἐνέμοντο[133].

Both the name of the Perrhæbi and that of the river Titaresius fix the Dodona of Homer in the north of Thessaly. And the character assigned to this Titaresius, so near Dodona, as a branch of Styx, ‘the mighty adjuration of the gods,’ well illustrates the close connection between that river, by which the other deities were to swear, and Jupiter, who was their chief, and was in a certain sense the administrator of justice among them. In the Odyssey, indeed, Ulysses, in his fictitious narrations to Eumæus and Penelope, represents himself as having travelled from Thesprotia to consult the oracle of Jupiter, that was delivered from a lofty oak[134]. But no presumption of nearness can be founded on this passage such as to justify our assuming the existence of a separate Dodona westward of the mountains in the Homeric age: and there was no reason why Ulysses should not represent himself as travelling through the passes of Mount Pindus[135] from the Ambracian gulf into Thessaly to learn his fate. Nor upon the other hand is there any vast difficulty in adopting the supposition which the evidence in the case suggests, that the oracle of Dodonæan Jupiter may have changed its seat before the historic age. The evidence of Homer places it in Thessaly, and Homer is, as we shall see, corroborated by Hesiod. After them, we hear nothing of a Dodona having its seat in Thessaly, but much of one on the western side of the peninsula. As in later times we find Perrhæbi and Dolopes to the westward of Pindus, whom Homer shows us only on the east, even so in the course of time the oracle may have travelled in the same direction[136]. It is highly improbable, from the manner in which the name is used, that there should have been two Greek Dodonas in the Homeric age.

However, the very passage before us indicates, that revolution had already laid its hand on this ancient seat of Greek religion. For though the Dodona of Homer was Pelasgic by its origin, its neighbourhood was now inhabited by a different race, the Selli or Helli, and these Helli were also the ὑποφῆται or ministers of the deity. While their rude and filthy habits of life mark them as probably a people of recent arrival, who had not themselves yet emerged from their highland home, and from the struggle with want and difficulty, into civilized life, still they had begun to encroach upon the Pelasgians with their inviting possessions and more settled habits, and had acquired by force or otherwise the control of the temple, though without obliterating the tradition of its Pelasgic origin. The very fact, that the Helli were at the time the ministers of Jupiter, tends to confirm the belief that the Pelasgians were those who originally established it; for how otherwise could the name of the Pelasgian race have found its way into an Hellenic invocation?

Thus, as before we found that what we term Thessaly is to Homer ‘the Argos of the Pelasgians,’ so we now find that people associated with the original and central worship of the Greek Jupiter, as having probably been the race to whom it owed its establishment.

And thus, though the Pelasgians were not politically predominant in Thessaly at the epoch of the _Troica_, yet Thessaly is Pelasgian Argos: though they were not possessed of the Dodonæan oracle, yet Jupiter of Dodona is Pelasgian Jupiter: two branches of testimony, the first of which exhibits them as the earliest known colonisers of the country, and the second as the reputed founders of the prime article of its religion.

We must not quit this subject without referring to the evidence of Hesiod, which, though second in importance to that of Homer, is before any other literary testimony. He refers twice to Dodona. Neither time does he appear to carry it to the westward. In one passage he connects it immediately with the Pelasgians;

Δωδώνην, φῆγόν τε, Πελασγῶν ἕδρανον, ἧκεν[137].

In the other passage, he associates it with the Hellic name through the medium of the territorial designation Hellopia:

ἐστί τις Ἑλλοπίη πολυλήϊος ἠδ’ εὐλείμων, ἔνθα τε Δωδώνη τις ἐπ’ ἐσχατίῃ πεπόλισται[138].

Thus, in exact accordance with Homer, he associates Dodona with two and only two names of race, the same two as those with which it is associated in the invocation of Achilles.

_Thessaly and the Southern Islands._

III. Next, we find in Homer a widely spread connection between Thessaly and the islands which form as it were the base of the Ægean sea.

From these islands he enumerates four contingents furnished to the Greek army:

1. From Crete, under Idomeneus (Il. ii. 645).

2. From Rhodes, under Tlepolemus (653).

3. From Syme, under Nireus (671).

4. From Nisyrus, the Calydnæ, and other minor islands, under Pheidippus and Antiphus (676).

1. As to Crete. Universal tradition connects the name of Deucalion with Thessaly. But he was the son, according to Homer, of Minos, who was the ruler or warden of Crete (Κρήτῃ ἐπίουρος, Il. xiii. 450): and he was also the father of Idomeneus, leader of the Cretans before Troy (Il. xiii. 452), and ruler over many of them (ibid.), but not, so far as appears, over the whole island.

Now Minos was not only king of all Crete, but son of Jupiter (ibid., and Od. xi. 568) by a Phœnician damsel of great note (Il. xiv. 321); we must therefore regard him, or his mother, as having come from Phœnicia into Crete. The inference would be, that Deucalion came from Crete to Thessaly, and that he, or Idomeneus his son, re-migrated to Crete. Homer does not indeed state that Deucalion was ever in Thessaly: but he indirectly supports the tradition both by placing Idomeneus in a different position in Crete from that of his grandfather Minos, and otherwise[139]. This supposition would at once reconcile the later tradition with Homer, and explain to us why the grandson of Minos only filled an inferior position.

Again, as we see that Thessaly is Pelasgic, and that the Thessalian Myrmidons are called Achæans, so likewise we find among the five nations of Crete both Pelasgians and Achæans[140]. Here, according to Strabo, Staphylus described these two races as inhabiting the plains, and Andron reported them, as also the Dorians, to have come from Thessaly: erroneously, says Strabo (x. 4., p. 476), making the mother city of the Dorians a mere colony from the Thessalians. And the ancient tradition which places the infant Jupiter in Crete (‘Jovis incunabula Creten’), concurs with the idea which the above-named facts would suggest, that the Pelasgians may have come, at least in part, from the southern islands of the Ægean.

2. As to Rhodes. Tlepolemus, its chieftain, is the son of Hercules, and of Astyochea, whom, in the course of his raids, he took from Ephyra by the river Selleeis. It is questioned which Ephyra, and which Selleeis, for of both there were several, these may have been. If they were in Thessaly[141], we have thus a line of connection established between Thessaly and Rhodes.

3. As to the contingent from Nisyrus, the Calydnæ, and Cos. Firstly, it was commanded by Pheidippus and Antiphus (678), sons of Thessalus, the son of Hercules. The connection between Hercules and Thessaly, which is agreeable to the general course of tradition, also harmonises with the most natural construction which can be put upon this passage of Homer: namely, that this Thessalus was the person who afterwards became the eponymist of Thessaly, that he was a native or inhabitant of the country, and that either he, or more probably his sons, were emigrants from it to the islands.

His name, latent for a time, may afterwards have attained to its elevation, as a means of connecting Thessaly with Hercules, when the descendants of that hero had become predominant in the South. Perhaps the appearance of the post-Homeric name ‘Doris’ may be explained in the same manner.

Secondly, Cos is described as the city of Eurypylus. This may mean a city which he had founded; or a city which was then actually under his dominion. Beyond all doubt, it indicates a very special connection of some kind between Cos and Eurypylus. Now, his name is mentioned without adjunct. Had he been a deceased founder of the city, he would probably have been called θεῖος like Thoas (Il. xiv. 230). If he was living, who was he? We have in the Iliad one very famous Eurypylus, who appears among the nine foremost of the Greek heroes (Il. vii. 167), and whose rank entitled him (xi. 818) to be called Διοτρεφής; an epithet confined, as is probable, to Kings[142]. Now although Homer allows himself, when he is dealing with secondary persons, to apply the same name to more than one individual, without always caring to discriminate between them, there is no instance in which he does this for a person of the class of Eurypylus. This probably, therefore, is the same Eurypylus, as meets us in other parts of the poem, the son of Euæmon. But from the Catalogue[143], it appears that he commanded the contingent from Ormenium in Thessaly. If then, the same person, who founded or had some special relation to Cos, was also the commander of a Thessalian force, here we have a new track of connection between Thessaly and the islands to the southward.

4. Nireus, named by Homer for his beauty alone, with his three ships from Syme, can scarcely be said to make an unit in the Greek catalogue.

With this one inconsiderable exception, we find in all the cases of island contingents a connection subsisting between them and Thessaly, and this connection not appearing to be mediate, along the line of mainland which reaches from Thessaly to within a short distance from Crete, but apparently maintained directly by the maritime route: a fact of importance in considering the probable extension and movement of the Pelasgic race, which we find existing in both regions. We know from Homer[144] that the southern islands were a common route connecting Greece with the East. There are also abundant traces of migration by the northern coast of the Ægean. Thus it is at both those gates of Greece, that we find the Pelasgian name subsisting in the time of Homer, when in the nearer vicinity of the centre of Achæan power it was already extinct.

_The Pelasgians._

IV. Again, I think we may trace the near connection between the Pelasgians and the Greek nation in the laudatory epithets with which the former are mentioned by Homer. We must here keep in mind on the one hand the extraordinary skill and care with which the Poet employed his epithets, and on the other hand, his never failing solicitude to exalt and adorn every thing Greek.

Homer names the Pelasgians only thrice, and each time with a laudatory epithet.

In Il. x. 429, where they form part of the Trojan camp, and again in Od. xix. 177, where they are stated to be found in Crete, they are δῖοι. Homer never applies this word except to what is preeminent in its kind: in particular, he never attaches it to any national name besides the Pelasgi, except Ἀχαιοὶ, which of itself amounts to a presumption that he regarded his countrymen as in some way standing in the same class with the Pelasgians.

In the remaining passage where he names the Pelasgians, that in the Trojan Catalogue (Il. ii. 340), he calls them ἐγχεσίμωροι. He uses this epithet in only three other places. Of itself it is laudatory, because it is connected with the proper work of heroes, the σταδίη ὑσμίνη. In one of the three places he applies it individually to two royal warriors, one Munes the husband of Briseis, and the other Epistrophus (Il. ii. 693), a warrior associated with Munes. In the second (Il. vii. 134), he gives it to the Arcadians; whom in the Catalogue (ii. 611), he has already commended as ἐπιστάμενοι πολεμίζειν. In the third passage (Od. iii. 188), he applies the epithet to the Myrmidons themselves. From each of these uses, the last especially, we may draw fresh presumptions of his high estimate of the Pelasgian name.

V. Again. In the case of a race, unless when it can be traced to an Eponymus or name-giver, the plural name precedes the singular in common use. There must be Celts before there can be a Celt, and Pelasgians before there can be a Pelasgian. The use therefore of the singular, in the names of nations, is a proof of what is established and long familiar.

For example, Homer never calls a single Greek Δαναός, nor Ἀργεῖος (though in the particular cases of Juno and of Helen he uses the singular feminine, of which more hereafter), but only Ἀχαιός; and we shall find, that this fact is not without its meaning. It is therefore worthy of note, that he uses the term Πελασγὸς in the singular. The chiefs of the Pelasgian ἐπίκουροι at Troy were Hippothous and Pulæus, (Il. ii. 843,) who were

υἷε δύω Λήθοιο Πελασγοῦ Τευταμίδαο.

And again, (xvii. 288),

Λήθοιο Πελασγοῦ φαίδιμος υἷος.

‘The illustrious son of Lethus the Pelasgian.’ It seems uncertain, from their place in the Trojan Catalogue, whether these Pelasgians were European or Asiatic; nor is it material to which region they belonged.

_The Pelasgians and Larissa._

VI. It is further observable, that Homer implies distinctly the existence of various tribes of Pelasgi under that same name in various and widely separated places. He says,

Ἱππόθοος δ’ ἄγε φῦλα Πελασγῶν ἐγχεσιμώρων τῶν, οἱ Λαρίσσην ἐριβώλακα ναιετάουσιν.

Strabo justly observes upon the use of the plural φῦλα in this passage as implying considerable numbers. And the words τῶν οἱ in the following line, signifying “namely those Pelasgi, who,” show that the poet found it necessary to use a distinctive mark in order that these Pelasgi might not be confounded with other Pelasgi. Again, as this is in the Trojan Catalogue, where as a matter of course no Greeks would be found, he could hardly need to distinguish them from any Pelasgi connected with the Greeks, and we may assume it as most probable that he meant thus to distinguish them from other Pelasgi out of Greece rather than in Greece. At the same time, he may have had regard to other Pelasgians of Pelasgic Argos. In that country, as we may conclude with confidence from the appellation itself, they were known to form the bulk of the population, and as we hear of no such Pelasgian mass elsewhere in Homer, he may possibly have had them particularly in his mind, when he described the Trojan Pelasgians as Pelasgians of Larissa.

Some light is also thrown upon the character and habits of nations by the epithets attached to their places of abode. Homer mentions Larissa but twice: once here, and once where he relates the death of Hippothous, τῆλ’ ἀπὸ Λαρίσσης ἐριβώλακος (Il. xvii. 301). The fertility of Larissa tends, as far as it goes, to mark the Pelasgi as a people of cultivators, having settled habits of life.

There is some difficulty, however, connected with the particular sign which Homer has employed to distinguish these Pelasgians. ‘Hippothous led the Pelasgi, those Pelasgi, I mean, who inhabit productive Larissa.’ From this it would appear that in the days of Homer, though there were many Pelasgi in various places, there was but one Larissa. And, accordingly, the name never appears within the Greece of Homer, either in the Catalogue, or elsewhere. Yet tradition hands down to us many Larissas, both in Greece and beyond it: and critics hold it to be reasonably presumed, wherever we find a Larissa, that there Pelasgi had been settled. But this name of Larissa apparently was not, and probably could not have been, thus largely employed in Homer’s time; for if it had been so, the poet’s use of the term Larissa would not have been in this case what he meant it to be, namely, distinctive. Yet the Pelasgians were even at that time apparently falling, or even fallen, into decay. How then could they have built many new cities in the subsequent ages? And, except in that way, how could the name Larissa have revived, and acquired its peculiar significance?

In six places of the Iliad we hear of a particular part of the city of Troy which was built upon a height, and in which the temple of Apollo was situated (v. 446). This affords us an example of a separate name, Πέργαμος, affixed to a separate part of a city, that part apparently being the citadel. In like manner the citadel of Argos (which stood upon an eminence) had, at a later date, a distinct name, which was Larissa[145], and was said to have been derived from a daughter of Pelasgus so called[146]. Now it may have been the general rule to call the citadels of the Pelasgian towns Larissa. If so, then we can readily understand that so long as the towns themselves, or rather, it might be, the scattered hamlets, remained, the name of the citadels would be rarely heard: but when the former fell into decay, the solid masonry which the Pelasgi used for walls and for public buildings, but which did not extend to private dwellings, would remain. Thus the citadels would naturally retain their own old name, which had been originally attached to them with reference to their fortifications. This hypothesis will fully account for the absorption of the particular and separate names of towns in the original and common name of their citadels.

Where an agricultural settlement was made upon ground, some particular spot of which afforded easy means of fortification, convenience would probably dictate the erection of a citadel for occasional retreat in time of danger, without any attempt to gather closely into one place and surround with walls the residences of the settlers: a measure which, as entailing many disadvantages, was only likely to take place under the pressure of strong necessity. Such I have presumed to have been the ordinary history of the Pelasgian Larissas. That which, while it flourished as a Pelasgian settlement, might be an Argos[147], would, perhaps, after a conquest, and the changes consequent upon it, become at last a Larissa.

But cases might arise in which the most fertile lands, lying entirely open and level, would, on the one hand, offer peculiar temptations to the spoiler, and, on the other, offer no scarped or elevated spot suitable for a separate fortification. In such a case the name ἐριβώλαξ would be best deserved, and in such a case too the probable result would be, to build a walled town including all the habitations of the colonists. This walled town would, for the very same reason as the citadels elsewhere, be itself a Larissa: and thus this Pelasgian name might be a distinctive one in the time of Homer, and yet might become a common one afterwards.

All this corresponds with the general belief on the two points, (1) that the Pelasgians dwelt, as in Attica, κωμηδὸν, and (2) that the Larissas are Pelasgian.

But moreover it is supported by particular instances. Troy, for example, had its Pergama on a lofty part of the site where it stood: and from the epithets αἰπείνη, ὀφρυόεσσα, ἠνεμόεσσα, applied to the name Ἴλιος but never to Τροίη (of course I mean when this latter word is used for the city, the only class of cases in point), it may justly be inferred that Ilus[148] built the Pergama when he migrated into the plain. But the wall surrounding the entire city was only built in the next generation, under King Laomedon, who employed Neptune and Apollo for the purpose.

Another, and perhaps more marked instance, is to be found in the case of Thebes. We know from Thucydides[149] that Bœotia was, from its openness and fertility, more liable to revolutions from successive occupancy than other parts of Greece. With this statement a passage of the Odyssey[150] is in remarkable accordance. Homer tells us that Amphion and Zethus, probably among the very earliest Hellic immigrants into Middle Greece, first settled on the site of Thebes; and, he adds specially, that they fortified it. But apparently it could not have been the usual practice of the time to surround entire cities, at least, with fortifications, because he goes on to assign the special reason for its being done in this case, namely, that, even powerful as they were, they could not hold that country, so open (εὐρύχορος, Od. xi. 265) and rich, except with the aid of walls. This would appear to be a case like the Λαρίσση ἐριβώλαξ of the seventeenth Iliad, and both alike were probably exceptions to the general rule.

I have now done with the direct notices of the Pelasgi in Homer. But we have still a considerable harvest of indirect notices to gather. Particularly, in discussing the meaning of the name Ionians, we shall hereafter find reason to suppose that Homer’s Athenians were Pelasgic: and I propose here to refer to some similar indications with respect to the Arcadians.

_The Arcadians in Homer._

Like the Pelasgians, the Arcadians are, as we have seen, happy in never being mentioned without Homer’s commendation. In Il. ii. 611 they are ἐπιστάμενοι πολεμίζειν. In Il. vii. 134 they are ἐγχεσίμωροι.

_The Arcadians Pelasgian._

In the Catalogue he also throws some light upon the habits of the Arcadians: first, by describing them as heavy armed, ἀγχιμάχηται: secondly, by stating that they had no care for maritime pursuits. In both respects their relation to the Trojans is remarkable. With the exception of the Arcadians, the epithet ἀγχιμάχηται is nowhere used except for the substantive Δάρδανοι, and the position of the Dardanians in Troas very much corresponded with that of the Arcadians in Greece. Again, the Trojans, as we know, were so entirely destitute of ships, that Paris had to build them by way of special undertaking. These resemblances tend to suggest a further likeness. As the Trojans appear to have been peculiarly given to the pursuits of peace, it is reasonable to suppose the poet had the same idea of the Arcadians. The ἀγχιμάχηται is connected with the habits of settled cultivators. A peasantry furnishes heavy infantry, while light troops are best formed from a population of less settled habits and ruder manners. And as the use of ships had much less to do with regular commerce than with piracy and war,[151] so the absence of maritime habits tends, for the heroic age, to imply a pacific character. In those days the principal purpose of easy locomotion was booty: and there was no easy locomotion for bodies of men, except by ships. Though inclosed by hills, Arcadia was a horse feeding[152], therefore relatively not a poor country. In later times it was, next to Laconia[153], the most populous province of the Peloponnesus; and even in Homer, although its political position was evidently secondary, it supplied no less than sixty ships with large crews to each[154]. All this is favourable to the tradition which gives it a Pelasgian character.

Again, the Arcadians were commanded by Agapenor the son of Ancæus[155]. He would appear not to have been an indigenous sovereign. For we learn from a speech of Nestor in the twenty-third Book[156], that games were celebrated at the burial of Amarynceus by the Epeans, in which he himself overcame in wrestling Ancæus the Pleuronian. Ancæus therefore was not an Arcadian but an Ætolian: and his son Agapenor was probably either the first Arcadian of his race, or else a stranger appointed by Agamemnon to command the Arcadians in the Trojan war. Their having ships from Agamemnon, and a chief either foreign or of non-Arcadian extraction, are facts which tend to mark the Arcadians as politically dependent, and therefore _pro tanto_ as Pelasgian: for it cannot be doubted that whatever in Greece was Pelasgian at the epoch of the _Troica_, was also subordinate to some race of higher and more effective energies.

Again. It will hereafter (I think) be found that the institution of all gymnastic and martial games was Hellenic and not Pelasgic[157]. In the passage last quoted there is a very remarkable statement, that there were present at the games Epeans, Pylians, and Ætolians: that is to say, all the neighbouring tribes, except the Arcadians. Thus we have a strong presumption established that these games were not congenial to Arcadian habits: and if the same can be shown from other sources with respect to the Pelasgians, there is a strong presumption that the Arcadians were themselves Pelasgian.

Once more. In the sixth book Nestor relates, that in his youth the Pylians and Arcadians fought near the town of Pheiæ and the river Iardanos. The Arcadians were commanded by Ereuthalion, who wore the armour of Areithous. Areithous had met his death by stratagem from Lycoorgos, who appropriated the armour, and bequeathed it to his θεραπών, or companion in arms, Ereuthalion. Nestor, on the part of the Pylians, encountered Ereuthalion, and by the aid of Minerva defeated him.

From this tale it would appear, first, that Lycoorgus was king of Arcadia. His name savours of Pelasgian origin, from its relation to Λυκαών of the later tradition respecting Arcadia, and to Lycaon son of Priam, descended by the mother’s side from the Leleges; again, to Lycaon the father of Pandarus; possibly also to the inhabitants of Lycia. The allusion to his having succeeded by stratagem only, is very pointed (148),

τὸν Λυκόοργος ἔπεφνε δόλῳ, οὔτι κράτεΐ γε,

and the terms employed appear to indicate a military inferiority: which accords with the probable relation of the Arcadians, as Pelasgi, to their Hellenic neighbours. And this again corresponds with the close of the story; in which Nestor, fighting on the part of the Pylians who were Achæan, and therefore Hellenic, conquers the Arcadian chieftain Ereuthalion (Il. vi. 132-56).

It may be remarked once for all, that this military inferiority is not to be understood as if the Pelasgi were cowards, but simply as implying that they gave way before tribes of more marked military genius or habits than themselves; as at Hastings the Saxons did before the Normans; or as the Russians did in the late war of 1854-6 before the Western armies.

Lastly, the δῖος applied to Ereuthalion (Il. v. 319), accords with the use of that epithet for the Pelasgi elsewhere.

Thus a number of indications from Homer, slight when taken separately, but more considerable when combined, and drawn from _all_ the passages in which Homer refers to Arcadia, converge upon the supposition that the Arcadians were a Pelasgian people.

They are supported by the whole stream of later tradition; which placed Lycaon, son of Pelasgus, in Arcadia, which uniformly represented the Arcadians as autochthonic[158], and which made them competitors with the Argives for the honour of having given to the Pelasgians their original seat in the Peloponnesus.

Here too philology steps in, and lends us some small aid. The name of Προσέληνοι, which the Arcadians took to themselves, and which is assumed to mean older than the moon, appears, when so understood, to express a very forced idea: it is difficult indeed to conceive how such a name could even creep into use. But if we refer its origin to πρὸ and Σελλοὶ or Σέλληνες, it then becomes the simple indication of the historical fact we are looking for, namely, that they, a Pelasgic population, occupied Arcadia before any of the Hellic or Sellic races had come into the Peloponnesus.

From its rich pastures, Arcadia was originally well adapted for Pelasgian inhabitants. Defended by mountains, it offered, as Attica did through the poverty of its soil, an asylum to the refugees of that race, when dispossessed from other still more fertile, and perhaps also more accessible tracts of the Peloponnesus[159]. Hence it is easy to account both for its original Pelasgian character, and for the long retention of it.

We seem then to find the Arcadians of Homer (first) politically dependent, and (secondly) commanded by a foreigner, but yet (thirdly) valiant in war. It would thus appear that what they wanted was not animal or even moral courage, but the political and governing element, which is the main element in high martial talent. All this we shall find, as we already have in some degree found, to be a Pelasgian portraiture. And if it should seem to have been drawn with the aid of conjecture, let it at any rate be observed that it is supported by the Arcadian character in the historic ages. They appear from various indications to have been for many generations the Swiss of Greece: not producing great commanders, and obscure enough, until a very late date, in the political annals of the country, but abounding in the materials of a hardy soldiery, and taking service with this or that section of the Greeks as chance might dictate. For in Xenophon they boast that when any of the Greeks wanted auxiliaries (ἐπίκουροι) they came to Arcadia to obtain them: that the Lacedæmonians took them into company when they invaded Attica, and that the Thebans did the very same when they invaded Lacedæmon[160]. And Thucydides tells us that, in the Sicilian war, the Mantineans, with a portion of their brother Arcadians, fought for hire with the Athenians on one side, while another contingent from the very same State assisted the Corinthians, who had come in force to aid in the defence of Syracuse against them[161].

_The Graians: the Pelasgians and Ceres._

Two other circumstances, slight in themselves, still remain for notice.

1. It was through the authority and practice of the Romans that the name of Greeks or Graians came ultimately to supplant that of Hellenes. Out of this fact, which is the most important piece of evidence in our possession, arises the presumption, that as it was the Pelasgians who may be said to have supplied the main link between Greece and Italy, and between the Hellenic and the Roman language, the Graians could not but have been a branch or portion of that people. Now we know that the Pelasgians were cultivators of the plains. Bœotia is, as we have seen, indicated by Thucydides[162] as the richest plain[163] of Greece, and on that account among the parts most liable to the displacement of their inhabitants. It was therefore probably a plain where the Pelasgi would have settled early and in numbers: and it deserves notice, that the Catalogue[164] placing the town of Graia in Bœotia, places it where we naturally assume a large, though now, as in Thessaly, subordinate Pelasgian population to have existed.

Nor is the passage in which Aristotle notices the Γραικοὶ adverse to the belief that they were a Pelasgian race. He states that the deluge of Deucalion was in the ancient Hellas: which is the country reaching from Dodona to the Achelous (αὕτη δ’ ἐστὶν ἡ περὶ τὴν Δωδώνην καὶ τὸν Ἀχελῷον). This may include either great part, or the whole, of Thessaly: whether we understand it of the little and Thessalian Achelous, near Lamia, which was within thirty _stadia_ of the Spercheus[165]: or of the great Achelous, which skirted the western border of that country, and whose line of tributaries was fed from the slopes of Pindus. If we understand the Dodona of Epirus, this will give a considerable range of country, all of it outside Thessaly. Aristotle proceeds to say, that there dwelt the Selli, and those then called Γραικοὶ but now Hellenes (καὶ οἱ καλούμενοι τότε μὲν Γραικοὶ νῦν δὲ Ἕλληνες). Thus he describes as Γραικοὶ those who, together with the Selli, were the inhabitants of the country that Homer calls Pelasgic Argos: so that according to him the Γραικοὶ were not Sellic: and the time, when they were thus neighbours of the Selli, was the pre-Hellenic time. This is nearly equivalent to an assertion by Aristotle that the Graians were Pelasgic, for we know of no other pre-Hellenic race in Thessaly[166].

2. In vv. 695, 6 we find that (Πύρασος) Pyrasus in Thessaly (probably deriving its name from πυρὸς wheat, grain), is described as Δήμητρος τέμενος: and it is the only ground consecrated to Ceres that Homer mentions. It is material that this should be in Thessaly, the especially Pelasgic country: for both slight notices in Homer, and much of later tradition, connect the Pelasgi in a peculiar manner with the worship of that deity. For example, Pausanias mentions a temple of Δημήτηρ Πελασγὶς[167] at Corinth even in his own time. This connection in its turn serves to confirm the character of the Pelasgi as a rural and agricultural people.

So far as this part of the evidence of Homer is concerned, it goes to this only, that with the aid of Hesiod it serves to exhibit Ceres in direct relations with two countries; both with Thessaly, and, as will now be shown, with Crete; in which also, as we know from Homer (brought down by Hesiod to a later date), the Pelasgian name still remained when it had apparently been submerged elsewhere in Greece; and in which therefore it may be inferred that the Pelasgian element was more than usually strong and durable.

In the fifth Odyssey[168] we are told that Ceres fell in love with a son of Iasus (Iasion, in Hesiod Iasios), whom she met νειῷ ἐνὶ τριπόλῳ; in what country Homer does not say, but Hesiod, repeating the story, adds it was in Crete, Κρήτης ἐν πίονι δήμῳ[169]. Thus the double connection is made good.

Over and above this, the name Iasus goes of itself to establish a Pelasgian origin.

1. Because Ἴασον Ἄργος is an old name for the Peloponnesus, or else a large portion of it; whereas the Hellenic name was, as we know, Ἀχαικὸν Ἄργος. And the Ἰασίδαι reigned in Orchomenus[170] two or three generations before the Neleids. This probably touches a period when no Hellic tribes had, as far as we know, found their way into the Peloponnesus[171], and when the dynasties even of the middle and north were, as is probable, chiefly Pelasgian.

2. Because Ἴασος[172] was the name of one of the Athenian leaders, and the Athenians were, as we shall find, manifestly Pelasgian. His father Sphelus is also the son of Boucolus, a name which will be shown to be of Pelasgic and not Hellenic character[173].

3. Because Dmetor the son of Iasus was the ruler of Cyprus at the epoch of the Troica, and that island seems to have stood in an anomalous relation of half-dependence to Agamemnon, which is best capable of explanation if we suppose it to have been inhabited by a population still retaining its Pelasgian character. To this question I shall shortly have occasion to return in a more full consideration of the case of Cyprus.

Of later tradition, there is abundance to connect Ceres with the Pelasgians: their character as tillers of the soil, and hers as the giver of grain: the worship of her at Eleusis, dating from time immemorial, and purporting to be founded upon rites different from those in vogue at a later epoch: this too taken in connection with the Pelasgian origin of Athens, and its long retention of that character. In the ancient hymn to Ceres, estranged from Jupiter and the other gods, she comes to Eleusis, and there herself founds the worship; and she announces in her tale that she was come from Crete:

νῦν αὖτε Κρήτηθεν, ἐπ’ εὐρέα νῶτα θαλάσσης, ἤλυθον, οὐκ ἐθέλουσα[174].

I even venture to suggest it as possible that the existence of a τέμενος (or land devoted to the service of any deity) at all, affords a presumption of a Pelasgic population and institutions. For we find only three other cases of such endowments: all in places strongly marked with a Pelasgic character. One is that of the river Sperchius in Thessaly: a second that of Venus in Cyprus; and the third that of Jupiter in Gargarus[175].

_The Ionians._

The notices of the Ionians contained in Homer are faint and few: but they are in entire contradiction with the prevailing tradition.

The word Ἰάονες occurs only once in the poems, where we find the five contingents of Bœotians, Ionians, Locrians, Phthians, and Epeans, united in resisting, but ineffectually, Hector’s attack upon the ships. They are here termed ἑλκεχίτωνες[176], an epithet which is unfortunately nowhere else employed by the poet. The order in which they are named is,

1. Bœotians, 2. Ionians, 3. Locrians, 4. Phthians, 5. Epeans.

A description thus commences in three parts, of which the first is (689-91),

οἱ μὲν Ἀθηναίων προλελεγμένοι· ἐν δ’ ἄρα τοῖσιν ἦρχ’ υἷος Πετεῶο, Μενεσθεύς· οἱ δ’ ἅμ’ ἕποντο Φείδας τε Στιχίος τε, Βίας τ’ ἐΰς·

The second describes the leaders of the Epeans: the third of the Phthians, and these, it says, meaning apparently the Phthian force, fought in conjunction with the Bœotians, μετὰ Βοιωτῶν ἐμάχοντο (700). No Bœotian leaders are named: the absence of Oilean Ajax, who officially led the Locrians, is immediately accounted for by saying that he was with his inseparable friend, the Telamonian chief.

These Ἰάονες ἑλκεχίτωνες then were the προλελεγμένοι, a chosen band of the Athenian force; or else they were the force composed of men picked among the Athenians. But no distinguished quality or act of war is recounted of the Athenians, either here or elsewhere in the Iliad. They are simply called μηστῶρες ἀüτῆς,[177] but this is a mere general epithet, has no reference to any particular conduct, and is not sustained by any relation of their feats in arms. The five divisions above named fight in order to be beaten by the Trojans: and we may be sure that Homer does not produce the flower of the Greeks for such a purpose. Nor has the Athenian chief Menestheus any distinction whatever accorded to him, even in the much questioned passage of the Catalogue, except that of being excellent at marshalling forces.

_The Athenians in the Catalogue._

The passage Il. ii. 546-56, describing the Athenians in the Catalogue, is of so much historical interest through the various points it involves, as to deserve a particular consideration, which it may best receive in this place. Upon it depends some part of the Homeric evidence relating to the signs of a Pelasgian origin.

Three lines of it must in any case be allowed to remain, in order to describe the Athenian contingent and its commander.

οἱ δ’ ἄρ’ Ἀθήνας εἶχον, ἐϋκτίμενον πτολίεθρον ... (v. 546.)

τῶν αὖθ’ ἡγεμόνευ’ υἷος Πετεῶο Μενεσθεύς. (552.)

τῷ δ’ ἅμα πεντήκοντα μέλαιναι νῆες ἕποντο. (556.)

To the supposition that this jejune _minimum_ represents the passage in its original form, it is certainly an objection, that in no other place of the whole Catalogue has Homer dispatched quite so drily and summarily any important division of the force.

The remainder of the passage falls into three portions, of which the first is separable from the two others, and the first with the second is also separable from the third. They are as follows:

(1)--vv. 546-9.

οἱ δ’ ἄρ’ Ἀθήνας εἶχον, ἐϋκτίμενον πτολίεθρον, δῆμον Ἐρεχθῆος μεγαλήτορος, ὅν ποτ’ Ἀθήνη θρέψε Διὸς θυγάτηρ, τέκε δὲ ζείδωρος Ἄρουρα, κὰδ δ’ ἐν Ἀθήνῃσ’ εἷσεν, ἑῷ ἐνὶ πίονι νηῷ.

There is a reading of Ἀθήνης for Ἀθηνῃσ’: it is disputed whether τέκε applies to δῆμον or to Erechtheus; whether ἑῷ is to be understood of Erechtheus or of Minerva; and again, what is the meaning of πίονι as applied to νηῷ? The variety of lection is not material: the application of τέκε is clearly to Erechtheus, as seems also that of ἑῷ to Minerva[178]. Again, the application of the epithet πίονι to the temple is perhaps sufficiently supported by Od. xii. 346, πίονα νηὸν, and Il. v. 512, μάλα πίονος ἐξ ἀδύτοιο.

It does not appear that these lines, or the two which follow, were rejected by the Alexandrian critics, but the Pseudo-Herodotus, in the Life of Homer, c. 28, states that they were interpolated.

The objections from internal evidence are stated by Payne Knight[179].

1. That the Greeks had no temples at the time of the _Troica_.

2. That as Ἄρουρα is _superficies non orbis Terræ_, so it was not a known personification at the time of Homer.

As to the first of these, we hear of Trojan temples in the Iliad; probably also of the Greek temple of Apollo in Il. ix. 404; and of Greek temples in the Odyssey, beyond all reasonable doubt. We hear of Ætolian priests in Il. ix. 575; while it is not likely that there should have been priests without temples.

Again, the circumstances of the Greeks in the Iliad were not such as to lead to the mention of temples usually or frequently. Therefore this is not a ground of suspicion against the passage.

As to the second objection, it should be borne in mind that the Earth, Γαῖα, as well as Ἄρουρα, was apparently to Homer, not less than to the other ancients, a surface, not a solid (κυκλοτερὴς ὡς ἀπὸ τόρνου, Herod. iv. 36.) The objection really is, that Ἄρουρα means a particular class of ground, namely, arable or cultivable land; and that to personify this class of land by itself is artificial, far-fetched, and not in the manner of Homer.

To me it appears clear that it would be unnatural for us, but very doubtful whether it was so for Homer. We could not in poetry well treat Corn-field or Garden as a person: but the corn-bearing Earth (ζείδωρος Ἄρουρα) had for the Greeks in their early days a vividness of meaning, which it has not for us. To us, to the modern European mind, the gifts of Ceres are but one item in an interminable list of things enjoyable and enjoyed: to man when yet youthful, while in his first ruder contact with his mother Earth and the elements, while possessed of few instruments and no resources, this idea was as determinate, as it was likewise suggestive and poetical. The Latins have no word by which to render the word Ἄρουρα in its full meaning, though _arvum_ must have been taken from it, or from the same root with it. It nearly corresponds with the English ‘glebe’ in its proper use[180]. It signifies not only corn land, but all productive land, for instance, vine land, in Il. iii. 246. But to them, so pregnant was the idea, that besides a crop of epithets such as πολύφορβος and τραφέρη, it threw off its own inverted image in the epithet, habitual with Homer, of ἀτρύγετος for θάλασσα, the un-cornbearing sea. Now when the idea of corn land had been thus vividly conceived, the next step, that of viewing Ἄρουρα as Γαῖα, was one not very hard to take. The objection seems to arise out of our unconsciously reading Homer in the false light of our own familiar associations.

His text affords evidence in support of these views. May it not be said that the phrase πάτρις Ἄρουρα[181] for _patria_ shows us a great step towards personification? In the Νεκυία (Od. xi. 489), ἐπάρουρος is equivalent to ‘alive;’ compare Il. xvii. 447. Again, Ulysses, the moment he escapes from the river mouth to the shore, kisses the ζείδωρος Ἄρουρα[182] among the reeds: which seems to show an use of the term nearly synonymous with Γαῖα or earth. And again, praying for the glory of Alcinous[183], he says,

τοῦ μέν κεν ἐπὶ ζείδωρον ἄρουραν ἄσβεστον κλέος εἴη.

The fame of Alcinous could not be confined to fields. So the setting sun casts shadows on the ἐρίβωλος Ἄρουρα[184]. In both cases the term so approximates to the meaning of Earth, doubtless by metonymy, as to be indistinguishable from it. Again Il. iv. 174, σέο δ’ ὄστεα πύσει Ἄρουρα. Surely the meaning here is Earth, for we are not to suppose Homer meant to say the bodies of his warriors would lie on the cultivable land only. But another passage brings us up to actual personification, that respecting Otus and Ephialtes

οὓς δὴ μηκίστους θρέψε ζείδωρος Ἄρουρα[185].

This objection to Ἄρουρα therefore will not hold good: and the passage cannot be condemned upon internal evidence. It is referred to by Plato, in the first Alcibiades[186].

(2)--Vss. 550, 1.

ἐνθάδε μιν ταύροισι καὶ ἀρνείοις ἱλάονται κοῦροι Ἀθηναίων, περιτελλομένων ἐνιαυτῶν.

Some refer μιν to Minerva, and construe the passage with reference to the Panathenaic celebration. When so interpreted, as it is contended, the words betray a palpable anachronism.

Again it is alleged, (1) Homer does not in the Catalogue introduce general descriptions of the religious rites of Greece, and it is scarcely likely he should mention here a celebration, which he does not report to have had anything peculiar in its character. (2) From xi. 729 it appears that cows were sacrificed to Minerva, not bulls: (3) the tenour of the sentence directs us to Erechtheus, and it involves worship offered to a local hero.

With respect to the Panathenaica, a difficulty would undoubtedly arise, if we were obliged to suppose that it contained a reference to gymnastic games, which we have every reason to treat as having borne in the age of Homer a marked Hellenic character[187]. But the words imply no such reference. They speak, at the most, of no more than periodical sacrifices. This implies an established festival, and nothing beyond it. Now such a signification raises no presumption whatever against the genuineness of the passage: because we have one distinct and unquestionable case in Homer of an established festival of a deity, that namely of Apollo in the Odyssey. The day of the vengeance of Ulysses was the ἑορτὴ τοῖο Θεοῖο ἁγνή[188].

So considering the passage, let us next examine the objection taken to it, that it involves hero-worship[189], which was not known in the Homeric age.

Now we have in the Odyssey, as well as here in the Iliad, cases of mortals translated to heaven and to the company of immortals.

In the Odyssey we have, for example, the case of Castor and Pollux, who enjoyed a peculiar privilege of life after death, and revisited earth in some mysterious manner on alternate days[190]. And this, too, although they were buried[191].

Their τίμη πρὸς Ζηνὸς was such that, as the passage in Od. xi. proceeds to state, they vied with deities;

τίμην δὲ λελόγχασ’ ἶσα θεοῖσιν.

This τίμη must have included honour paid on earth: to be in heaven, unless in connection with earth and its inhabitants, was not of itself a τίμη, much less was it the τίμη of the gods. The subject of hero-worship will be further examined in a later portion of this work: but for the present it appears sufficiently, that this comes near to hero-worship. The passage about Erechtheus is no more than a development of the expression relating to the Tyndarid brothers; and, though by some steps in advance of it, can hardly be rejected on this ground alone as spurious. All passages cannot be expected to express with precisely the same degree of fulness the essential ideas on which they are founded; and we are not entitled to cut off, on that ground alone, the one which happens to be most in advance.

But although the application to Erechtheus might not convict the passage, I very much question whether we ought so to apply it. It is quite against the general bearing of the passage, which would much more naturally refer it to Minerva. The reason for it is that cows or heifers were offered to her, and not rams or bulls. No doubt, in the particular cases mentioned to us, (Il. vi. 94, x. 292, xi. 729, and Od. iii. 382,) cows or heifers only are spoken of. But in Od. iii. 145 we are told that ἑκατομβαὶ were to be offered to her, which we can hardly limit so rigidly: and considering that the cases of cows mentioned by Homer are all special, while this passage speaks of what was ordinary and periodical, I think we should pause before admitting that the application of the lines to Minerva is on this ground indefensible.

The word περιτελλομένων[192] is taken to mean not annual revolutions, but the revolutions of periods of years. I question the grounds of this interpretation: but, if it could be established, it would certainly rather weaken the passage; for Homer nowhere else mentions periodical celebrations of any kind divided by any number of years, and I doubt whether such an idea does not involve greater familiarity with numerical combinations than the Poet seems to have possessed.

Leaving these two lines subject to some doubt, but by no means fully convicted, let us proceed to the third and last of the contested portions of the passage.

(3)--Vss. 553-5.

τῷ δ’ οὔπω τις ὁμοῖος ἐπιχθόνιος γένετ’ ἄνηρ κοσμήσαι ἵππους τε καὶ ἀνέρας ἀσπιδιώτας· Νέστωρ οἶος ἔριζεν· ὁ γὰρ προγενέστερος ἦεν.

These lines were condemned by Zenodotus[193] upon the ground that we have no other mention of these gifts of Menestheus, and no example of his putting them in exercise. Mr. Payne Knight[194] also urges that Menestheus, here so commended with respect to chariots as well as infantry, does not even appear as a competitor in the chariot-race at the funeral games of Patroclus, although, in order to enlarge the competition, even the slow horses of Nestor are put in requisition.

The Scholiast answers, with regard to the first objection, and Heyne[195] accepts the defence as sufficient, that other persons are praised in the gross, of whom no details are given anywhere: as Machaon is called ἀριστεύων in Il. xi. 506. But a mere general epithet is very different from a set passage of three lines expressing extraordinary preeminence in particular accomplishments.

Again, the word applied to Machaon is by no means one of abstract panegyric, but is itself a description of the activity in the field by which he was at the moment baffling the energies of Hector, and would, says the Poet, have continued to baffle them, had not Paris wounded him. Thus the word is not a vague epithet: the words παῦσεν ἀριστεύοντα Μαχάονα simply mean, that the manful exertions of Machaon were arrested.

There is another objection to the passage in the rather inflated character of its compliment to an undistinguished man. Even Nestor[196], it says, did not beat him, but only (ἔριζεν) vied with him: and this not as an abler, but only as an older, man.

On the other hand, some of the Scholiasts ingeniously suggest that these verses are given to Menestheus by way of compensation; τοῦτο χαρίζεται αὐτῷ, ἐπεὶ μὴ εὐδοκιμήσει ἐν ταῖς μάχαις[197]. But Homer does not usually deal out compensation, among the Greeks, by abstract praises, for the want of the honour earned by deeds: and all the other martial eulogies on chiefs in the Catalogue are well borne out in the poem.

On the whole, Mr. Payne Knight’s objection, and the judgment of the Alexandrine Critics, seem to leave this part of the passage in a state so questionable, that nothing ought to be rested on it. The best point in its favour is, that the Athenian Legates before Gelon are represented by Herodotus as confidently relying on it, when there would have been an interest on his part in demurring to its authority, for it was a question of military precedence that was at issue: τῶν καὶ Ὅμηρος ὁ ἐποποιὸς ἄνδρα ἄριστον ἔφησε εἰς Ἴλιον ἀπικέσθαι, τάξαι τε καὶ διακοσμῆσαι στράτον[198].

On the other hand, it may be observed with justice that the compliment here paid to Menestheus is the very best of which the case admitted; perhaps the only one that an interpolator would have been safe in selecting. For he would have known that any panegyric relating to strength or prowess in action would be conclusively belied by the rest of the poem in its entire tenour.

But while we cannot confidently rely upon these three lines, there appears to be no reason why we should not use the evidence supplied by the rest of the passage as most probably good historic matter. It undoubtedly represents a strong course of old local tradition[199]: for there was in Athens a most ancient temple dedicated to Minerva and Erechtheus in conjunction.

_Review of the Homeric evidence._

The Homeric evidence then up to this point stands as follows with reference to Athens and the Athenian contingent, or the principal and picked men of it, whichever be the best term for the passage. They were

1. Ionians, Il. xiii. 685.

2. ἑλκεχίτωνες, ibid.

3. Autochthonous, Il. ii. 547.

4. Undistinguished in the war.

5. Under the special patronage of Pallas or Minerva, Il. ii. 546, and Od. xi. 323, where the epithet ἱεράων, given to Athens, indicates a special relation to a deity.

The epithet ἑλκεχίτωνες suggests unwarlike habits, and, though more faintly, it also betokens textile industry. It stands in marked contrast with the ἀμιτροχίτωνες[200] of the valiant Lycians, whose short and spare tunic required no cincture to confine it. It corroborates the negative evidence afforded by the Iliad of some want of martial genius in the primitive Athens. It coincides with the tutelage of Pallas, for the Minerva of Homer has no more indisputable function than as the goddess of skilled industry[201]. All this tends to betoken that the inhabitants of the Homeric Attica were Pelasgian.

Again, the autochthonic origin, ascribed to the Athenians in the person of Erechtheus, amounts to an assertion that they were the first known inhabitants of the country: in other words, that they were Pelasgian.

The negative evidence is also important. There is nothing in Homer that tends to associate Athens with the Hellenic stem. The want of military distinction deserves a fuller notice.

It can hardly be without meaning, that of all the chiefs, considerable in the Iliad by their positions and commands, there are but two who are never named as in actual fight, or with any other mark of distinction, and these two are the heads of the two (as we suppose) emphatically Pelasgian contingents, from Athens and Arcadia respectively. Agapenor, who (being however of Ætolian extraction) leads the Arcadians, is named nowhere but in the Catalogue: Menestheus is repeatedly named, but never with reference to fighting. In the only part of the action of the poem where he is put forward, he shudders[202], and shows an anxiety for his personal safety, much more like a Trojan leader than a Greek one. Yet they were sole commanders, the first of no less than sixty ships, the second of fifty. There are no similar cases. The nearest to them are those (1) of Prothous[203], who commands 40 ships of the Magnesians, and Gourieus[204], who leads 22 of the Enienes and Perrhæbi: both of these are remote, Thessalian, and very probably Pelasgian tribes: (2) of Podarkes, who commands 40 ships, but only as deputy for his deceased brother Protesilaus, who is said to have been not only the elder, but the more valiant[205].

Agapenor, indeed, was evidently dependent in a peculiar sense on Agamemnon, in whose ships he sailed: but this could not affect his position as to personal prowess. The case of Menestheus is the more remarkable from this circumstance, that he is the only independent and single commander in charge of so many as fifty ships, who is not invested with the supreme rank of Βασιλεὺς or King. His father Peteos is however called Διοτρεφὴς Βασιλεὺς (Il. iv. 338), which marks him as having probably been a person of greater importance.

And what is true of the commanders is true also of the troops. Athens, and with her Arcadia, may justly be regarded as the only two undistinguished in Homer among those states of Greece which afterwards attained to distinction. For among the States which acquired fame in the historic ages, Argolis, Achaia, and Laconia hold through their chiefs very high places in the poem: Elis and Bœotia are conspicuous in the anterior traditions which it enshrines. Only Attica and Arcadia fail in exhibiting to us signs of early pre-eminence in the arts of war: which in a marked manner confirms the suppositions we have already obtained, as to the Pelasgian character of their inhabitants.

A sign, though a more uncertain one, that points in the same direction, is afforded by the choice of Athens, on the part of Orestes[206], as his place of habitation during the tyranny of Ægisthus in Mycenæ. The displaced, if they do not fly to the strong for protection, go among those who are weaker, and where they may most easily hold their ground, or even acquire power afresh. In other words, in the case before us, an Hellenic exile would very naturally betake himself among a Pelasgian people.

While however the indications of a predominating Pelasgian character among the Athenians at the epoch of the _Troica_ appear to be varied and powerful, I must admit that they are crossed by one indication, which is at first sight of an opposite character, I mean that which is afforded by their name. Even though we were to surrender the entire passages in the Catalogue respecting them, it would still be difficult to contend that the name of Athens and of Athenians is forged in six other places of the poems where one or the other of them is found, besides that there is a second allusion to Erechtheus in the Odyssey. Here we have then, attached to a people whom we suppose Pelasgian, a name connecting them immediately with a deity commonly reputed to be of strong Hellic propensities: connecting them, indeed, in a manner so special as to be exclusive, because no other city or population in Homer takes its name from a deity at all. This indicates a relation of the closest description: and it is quite independent of the suspected passage, which represents Minerva as the nurse or foster-mother of Erechtheus.

_Athenian relations with Minerva._

Now it will be found, upon close examination, that Minerva plays a very different part in the Iliad from Juno, the great protectress of the Greeks, and from Neptune, their actual comrade in fight. The difference even at first sight is this, that theirs appears to be a national, hers more a personal and moral sentiment. In Juno, it is sympathy with the Greeks as Greeks; in Neptune, antipathy to the Trojans as Trojans: but both cases are plainly distinguishable from the temper and attitude of Minerva.

Her protection of Ulysses, whose character is the human counterpart of her own, is the basis of the whole theurgy of the Odyssey, and is also strongly marked in the Δολώνεια. Again, she comes, in the first book[207], at the instance of Juno, to restrain and guide Achilles: for Juno, it is stated, loved both Agamemnon and Achilles alike; which may imply, that this was not the exact case with Minerva. So again, she inspires Diomed[208] for the work of his ἀριστεῖα, with a view to his personal distinction[209]. On each of the two occasions when the two goddesses come down together from heaven, it is Juno that makes the proposal. When Minerva prompts Pandarus to treachery, it is by the injunction of Jupiter, issued on the suggestion of Juno[210]. In the seventh book, however, she descends of herself on seeing that the Greeks lose ground, tells Apollo that she was come, as he was, with the intention to stay the battle[211], and the result of their counsel is one of the single fights (that between Hector and Ajax), which were sure to issue in glory to the Greek heroes. Still she has not the rabid virulence against Troy which distinguishes Juno, which makes her exact the decision for its destruction in the Olympian assembly, and which leads Jupiter to say to her sarcastically, that if she could but eat Priam and his children and subjects raw, then her anger would be satiated.

In fact, Juno has all the marks of a deity entirely Hellic: both in the passionate character of her attachment, and in the absence of all signs whatever of any practical relation between her and the Trojan people.

It is not so with Pallas. Pitilessly opposed to the Trojans in the war, she is nowhere so identified with the Greeks as to exhibit her in the light of one of those deities, whose influence or sympathies were confined to any one place or nation. Her enmity to Troy is mythologically founded on the Judgment of Paris[212]: but it has a more substantive ethical ground in the nature of the quarrel between the two countries.

Unlike Juno and Neptune, she was regularly worshipped at Troy, where she had a priestess of high rank, and a temple placed, like that of Apollo, on the height of Pergamus.

Distinct proof, however, that Minerva was neither originally at war with the Trojans, nor unknown to them by her beneficial influences, is afforded by the case of Phereclus son of Harmonides, the carpenter; this Phereclus was the builder of the ships of Paris, and was a highly skilled workman[213] by her favour,

ἐξόχα γάρ μιν ἐφίλατο Πάλλας Ἀθήνη.

The name of Harmonides may be fictitious; but the relation to Pallas deserves remark, if we assume Troy to have been fundamentally Pelasgian; and it affords a strong presumption, that there was nothing in the character of Minerva to prevent her being propitious to a Pelasgian country. Her attributes as the goddess of industry, or more strictly, in our phrase, of manufacture, were indeed in no special harmony with the character of the Pelasgians, as she had nothing to do with works of agriculture: but neither was there any antagonism between them.

There is also something that deserves notice in the speech in which Minerva expresses to Juno her resentment at the restraint put upon her by Jupiter. She accuses him of forgetting the services she had so often rendered to Hercules when he was oppressed by the labours that Eurystheus had laid upon him, and declares that it was she who effected his escape from Hades[214]. Now this has all the appearance of being the fabulous dress of the old tradition, which reports that the children of Hercules had taken refuge in Attica, and had been harboured there; that Eurystheus invaded the country in consequence of the protection thus given, and that he was slain while upon the expedition. It seems therefore possible, that this reception of the Heraclids may have had something to do with the special relation, at the epoch of the _Troica_, between Athens and Minerva as its tutelary goddess? In connection with Hercules personally, the Iliad affords us another mark that friendly relations might subsist between Troy and Pallas. She, in conjunction with them,

Τρῶες καὶ Πάλλας Ἀθήνη[215],

erected the rampart in which Hercules took refuge from the pursuing monster.

But the full answer to the objection is of a wider scope, and is to be found in the general character of this deity, which did not, like inferior conceptions, admit of being circumscribed by the limits of a particular district or people.

It will hereafter be shewn, that, like Latona and Apollo in particular, Minerva in Pagan fiction represents a disguised and solitary fragment of the true primeval tradition[216]. All such deities we may expect to find, and we do find, transmitted from the old Pelasgians into the mythologies both of Greece and Rome, or those common to Pelasgian and Hellene. We expect to find, and we do find, them worshipped both among the Greeks and among the Trojans as gods, not of this or that nation, but of the great human family. In theory, exclusive regard to the one side or the other comports far better with the idea of such deities as represent unruly passions or propensities of our nature like Mars and Venus, or Mercury; or chief physical forces like Neptune; or such as, like Juno, are the sheer product of human imagination reflected upon the world above, and have no relation to any element or part of a true theology. But the Homeric Jupiter, in so far as he is a representative of supreme power and unity, and the Pallas and Apollo of the poems by a certain moral elevation, and by various incidents of their birth or attributes, show a nobler parentage[217].

In the capacity of a traditive deity, Minerva is with perfect consistency worshipped alike among Trojans and Greeks, Hellenic and Pelasgian tribes. There is nothing strange, then, in our finding her the patroness of a Pelasgian people. The only strangeness is her being (if so she was) more specially their patroness than of any other people. The very fact that, for the purposes of the war, Homer gives her to the Greeks, might perhaps have prepared us to expect that we should find her special domicile among the Hellic portions of that nation: but it supplies no absolute and conclusive reason for such a domicile. But I close the discussion with these observations. In the first place, the Pelasgian character of the Athenians in early times is established by evidence too strong to be countervailed by any such inference as we should be warranted in drawing to a contrary effect from the special connection with Minerva. Again, it may be that the connection of both with Hercules may contain a solution of the difficulty. But lastly, if, as we shall find reason to believe, the traditive deities were the principal gods of ancient Greece, and if the entrance of the Hellic tribes brought in many new claimants upon the divine honours, it may after all seem not unreasonable that we should find, in one of the most purely Pelasgian States, the worship of this great traditive deity less obscured than elsewhere by competition with that of the invaders, and consequently in more peculiar and conspicuous honour.

An examination of the etymology of certain names in Homer will hereafter, I trust, confirm these reasonings on the Athens of the heroic age: with this exception, we may now bid adieu to the investigation of the Homeric evidence of Pelasgianism in Attica.

_Post-Homeric evidence._

That evidence certainly receives much confirmation, positive and negative, from without. In the first place, though Hesiod supplies us with an Hellen, and with a Dorus and Æolus among his sons, he says not a word of an Ion; and the tradition connecting Ion with Hellen through Xuthus is of later date: probably later than Euripides, who makes Ion only the adopted son of Xuthus an Achæan[218], and the real son of Creusa, an Erectheid; with Apollo, a Hellic, but also a Pelasgian deity, for his father. Again, in the legendary times we do not hear of the Athenians as invaders and conquerors, which was the character of the Hellic tribes, but usually as themselves invaded; for example, by Eurystheus from the Peloponnesus.

In ancient tradition generally, the Athenians appear on the defensive against Bœotians[219], Cretans, or others. And the reputed Pylian and Neleid descent of the Pisistratid family is a curious illustration of the manner in which Attica was reported to have imported from abroad the most energetic elements of her own population[220], and also of the (so to speak) natural predominance of Hellic over Pelasgic blood.

Thucydides[221] informs us, that the Athenians were first among the Greeks to lay aside the custom of bearing arms, and to cultivate ease and luxury. Of this we have perhaps already had an indication in the words ἑλκεχίτωνες.

He also states that, on account of the indifferent soil[222], which offered no temptation comparable to those supplied by the more fertile portions of Greece, there was no ejection of the inhabitants from Attica by stronger claimants. Τὴν γοῦν Ἀττικὴν, ἐκ τοῦ ἐπὶ πλεῖστον διὰ τὸ λεπτογέων ἀστασίαστον οὖσαν, ἄνθρωποι ᾤκουν οἱ αὐτοὶ ἀεί. This is simply stating in another form what was usually expressed by declaring them autochthons. It is part of their Pelasgian title.

A remarkable passage in Herodotus covers the whole breadth of the ground that has here been taken; and it is important, because no doubt it expresses what that author considered to be the best of the current traditions, founded in notoriety, and what Crœsus likewise learned upon a formal inquiry, undertaken with a view to alliances in Greece, respecting the origin of the Athenians. Herodotus, like Homer, makes the Athenians Ionian; and in conformity with the construction here put upon Homer, he declares the Ionians not to be Hellenic, but to be Pelasgian[223]. The Attic people, he goes on to say, having once been Pelasgian became Hellenic[224]. According to some opinions[225], this change occurred when the Ionians came into Attica: but the evidence of Homer, I think, makes Athens Ionian at the same epoch when it is Pelasgian. I therefore construe the statement of Herodotus as signifying that the Athenians, in the course of time, received among themselves Hellenic immigrants from the more disturbed and changeful parts of Greece, and these immigrants impressed on Attica, as they had done on other states[226], the Hellenic character and name; only with the difference that, instead of a conflict, and the subjugation of the original inhabitants, there came a process of more harmonious and genial absorption, and in consequence, a development of Greek character even more remarkable for its fulness than in any other Grecian race. Even in the case of Attica, however, the Hellenic character was not finally assumed without a collision, though perhaps a local and partial one only, which ended in the ejectment of the Pelasgians. This conflict is reported to us by Herodotus from Hecatæus[227], and if we find that in it, according to the Athenian version of the story, the Pelasgians were the wrong-doers, it is probably upon the ground that the winner is always in the right: and the Athenians had the more need of a case, because their policy demanded a justification, when, under Miltiades, they followed the Pelasgians to Lemnos, and again subdued them there. Each version of the Attican quarrel contains indications of being related to the truth of the case: for the Pelasgians are made to declare, that the Athenians drove them out from the soil of which they were the prior occupants, and which they cultivated so carefully as to arouse their envy, while the Athenians alleged that when, before the days of slavery, their children went to draw water at the Nine-Springs (Ἐννεάκρουνοι), the Pelasgians of the district insulted them. What more likely than that, when the Hellenic part of the population was coercing the other portion of it into servitude, their resentment should occasionally find vent in rustic insolence to boys and maidens?

The doctrine thus propagated by Herodotus concerning Attica is even more strongly represented in Strabo as respects its Ionian character. Τὴν μὲν Ἰάδα τῇ παλαίᾳ Ἀτθίδι τὴν αὐτὴν φαμέν· καὶ γὰρ Ἴωνες ἐκαλοῦντο οἱ τότε Ἀττικοὶ, καὶ ἐκεῖθεν εἰσιν οἱ τὴν Ἀσίαν ἐποικήσαντες Ἴωνες, καὶ χρησάμενοι τῇ νῦν λεγομένῃ γλώττῃ Ἰάδι[228]. The poverty of their soil kept them, he adds, apart as of a different race (ἔθνος), and of a different speech (γλώττη).

And thus again Herodotus reports that the same letter which the Dorians called San, the Ionians called Sigma. Is not this more than a dialectic difference, and does it not indicate a deeper distinction of race?[229]

The connection of the Pelasgians with ancient Attica will receive further illustration from our inquiry hereafter into the general evidence of the later tradition respecting that race.

_Egypt._

_Egypt and the Pelasgians._

If we are to venture yet one step further back, and ask to what extraneous race and country do the Pelasgic ages of Greece appear particularly to refer us as their type, the answer, as it would seem, though it can only be given with reserve, must be, that Egypt and its people appear most nearly to supply the pattern. A variety of notes, indicative of affinity, are traceable at a variety of points where we find reason to suspect a Pelasgian character: particularly in Troy, and in the early Roman history, more or less in Hesiod and his school, and in certain parts of Greece. Many of these notes, and likewise the general character that they indicate, appear to belong to Egypt also.

The direct signs of connection between Egypt and Greece are far less palpable in Homer, than between Greece and Phœnicia. We have no account from him of Egyptians settled among the Greeks, or of Greeks among the Egyptians. The evidence of a trading intercourse between the two countries is confined to the case of the pseudo-Ulysses, who ventures thither from Crete under circumstances[230] which seem to show that it was hardly within the ordinary circle of Greek communications. He arrives indeed in five days, by the aid of a steady north-west wind: but a voyage of five days[231] across the open sea, which might be indefinitely prolonged by variation or want of wind, was highly formidable to a people whose only safety during their maritime enterprises lay in the power of hauling up their vessels whenever needful upon a beach. It was near twice the length of the voyage to Troy[232]. Hence we find that Menelaus was carried to Egypt not voluntarily, but by stress of weather: and Nestor speaks with horror of his crossing such an expanse, a passage that even the birds make but once a year[233]. If this be deemed inconsistent with the five days’ passage, yet even inconsistency on this point in Homer would be a proof that the voyage to Egypt was in his time rare, strange, and mysterious to his countrymen, and so was dealt with freely by him as lying beyond experience and measurement.

There is nothing in Homer absolutely to contradict the opinion that Danaus was Egyptian; but neither is there anything which suffices conclusively to establish it. And if he considered the Egyptians to approach to the Pelasgian type, this may cast some slight doubt on the Egyptian origin of Danaus. The Poet certainly would not choose a Pelasgian name, unless fully naturalized, for one of the characteristic national designations of the Achæans. But he is too good a Greek to give us particular information about any foreign eminence within his fatherland. It seems, however, possible that in the name ἀπίη, given to Peloponnesus, there may lie a relation to the Egyptian Apis. Apis was the first of the four divine bulls of Egypt[234]; and the ox was the symbol of agriculture which, according to the tradition conveyed by Æschylus[235], Danaus introduced into the Peloponnesus.

The paucity of intercourse however between Greece and Egypt in the time of Homer does not put a negative on the supposition that there may have been early migration from the latter country to the former.

It has been questioned how far the ancient Egyptians were conversant with the art of navigation. The affirmative is fully argued by Mr. M’Culloch[236] in his commentaries on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. But it is plain that the Egyptians were not known to Homer as a nautical people. Not only do we never on any occasion hear of them in connection with the use of ships, but we hear of the plunder of their coast by pirates, when they confined themselves to resistance by land. This want of nautical genius agrees with all that we learn of them in Holy Scripture. And it places them in marked resemblance to the Pelasgian races generally: to the Arcadians[237]; to the Trojans; to the early Romans, who paid no serious attention to the creation of a fleet until the second Samnite War B.C. 311, or, as Niebuhr thinks, then only first had a fleet at all[238]: and again, to the landsmanlike spirit of Hesiod, who calls himself

οὔτε τι ναυτιλίης σεσοφισμένος, οὔτε τι νηῶν,

limits it entirely to a certain season, never was at sea except crossing from Aulis to Eubœa, and considers the whole business of going to sea one that had better be avoided[239].

That with Homer the fabulous element enters into his view of the Egyptians seems plain, from his calling them the race of Paieon, in the same way as he calls the Phæacians the race of Neptune: and in some degree also from the place which he gives them in the wanderings of Menelaus, since they lay, like those of Ulysses, in the exterior and unascertained sphere of geography.

Proteus is called Αἰγύπτιος, but in all probability the meaning is Proteus of the Nile, which is the proper Αἴγυπτος in the masculine gender; while the country, derivatively called from it as the γῆ Αἴγυπτος, takes the feminine. We shall hereafter see how Proteus belongs to the circle of nautical and therefore Phœnician tradition[240]. That deity has upon him all the marks of the outer and non-Grecian world. He is no less an admirable type of the πρωκτής, than a regular servant of Neptune, Ποσειδάωνος ὑποδμώς (Od. iv. 386). This connection with Neptune by no means makes him Greek: Neptune was the god of the θάλασσα, which extended beyond the circle of Greek experience, even to the borders of Ocean. We see set upon the whole of this adventure the same singular religious token as upon the remote adventures of Ulysses, namely this, that Menelaus passes beyond the ordinary charge of the Hellenic deities. The means of deliverance are pointed out to him, not by Minerva, but by Eidothea, daughter of Proteus himself, whose name, function, and relationship alike remind us that it was Ino Leucothea, daughter of the Phœnician Cadmus, who appeared to Ulysses for his deliverance, in a nearly similar border-zone of the marine territory lying between the world of fable and the world of experience; for the position of Egypt was in this respect like that of Phæacia. It would seem, then, as if Homer himself knew Egypt mainly through a Phœnician medium.

Of the Phœnician intercourse with that country we may safely rest assured, from their proximity, from their resort thither mentioned in Homer[241], and from the traces they left in Egypt itself.

It seems a probable conjecture that they had from a very early date a colony or factory in Egypt, by which they carried on their commerce with it. In the time of Herodotus, there was at Memphis a large and well-cared-for τέμενος or demesne of Proteus, whom the priests reported to be the successor of Sesostris on the Egyptian throne. This demesne was surrounded by the habitations of the ‘Tyrian Phœnices,’ and the whole plain in which it stood was called the Τυρίων στρατόπεδον. There is another tradition in Herodotus, according to which the Phœnicians furnished Egypt with the fleet, which in the time of Necho circumnavigated Africa[242].

Homer affords us little or no direct evidence of a connection between the religion of Greece and an Egyptian origin, to which Herodotus conceived it to be referable; but yet it may very well be the case, that Egypt was the fountain-head of many traditions which were carried by the Phœnicians into Greece. In Homer, for example, we find marks that seem to connect Dionysus with Phœnicia: but the Phœnicians may have become acquainted with him in Egypt, where Diodorus[243] reports that Osiris was held to be his original. There are two marks, however, of Egyptian influence, which seem to be more deeply traced. One is the extraordinary sacredness attached to the oxen of the Sun. The other, the apparent relation between the Egyptian Neith and the Athene of Attica, taken in conjunction with the Pelasgian character of the district[244]. But certainly our positive information from Homer respecting the Egyptians may be summed up in very brief compass. They would appear to have been peaceful, rich, and prosperous: highly skilled in agriculture, and also in medicine, if we are not rather to understand by this that they knew the use of opium, which might readily draw fervid eulogiums from a race not instructed in its properties. But the testimony to their agricultural excellence cannot be mistaken. Twice their fields are mentioned, and both times as περικάλλεες ἀγροί: in exact correspondence with the tradition which we find subsisting in Attica respecting those fields which were tilled by the Pelasgians[245]. And this case of the Egyptians is the only one throughout the Poems in which Homer bestows commendation upon tillage. Again, they fought bravely when attacked[246]. We find also the name Ægyptius naturalized in Ithaca. Lastly, they appear to have been hospitable to strangers, and placable to enemies[247]. This is a faint outline: but all its features appear to be in harmony with those of the Pelasgian race.

It is worthy of remark, that the Lotophagi visited by Ulysses correspond very much with the Egyptians, such as Homer conceived them. Locally, they belonged to the Egyptian quarter of the globe: they received the companions of Ulysses with kindness[248]; and they gave them to eat of the lotus, which appears in its essential and remarkable properties exactly to correspond with the νήπενθες[249] that Helen had obtained from Egypt. As every figure of the Phœnician traditions, except perhaps Æolus, is essentially either hard, or cruel, or deceitful, even so, whether on account of neighbourhood or otherwise, it seems to have been the poet’s intention to impress the less energetic but more kindly character of the Egyptians on this particular people, which perhaps he conceived to be allied to them.

There is indeed one suggestive passage of the Odyssey from which it is open to us to conjecture that there was more of substantive relation between Greece and Egypt than Homer’s purpose as a national poet led him fully to disclose. Menelaus, when he returns to Egypt after hearing from Proteus of the death of Agamemnon, raises in Egypt a mound in honour of his brother[250], ἵν’ ἄσβεστον κλέος εἴη. But this mound could not contribute to the glory of the slain king, unless Greece and its inhabitants were tolerably well known in Egypt.

Upon the whole, the evidence of the Homeric poems does not correspond with those later traditions which refer principally to Egypt as the origin of what is Greek. In considering this subject, we ought indeed to bear in mind Homer’s systematic silence as to the channels by which foreign influences found their way into Greece. For it throws us entirely upon such indirect evidence as he may (so to speak) involuntarily afford. And we must also recollect firstly that the Egyptian influence, whatever it may have been, may perhaps have operated more in the Pelasgian period, than in that Achæan age to which the representations of Homer belong. Secondly, that much may have reached Greece, as to religion or otherwise, in a Phœnician dress, which the Phœnicians themselves may have derived from Egypt.

There are other features, well known from all history to be Egyptian, though not traced for them by the hand of Homer, which tend strongly to confirm their relationship to the Pelasgian race, partly as it is delineated in the Homeric outlines, and partly as it is known from later tradition. One of these points is the comparatively hard and unimaginative character of its mythology, conforming to that of the race. It is interesting to notice how the Greeks, with their fine sense of beauty, got rid at once, in whatever they derived from Egypt, of the mythological deformities of gods incarnate in beasts, and threw them into the shapes of more graceful fable.

A second point of Pelasgian resemblance is the strong ritual and sacerdotal development of religion. A third is the want of the political energies which build and maintain extensive Empire. With all its wealth, and its early civilization, this opulent state could never make acquisitions beyond its own border, and has usually been in subordination to some more masculine Power. A fourth is, the early use of solid masonry in public edifices. The remains in Greece and Italy which are referred to the Pelasgians are indeed of much smaller dimensions than those of Egypt: but the Pelasgians of these countries, so far as we know, had not time to attain any higher political organization than that of small communities, with comparatively contracted means of commanding labour. A fifth is their wealth itself, which causes Egyptian Thebes to be celebrated both in the Iliad and in the Odyssey, perhaps the only case in which the poet has thus repeated himself, Il. ix. 381, and Od. iv. 126.

Lastly, the reputed derivation of the oracle at Dodona from Egypt harmonises with the Pelasgian character assigned to that seat of worship by Homer. The tradition to this effect reported by Herodotus[251] was Greek, and not Egyptian: it was obtained by him on the spot: and if Homer’s countrymen partook of the poet’s reserve, and his dislike of assigning a foreign source to anything established in Greece, a presumption arises that this particular statement would not have been made, had it not rested on a respectable course of traditionary authority.

_Silence of the Iliad._

It may however be asked, if the Pelasgians are to be regarded as Greeks, and as the base of the Greek nation, and if Homer was familiar with their name and position in that character, how happens it that he never calls the Greeks Pelasgians, as he calls them Danaans, Argeians, and Achæans, and never even gives us in the Iliad a Pelasgian race or tribe by name as numbered among the Greeks?

Now it is not a sufficient answer to say, that the Pelasgian race and name were falling under eclipse in the age of Homer; for we shall see reason hereafter to suppose that the appellations of Danaan and Argeian were likewise (so to speak) preterite, though not yet obsolete, appellations; still Homer employs them freely.

Their case is essentially different, however, as we shall find, from that of the Pelasgians, since those two names do not imply either any blood different from that of the Achæan or properly Greek body, or any particular race which had supplied an element in its composition: one of these the Pelasgian name certainly does imply. Those names too, without doubt, would not be used, unless they shed glory on the Greeks: the Pelasgian name could have no such treasure to dispense.

It should, however, here be observed, that an examination presently to be made of the force of the Argeian name will help us to account for the disappearance from Greece of the Pelasgian name, which it may perhaps have supplanted.

Let me observe, that if the Pelasgians did, in point of fact, supply an element to the Greek nationality, which had, while still remaining perceptibly distinct, become politically subordinate in Homer’s time, that is precisely the case in which he would be sure not to apply the name to the Greeks at large, nor to any Greek state, as its application could not under such circumstances be popular. His non-employment of it, therefore, for Greeks is _pro tanto_ a confirmation to the general argument of these pages.

If, again, there were a distinct people of Pelasgians among the Trojan auxiliaries, and on the Greek side a large but subordinate Pelasgic element, this would be ample reason both for his naming the Pelasgic allies of the Trojans, with a view to the truth of his recital, and for his not using the Pelasgic name in connection with the Greeks; for in no instance has he placed branches of the same race or tribe on both sides in the struggle. Glaucus and Sarpedon, the transplanted Æolids, cannot be considered as exceptions, first, from the old date of their Greek extraction: and secondly, because they are individuals, whereas we now speak of tribes and races. The name, too, was more suited to the unmixed Pelasgians of the Trojan alliance, than to a people, among whom it had grown pale beneath the greater splendour of famous dynasties and of more energetic tribes.

The application of this reasoning to the Pelasgi is fortified by its being applicable to other Homeric names.

_Thraces and Threicii._

It can hardly be doubted that the name Θρῇξ is akin to Τραχὶν and τρῆχυς[252], that it means a highlander, or inhabitant of a rough and mountainous country, and that it included the inhabitants of territories clearly Greek. This extended signification of the term explains the assertion of Herodotus[253], that the Thracians were the most numerous of all nations, after the Indians.

Now Homer makes Thamyris the Bard a Thracian; yet it is clear from his having to do with the Muses, and from the geographical points with which Homer connects his name, that he must be a Greek[254]. They are, Δώριον in the dominions of Pylos, where he met his calamity, and the Œchalia of Eurytus in Thessaly, from whence he was making his journey[255]. Strabo tells us that Pieria and Olympus were anciently Thracian[256], and moreover, that the Thracians of Bœotia consecrated Helicon to the Muses. Orpheus, Musæus, Eumolpus, were held to be Thracians by tradition, yet it also made them write in Greek. I think we may trace this descriptive character of the name Θρῇκες, and its not yet having acquired fully the force of a proper name with Homer, in his employment of it as an adjective, and not a substantive. It is very frequently joined in the poems with the affix ἄνδρες, which he does not employ with such proper names as are in familiar and established use, such as Danaan, Argive, or Achæan. He says Achæan or Danaan heroes, but never joins the names to the simple predicate ‘men.’ When he says Ἀχαιὸς ἄνηρ, it is with a different force; it is in pointing out an individual among a multitude. Indeed in Homer it is not Θρῇξ but Θρηίκιος which means Thracian, of or belonging to the country called Thrace, Θρῄκη. There is then sufficient evidence that Greeks of the highlands might be Thraces; and there may very probably have been whole tribes so called among the Greeks. Yet we never have Thracians named by Homer on the Greek side, while on the Trojan side they appear as supplying no less than two contingents of allies: one in the Catalogue, and another which had just arrived at the period of the Δολώνεια[257].

These two appear to be entirely distinct tribes: because no connection is mentioned between them; because the first contingent is described as being composed not of all the Thracians, but of all the Thracians within the Hellespont: and lastly, because the new comers have their own βασιλεὺς with them, as the first contingent had its leaders, Acamas and Peirous. The Hellespont meant here seems to be the strait, because it is ἀγαρρόος. And it is therefore possible, that while the first contingent was supplied by the nearer tribes, the second may have been composed of those Thracians who lay nearer the Greek border.

Notwithstanding that Mars, who is so inseparably associated with Thrace, fights on the Trojan side, we have no evidence from Homer which would warrant the assumption that he intended to connect the Thracians more intimately with the Pelasgians than with the Hellenes. It may be that the poet’s ethnical knowledge failed him. The wavering of Mars seems to indicate a corresponding uncertainty in his own mind. Perhaps with both the Thracian and Pelasgian names it was the breadth of their range that constituted the difficulty. Some part of Thrace is with him ἐριβώλαξ[258]; it is the part from which the first contingent came, as the son of Peirous belonged to it. And that part is less mountainous than the quarter which I have presumed may have supplied the contingent of Rhesus. The epithet is the very same as is applied to the Pelasgian Larissa[259]: and the Larissan Pelasgians are placed next to the first Thracian contingent in the Trojan Catalogue.

The most probable supposition for Thracians as well as Pelasgians is, that they had affinities in both directions; that they existed among the Greeks diffusively, and were absorbed in names of greater splendour: but that on the Trojan side they still had distinct national existence, and therefore they are named on that side, while to avoid confusion silence is studiously maintained about them on the other. The whole race, says Grote, present a character more Asiatic than European[260].

_Caucones and Leleges._

Many other races have been recorded in the later traditions as having in pre-historic times inhabited various parts of Greece. Such are Temnices, Aones, Hyantes, Teleboi. Of these Homer makes no mention. But there are two other races whom he names, the Leleges and Caucones, and with respect to whom Strabo[261] has affirmed, that they were extensively diffused over Greece as well as over Asia Minor.

Homer has proceeded, with respect to the Caucones, exactly in the same way as with respect to the Pelasgi. In the Iliad he names them[262] among the Trojan allies, and is wholly silent about them in dealing with the Greek races. But in the Odyssey, where he had no national distinctions to keep in view, he names them as a people apparently Greek, and dwelling on the western side of Greece. The pseudo-Mentor is going among them on business, to obtain payment of a debt[263]: and the manner in which they are mentioned, without explanation, shows that the name must have been familiar to Nestor and the other persons addressed. Probably therefore they were a neighbouring tribe: certainly a Greek tribe, for we do not find proof that the Homeric Greeks carried on commerce except with their own race.

The poet names them with a laudatory epithet: they are the Καύκωνες μεγάθυμοι. This may remind us of his bounty in the same kind to the Pelasgians: and it seems as though he had had a reverence for the remains of the ancient possessors of the country.

We have abundant signs of the Leleges on the Trojan side in the war. In the Tenth Book they appear as a contingent: but besides this, Priam had for one of his wives Laothee, daughter of Altes, king of the Lelegians, who are here called φιλοπτόλεμοι[264]. What is more important, we find the expressions Λέλεγες καὶ Τρῶες[265] used together in such a way, as implies the wide extension of the former as a race. In the Twentieth Iliad, Æneas in speaking of Achilles refers to his former escape from the great warrior. He fought, says Æneas, under the auspices of Minerva: who shed light before him, and bid him slay Lelegians and Trojans,

ἠδ’ ἐκέλευεν ἔγχεï χαλκείῳ Λέλεγας καὶ Τρῶας ἐναίρειν.

The Trojan force was in two main portions, each with many subdivisions: first, the army of Priam, with those of his kindred or subordinate princes: and, secondly, the allies, with their numerous and widely dispersed races. In the passage just quoted, the word _Leleges_ must either mean the great body of allies, or else it must, conjointly with _Troes_, signify the whole mass of what we may call the indigenous troops. Now the former is highly improbable. Such differences as are implied in the combination of Thracians, Lycians, and Pelasgians, could not well be, and nowhere else are comprehended by Homer under a single name as one race or nation, though the Lycians, on account of their excellence, are sometimes[266] taken to represent the whole body of the allies. And again, if the Leleges meant the whole body of allies, the Pelasgians would appear as a branch of them, which is contrary to all evidence and likelihood. If then the two words together represent those indigenous troops, as contradistinguished from the allies, who were arrayed in the five divisions that are enumerated in vv. 816-39 of the Second book, the question is, how is the sense to be distributed between them. And here there is not much room for doubt. The name Τρῶες had been assumed four generations before the war from King Tros, and was therefore a political or dynastic name, not a name of race. It most probably therefore indicates either the inhabitants of Priam’s own city and immediate dominions, or else the ruling race, who held power here, as elsewhere, among a subject population. In either case we must conclude that the word Leleges is meant to indicate the blood, and also the blood-name (so to speak) of the bulk of the population through a considerable tract of country: and it will be observed that in the fourth and fifth of the divisions[267] in the Trojan Catalogue Homer specifies no blood-name or name of race whatever.

This being so, we find an important light cast upon the meaning of the word Leleges. As we proceed with these inquiries, we shall find accumulating evidence of the Pelasgianism of the mass of the population on the Trojan side: and thus when it appears that that mass or a very great part of it was Lelegian, it also appears probable that the Leleges were at least akin to the Pelasgians, though some have taken them to be distinct[268].

In answer therefore to the question, who were these Caucones and these Leleges, while we are deficient in the means of detailed and particular reply, we may, I think, fall back with tolerable security upon the words used by Bishop Thirlwall in closing an ethnological survey:

“The review we have just taken of the Pelasgian settlements in Greece appears inevitably to lead to the conclusion that the name Pelasgians was a general one, like that of Saxons, Franks, or Alemanni: but that each of the Pelasgian tribes had also one peculiar to itself[269].”

Upon our finding, as we find, the Pelasgian name in certain apparent relations with others, such as Leleges and Caucones, it appears more reasonable to presume a relationship between them, than the reverse: for nothing can be more improbable than the simultaneous presence at that early period of a multitude of races, radically distinct from each other, and yet diffused intermixedly over the same country upon equal terms, and if there was a relationship, it would most probably be that of subdivision, under which Leleges and Caucones might be branches of the widely spread Pelasgian family.

This opinion is supported, not only by presumptions, but by much indirect evidence. It is indisputable that various names were applied, by the custom of the Homeric age, to the same people, and at the same period. The poet calls the inhabitants of Elis both Elians and Epeans. The people of Ithaca are Ithacesians (Ἰθακήσιοι), but there are also Ἀχαιοί[270], and in the Catalogue they are included under the Cephallenians[271]. The Dolopians in the speech of Phœnix[272] are included under the Phthians; and are also within the scope of the other names applied by the Catalogue to the followers of Achilles, who were called by the name of Myrmidons, or of Hellens, or of Achæans. Of these the first seems to be the denomination, which the ruling race of that particular district had brought with it into the country. The third probably belongs to the Myrmidons, as members of that tribe, of Hellic origin, which at the time predominated in Greece generally. The second, as we shall find, was the common name for all Greek tribes of that origin, and was the name which ultimately gained a complete ascendancy in the country. Of the five nations of Crete in the Seventeenth Odyssey[273], either all or several are probably included in the Κρῆτες of the Second Iliad[274]. Nay, we may now declare it to be at least highly probable[275], that the Ionian name was a sub-designation of the Pelasgians. Thus we have abundant instances of plurality in the designations of tribes. On the whole, we shall do best to assume that the names in question of Leleges and Caucones indicated Pelasgian subdivision. The inquiry is, however, one of ethnical antiquarianism only; these names are historically insignificant, for, apart from the Pelasgian, they carry no distinctive character or special function in reference to Greece.

_Erratum._--I have inadvertently, in p. 103, rendered κητώεσσαν ‘full of wild beasts.’ It ought to have been translated ‘deep-sunken.’ See Buttmann’s Lexilogus, _in voc._

FOOTNOTES:

[126] Il. ii. 681-5.

[127] Hermann Gr. Staats-alt. sect. 12.

[128] Il. ii. 841.

[129] Inf. sect. viii.

[130] Il. xiii. 686, et seqq.

[131] So Strabo, p. 221.

[132] The discussion is reviewed in Cramer’s Greece, vol. i. 115.

[133] Il. ii. 750.

[134] Od. xiv. 327; xix. 296.

[135] Cramer’s Ancient Greece, i. 353.

[136] Cramer’s Greece, i. 370.

[137] Hesiod ap. Strab. vii. 327.

[138] Schol. ad Trach. v. 1169.

[139] Vid. inf. sect. iii.

[140] Od. xix. 175.

[141] This question is discussed, inf. sect. ix.

[142] See inf. sect. ix.

[143] Il. ii. 735.

[144] Od. iv. 83. xiv. 199, 245. xvii. 448.

[145] Strabo viii. 6. p. 370.

[146] Cramer’s Greece, iii. 244.

[147] Inf. sect. viii.

[148] Il. xx. 215 and seqq.

[149] Thuc. i. cap. 2.

[150] Od. xii. 260-5.

[151] This state of ideas and habits is well illustrated by Odyss. xiv. 222-6: and see inf. sect. 7.

[152] Strabo viii. p. 383.

[153] Xenoph. Hell. vii. 1, 23, and Cramer iii. 299.

[154] Il. ii. 610.

[155] Il. ii. 609.

[156] 630-5.

[157] See inf. sect. vii.

[158] Xenoph. Hell. vii. 1. 23.

[159] Thuc. i. 2.

[160] Xenoph. Hellen. vii. 1. 23.

[161] Thucyd. vii. 57.

[162] B. i. 2.

[163] See also Müller, Orchomenus p. 77, and his references.

[164] Il. ii. 498.

[165] Strabo ix. p. 433.

[166] Aristot. Meteorol. i. 14.

[167] Paus. ii. 22. 2.

[168] Od. v. 125.

[169] Hesiod. Theog. 971.

[170] Od. xi. 281-4.

[171] See inf. sect. 8.

[172] Il. xv. 332, 7.

[173] Inf. sect. vi.

[174] Hymn. Cer. 123.

[175] Il. xxiii. 148. Od. viii. 362. Il. viii. 48.

[176] Il. xiii. 635.

[177] Il. iv. 328.

[178] Heyne in loc.

[179] In loc.

[180] From the Greek βῶλος, according to Richardson, who quotes _The Fox_ (v. 2.)

If Italy Have any glebe, more fruitful than these fallows, I am deceived.

[181] Od. i. 407.

[182] Od. v. 463.

[183] Od. vii. 332.

[184] Il. xxi. 232.

[185] Od. xi. 309.

[186] (ii. 132 Serr. Steph.)

[187] Inf. sect. 7.

[188] Od. xxi. 255.

[189] Payne Knight in loc.

[190] Od. xi. 302-4.

[191] Il. iii. 243.

[192] Eustath. in loc. et alii.

[193] Schol. A. in loc.

[194] In loc.

[195] Obss. in loc.

[196] Eustath. in loc.

[197] Schol. BL. in loc.

[198] Herod. vii. 161.

[199] Lord Aberdeen’s Inquiry, p. 100.

[200] Il. xvi. 419.

[201] See Od. xx. 72.

[202] Il. xii. 331.

[203] Il. ii. 756.

[204] Il. ii. 748.

[205] Ibid. 703-7.

[206] Od. iii. 307.

[207] Il. i. 194.

[208] Il. v. 1-8.

[209] V. 2, 3.

[210] Il. iv. 64-74.

[211] Il. vii. 34.

[212] Il. xxiv. 25-30.

[213] Il. v. 59.

[214] Il. viii. 362-9: cf. Od. xi. 626.

[215] Il. xx. 146.

[216] See inf. Religion and Morals, Sect. II.

[217] Vid. inf. as before.

[218] Eurip. Ion 64. 1590. Grote i. 144.

[219] Thirlwall, vol. ii. p. 2.

[220] Herod. v. 65.

[221] Thuc. i. 6.

[222] i. 2.

[223] Herod. i. 56.

[224] i. 57.

[225] Höck’s Creta ii. 109.

[226] Thuc. i. 3.

[227] Herod. vi. 137, 8.

[228] B. viii. p. 333.

[229] Herod. i. 139.

[230] Od. xiv. 243.

[231] Ibid. 257.

[232] Il. ix. 363.

[233] Od. iii. 318.

[234] Döllinger Heidenthum und Judenthum vi. 136. p. 427.

[235] Inf. p. 176.

[236] Note xvii.

[237] Il. ii. 614.

[238] Smith, Antiq. p. 331. Niebuhr, Hist. iii. 282.

[239] Works and Days 616 et seqq.

[240] Vid. inf. sect. 4. Nägelsbach (Hom. Theol. ii. 9.) may be consulted in an opposite sense.

[241] Od. xiii. 272. xiv. 228.

[242] Herod. iv. 42.

[243] i. 13.

[244] Inf. Religion and Morals, sect. iii.

[245] Sup. p. 148.

[246] Od. xiv. 271.

[247] Od. v. 278-86.

[248] Ibid. ix. 84, 94.

[249] Ibid. iv. 220.

[250] Ibid. 584.

[251] Herod. ii. 54. According to the Egyptian tradition there reported, the Phœnicians carried into Greece the priestess who founded the Dodonæan oracle. This again leads us to view the Phœnicians as the chief medium of intercourse between Egypt and Greece.

[252] Mure, Lit. Greece, vol. i.

[253] Herod. v. 2.

[254] Il. ii. 594-600.

[255] Il. ii. 730.

[256] Strabo x. p. 471.

[257] Il. ii. 844, and x. 434.

[258] Il. xx. 485.

[259] Il. ii. 841.

[260] Hist. Greece, iv. 28.

[261] Strabo viii. 7. p. 321, 2.

[262] Il. x. 429; xx. 329.

[263] Od. iii. 366.

[264] Il. xxi. 85.

[265] Il. xx. 96.

[266] Inf. p. 182.

[267] Il. ii. 828-39.

[268] Höck’s Creta, ii. p. 7.

[269] Thirlwall’s Hist. of Greece. Ch. ii. Vol. i. p. 41. 12mo.

[270] Od. passim.

[271] Il. ii. 631.

[272] Il. ix. 184, and xvi. 196.

[273] Od. xix. 175.

[274] Il. ii. 645.

[275] See supr. p. 126.

SECT. III.

_Pelasgians continued: and certain States naturalised or akin to Greece._

_a._ Crete. _b._ Lycia. _c._ Cyprus.

_Crete and the traditions of Minos._

This appears to be the place for a more full consideration of the testimony of Homer with respect to, probably, the greatest character of early Greek history, and one who cannot be omitted in any inquiry concerning the early Pelasgians of Greece: in as much as they stand in a direct Homeric relation to Crete, of which he was the king.

In the poems of Homer, Minos appears to stand forth as the first great and fixed point of Greek nationality and civilization. He is not indeed so remote from the period of Homer himself as others, even as other Europeans, whom the poet mentions, and whom he connects by genealogy with the Trojan period, particularly the Æolids. But the peculiarities meeting in his case, as compared with most of them, are these:

1. That he is expressly traced upwards as well as downwards.

2. That he is connected with a fixed place as its sovereign.

3. That so much is either recounted or suggested of his character and acts.

4. That the Homeric traditions as to Minos are so remarkably supported from without.

Minos is mentioned, and somewhat largely, in no less than six different passages of the Iliad and Odyssey. Homer has given us a much fuller idea of him, than of the more popular hero Hercules, although he is not named in nearly so many passages; and it is singular, that the more ancient of the two personages is also by much the more historical. Again, the poet has told us more about Minos, although he is of foreign extraction, than he has said about all the rest of the older Greek heroes put together. Of Theseus, Pirithous, Castor, Pollux, Meleager, Perseus, Jason, and the rest, his notices are very few and meagre. In dealing with Homer, I should quote even this fact of the greater amount of his references, which in the case of most other poets would be immaterial, as a strong presumption of the superior historical importance of the person concerned.

Minos, according to Homer, had Jupiter for his father, a Phœnician damsel for his mother, and Rhadamanthus for his younger brother. The name[276] of his mother is not recorded, but Jupiter calls her far-famed. This fame, if due to her beauty, would probably have kept her name alive; but as it has not been preserved, it is more probably a reflection from the subsequent greatness of her son.

The story thus far appears probably to indicate that Minos was a Phœnician by birth, but without a known ancestry, and raised into celebrity by his own energies and achievements.

The mode, by which he rose to fame, was by the government of men and the foundation of civil institutions. At nine years old he received, such is the legend, revelations from Jupiter,[277] and reigned, in the great or mighty city (μεγάλη πόλις) of Cnossus, over Crete: such was the form, copied by the politic legislator of Rome, in which a title to veneration was secured for his laws. No other city, besides this capital, is described in Homer by the epithet μεγάλη, or by any equivalent word.

A further vivid mark of his political greatness is afforded us by that passage in the Odyssey, which exhibits him not simply as exercising in the world beneath[278] the mere office of a judge, but rather as discharging there a judicial function in virtue of his sovereignty. Such is the force of the word θεμιστεύειν,[279] which signifies rather to give law than to administer it: or, at least, to exercise the function of a king rather than of a judge[280] (ἵστωρ). He is described as still the illustrious son of Jupiter, Διὸς ἀγλαὸς υἱός. Even there he appears not as one of the suffering or bewildered inhabitants of that lower world, but in the exercise of power as an actual ruler among the spirits of the departed;

οἱ δέ μιν ἀμφὶ δίκας εἴροντο ἄνακτα.

He only is invested with any character of this kind. Every other apparition below is either in actual suffering, or gloomy and depressed.

The epithet ὀλοόφρων, applied to Minos in an earlier passage of the Νεκυία, might perhaps convey the same idea as Virgil has rendered by his _durissima_ regna,[281] in the description of Rhadamanthus: and we may also compare the address of Menelaus in the Third Iliad to Jupiter,

Ζεῦ πάτερ οὔτις σεῖο θεῶν ὀλοώτερος ἄλλος.[282]

A reasonable construction would refer the word to the commercial character of the Phœnician people, at once cunning and daring[283]; and there is much probability in the opinion of Höck, who interprets the word as meaning ‘exactor of tribute,’ or as alluding to the exaction by Minos of a tribute from Attica[284]. On this we shall shortly have to enlarge.

_Power of Crete._

As to the family and kingdom of Minos, we should gather in the first place from Homer, that Crete had under him been preeminent in power. He was king of the island (Κρήτῃ ἐπίουρος)[285], and he reigned, at the age of nine years only (ἐννέωρος βασίλευε), in Cnossus over the five nations. The island had ninety, or in the rounder numbers, an hundred cities. Two generations had passed since Minos; Idomeneus his grandson did not apparently reign, like Minos himself, over the whole of it: for if this had been the case, it is very improbable, presuming that we may judge by the analogies which the order of the army in general supplies, that Meriones would have been made his associate, which in some manner he is, in the command; and again, the feigned story of Ulysses in the Odyssey, though it introduces Idomeneus, does not represent him as king of the whole island, but rather implies that his pretended brother, Æthon, also exercised a sovereignty there[286]. But even then the Cretan contingent, although the towns named as supplying it do not extend over the whole island[287], amounted to eighty ships, and thus exceeded any other, except those of Agamemnon and of Nestor. And then, when Minos had so long been dead, it was still the marked and special distinction of the country, that it was the seat of his race. So Eumæus, describing the disguised stranger to Penelope, says[288],

φησὶ δ’ Ὀδυσσῆος ξεῖνος πατρώïος εἶναι, Κρήτῃ ναιετάων, ὅθι Μίνωος γένος ἐστίν.

A passage which perhaps testifies that the family of Minos had been ξεῖνοι to the predecessors of Ulysses.

But perhaps there is no country in Greece which Homer so rarely mentions without a laudatory epithet. Though (περίρρυτος) sea-girt, it is not with him an island: it is Κρήτη γαῖα, Κρήτη εὐρεῖα, Κρήτη ἑκατόμπολις[289], and in the principal description, Homer exalts it more highly, I think, than any other territory,

Κρήτη τις γαῖ’ ἐστὶ, μέσῳ ἐνὶ οἴνοπι πόντῳ καλὴ καὶ πίειρα, περίρρυτος· ἐν δ’ ἄνθρωποι πολλοὶ, ἀπειέσιοι, καὶ ἐννήκοντα πόληες[290].

If it should be thought that the evidence to the character of Minos as a lawgiver is slight, we must call to mind that even the word _law_ is not found in Homer. The term afterwards used by the Greeks to express what we mean by a law, νόμος, only occurs with Homer in a sense quite different. He tells us of nothing more determinate than δίκαι and θέμιστες. But relatively to his pictures of other governors, the legislatorial character of Minos is as strongly marked as that of Numa is in Livy, relatively to other kings of Rome.

In conclusion, as to the region of Crete, it was inhabited by five races: namely,

1. Ἀχαιοί. 2. Ἐτεοκρῆτες. 3. Κυδῶνες. 4. Δωριέες. 5. Πελάσγοι.

_Pelasgianism in Crete._

Of these the Achæans and Dorians are evidently Greek. We are now examining at large the title of the Pelasgi to the same character. With respect to the Cydones, we may draw an inference from the facts, that they lived (Od. iii. 292), on a Cretan river Iardanus, and that this was also the name of a river of Peloponnesus (Il. vii. 133). I should even hold that this stream, which is not identified, was most probably in Arcadia: first, because in the contest with the Hellic tribes of Pylos, the Arcadians as Pelasgians would be on the defensive, and would therefore fight on their own ground: secondly, because the battle was on the ὠκύροος Κελάδων. These words are most suitable to some mountain feeder of the Iardanus, with its precipitate descent, rather than to the usually more peaceful course of a river near the sea, especially near the sea coast of sandy Pylus, which reached to the Alpheus[291]. This supposition respecting the Celadon will also best account for what otherwise seems singular; namely, that the battle was at once on the Celadon, and also about the Iardanus (Ἰαρδάνου ἀμφὶ ῥεέθρα[292]). Again, the battle was between Arcadians and Pylians, and therefore, from the relative situation of the territories, was probably on some Arcadian feeder of the Alpheus, lying far inland. Now if Iardanus was an Arcadian river, and if the Arcadians were Pelasgi, it leads to a presumption that the Cydonians of Crete, who dwelt upon an Iardanus, were Pelasgian also.

There remain the Ἐτεοκρῆτες, apparently so called, to distinguish them as indigenous from all the other four nations, who were ἐπήλυδες, or immigrant. This is curious, because it refers us elsewhere for the origin of the Pelasgi. It is the only case in which we hear of any thing anterior to them, upon the soils which they occupied. Lastly, Crete lay between Greece and Cyprus, and Cyprus is clearly indicated in the Odyssey as on the route to Egypt[293].

But we hear also of Rhadamanthus as the brother of Minos, of Deucalion as his son, and of Ariadne as his daughter[294]. And the notices of these personages in Homer all tend to magnify our conception of his power and his connections.

Theseus, who is glorified by Nestor as a first rate hero[295], and described as a most famous child of the gods[296], whom both Homer, and also the later legends connect with Attica, marries Ariadne, who dies on her way to Athens[297]. The marriages of Homer were generally contracted among much nearer neighbours. This more distant connection cannot, I think, but be taken as indicating the extended relations connected with the sovereignty of Minos and his exalted position.

_Traditions of Deucalion._

The genealogy of Idomeneus runs thus[298]; ‘Jupiter begot Minos, ruler of Crete. Minos begot a distinguished son, Deucalion. Deucalion begot me, a ruler over numerous subjects in broad Crete.’

Here it is to be remarked,

1. That while Minos and Idomeneus, the first and third generations, are described as ruling in Crete, Deucalion of the second is not so described.

2. That Idomeneus is nowhere described as having succeeded to the throne of his grandfather Minos, but only as being a ruler in Crete: and that, as we have seen, from the qualified conjunction of Meriones with him in the command, perhaps also from the limited range of the Cretan towns in the Catalogue, there arises a positive presumption that he had succeeded only to a portion of the ancient preeminence and power of his ancestor.

Now there is no direct evidence in Homer connecting Deucalion with Thessaly. The later tradition, however, places him there: and this tradition may probably claim an authority as old as that of Hesiod. A fragment of that poet[299], with the text partially corrupt, speaks of Locrus, leader of the Leleges, as among those whom Jupiter raised from the earth for Deucalion. This reference to Locrus immediately suggests the name of the Locrian race, and so carries us into the immediate neighbourhood of Thessaly; and the general purport of the words is to express something a little like the later tradition about Deucalion, which had that country for its scene. Combining this with the negative evidence afforded by the Homeric text, we thus find established a communication seemingly direct between Crete under Minos, and Thessaly, to which country we have already found it probable that Deucalion immigrated, and where he may have reigned.

The usual statement is, that the name Deucalion was common to two different persons, one the son of Minos, and the other the king of Thessaly. But we must be upon our guard against the device of the later Greek writers, who at once unravelled the accumulated intricacies that had gradually gathered about their traditions, and enlarged the stock of material for pampering vanity, and exciting the imagination, by multiplying the personages of the early legends. As regards the case now before us; the tradition, which makes Hellen son of the latter of these Deucalions, would certainly make him considerably older than he could be if a son of Minos. It must be admitted, that Homer repeats the name of Deucalion, for a Trojan so called is slain by Achilles in Il. xx. 478. It has pleased the fancy of the poet there to use the names of a number of dead heroes to distinguish the warriors who fell like sheep under the sword of the terrible Achilles: we find among them a Dardanus, a Tros, and a Moulius; and it is so little Homer’s practice to use names without a peculiar meaning, that we may conjecture he has done it, in preference to letting Achilles slaughter a crowd of ignoble persons, in order that in every thing his Protagonist might be distinguished from other men. But the poet seems to take particular care to prevent any confusion as to his great Greek, and indeed as to all his great living, personages. I am not aware of more than one single passage in the Iliad[300], among the multitude in which one or other of the Ajaxes is named, where there can be a doubt which of the two is meant. It is exceedingly unlikely that if a separate Deucalion of Thessaly had been known to Homer, he should not have distinguished him from the Deucalion of Crete. This unlikelihood mounts to incredibility, when we remember (1) that this other Deucalion of Thessaly is nothing less than the asserted root of the whole Hellenic stock, and (2) that the poet repeatedly uses the patronymic Deucalides as an individual appellation for Idomeneus, whereas the adverse supposition would make all the Achæans alike Δευκαλίδαι. We may therefore safely conclude at least, that Homer knew of no Deucalion other than the son of Minos.

_Of Rhadamanthus and the Phæacians._

We come now to Rhadamanthus, who is thrice mentioned by Homer. Once[301], as born of the same parents with Minos[302]. Once, as enjoying like him honours from Jupiter beyond the term of our ordinary human life: for he is placed amidst the calm and comforts of the Elysian plain. The third passage is remarkable. It is where Alcinous[303] promises Ulysses conveyance to his home, even should it be farther than Eubœa, which the Phæacian mariners consider to be their farthest known point of distance, and whither they had conveyed Rhadamanthus,

ἐποψόμενον Τίτυον, Γαιήιον υἱόν·

on his way to visit, or inspect, or look after, Tityus. This Tityus we find in the νεκυία suffering torture for having attempted violence upon Latona[304], as she was proceeding towards Pytho, through Panopeus. Panopeus was a place in Phocis, on the borders of Bœotia, and on the line of any one journeying between Delos and Delphi.

There is in this legend the geographical indistinctness, and even confusion, which we commonly find where Homer dealt with places lying in the least beyond the range of his own experience or that of his hearers, as was the case with Phæacia. If Tityus was in Panopeus, the proper way to carry Rhadamanthus was by the Corinthian gulf. But from various points in the geography of the Odyssey, it may, in my opinion, be gathered, that Homer had an idea, quite vague and indeterminate as to distance, of a connection by sea between the north of the Adriatic, and the north of the Ægean, either directly, or from the sea of Marmora: and it suited his representation of the Phæacians, and best maintained their as it were aerial character, to give them an unknown rather than a known route. However that might be, if we look into the legend in order to conjecture its historic basis, it appears to suggest the inferences which follow:

1. That according to tradition, the empire or supremacy of Minos, which may in some points have resembled that afterwards held by Agamemnon, embraced both Corcyra and likewise middle Greece, where Panopeus and Pytho or Delphi lay.

We must, however, presume the empire of Minos to have been in great part insular. There were contemporary kingdoms on the mainland, which give no sign of dependence upon it.

2. That the Phæacians acted as subjects of Minos in carrying Rhadamanthus by sea from one part of the dominions of that king to another.

3. That Rhadamanthus went to punish Tityus as an offender within the realm of Minos, and did this on the part and in lieu of Minos himself.

4. That though he was not Greek by birth, his person, and family, and empire were all Greek in the view of Homer.

This conjectural interpretation of the legend derives support from many quarters.

It is in thorough harmony, as to the extended rule of Minos, with the Eleventh Odyssey, which represents Minos as acting in the capacity of a sovereign in the shades below; which also exhibits, as suffering judicially the punishments that he awarded, offenders connected with various portions of Greek territory, and among them this very Tityus.

_Minos: post-Homeric tradition._

It is now time to look to the post-Homeric traditions.

The extent of the sway of Minos is supported by the tradition of Pelasgus, in the Supplices of Æschylus[305], which represents the whole country from (probably) Macedonia to the extreme south of the peninsula, as having been formerly under one and the same sway. The empire of Minos may have been magnified into this tradition.

The authority of Thucydides is available for the following points[306]:--

1. That Minos was the earliest known possessor of maritime power: thus harmonising with the hypothesis that the Phæacians, whose great distinction was in their nautical character, were acting as his subjects when they carried Rhadamanthus.

2. That his power extended over the Grecian sea, or Ægean (Ἑλληνικὴ θάλασσα) generally (ἐπὶ πλεῖστον); thus indicating a great extent of sway.

3. That he appointed his children to govern his dominions on his behalf (τοὺς ἑαυτοῦ παῖδας ἡγεμόνας ἐγκαταστήσας): which supports the idea that his brother Rhadamanthus may have acted for him at a distance.

4. That he drove the Carians out of the islands of the Ægean. This statement receives remarkable confirmation from Homer, who makes the islands up to the very coast of Caria contributors to the force of the Greek army: while Lesbos and others, situated farther north, and more distant from Crete, appear to have been, like Caria itself, in the Trojan interest.

In the Minos ascribed to Plato[307] we find the tradition of his direct relations with Attica, which were well known to the theatre. This supports the notice in Homer of the marriage contracted between Theseus and his daughter Ariadne.

Aristotle[308], like Thucydides, asserts the maritime power of Minos and his sovereignty over the islands, and adds, that he lost or ended his life in the course of an expedition to conquer Sicily[309].

Herodotus[310], like Thucydides, treats Minos as the first known sovereign who had been powerful by sea. He states, that Minos expelled his brother Sarpedon from Crete, and that Sarpedon with his adherents colonised Lycia, which was governed, down to the time of the historian himself, by laws partly Cretan[311]: and he also delivers the tradition that Minos was slain in an expedition against Sicily at Camicus, afterwards Agrigentum. A town bearing his name remained long after in the island.

Euripides laid the scene of his Rhadamanthus in Bœotia: and a Cretan colony is said to have established the Tilphosian temple there[312]. Höck finds traces of a marked connection between Crete and that district[313].

_Minos: Laconian and Cretan laws._

More important, however, than any isolated facts are the resemblances of the Lacedæmonian and Cretan politics, noticed by Aristotle[314], in combination with the admission always made by the Lacedæmonians, that their lawgiver Lycurgus initiated the Cretan institutions[315], and with the universal Greek tradition that in Crete, first of all parts of Greece, laws and a regular polity had been established by Minos. Again, in the Dialogue printed among the works of Plato, the author of it seeks to establish the fundamental idea of law: puts aside the injurious statements of the tragedians who represented Minos as a tyrant, declares his laws to have been the oldest and the best in Greece, and the models from which the prime parts of the Laconian legislation had been borrowed[316].

Among the resemblances known to us appear to be

1. The division between the military and the agricultural part of the community.

2. The περίοικοι of Crete, holding the same relation to the Cretans, as the Helots to the Spartans, and like them cultivating the land.

3. The institution of συσσίτια in both countries.

4. The organism of the government: the five ephors corresponding with the ten κοσμοὶ of Crete, and the βουλὴ being alike in both.

There also still remain etymological indications that Minos was the person who raised some tribe or class to preeminence in Crete, and depressed some other tribes or classes below the level of the free community. In Hesychius we read,

μνοῖα, οἰκετεία.

μνῆτοι, δοῦλοι.

μνῶα, δουλεία.

And Athenæus quotes from the Cretica of Sosicrates, τὴν μὲν κοινὴν δουλείαν οἱ Κρῆτες καλοῦσι μνοίαν· τὴν δὲ ἰδίαν ἀφαμιώτας· τοὺς δὲ περιοίκους, ὑπηκόους[317]. He also says, that, according to Ephorus, the general name for slave in Crete was κλαρώτης, and that it was derived from the custom of apportioning the slaves by lot. This remarkably fixes the character of Cretan slavery as owing its rise to some institutions public in the highest sense, for merely private slavery could not, it would appear, have had an origin such as to account for the name. It thus indirectly supports the idea implied in μνοία and μνῆτοι, that it was derived from Minos. Athenæus[318] again, quoting the _Creticæ glossæ_ of Hermon, gives us the words μνώτας, τοὺς εὐγενεῖς (otherwise read ἐγγενεῖς) οἰκέτας, and thus pointing to the reduction to servitude of some of the previously free population of the country.

There can be little doubt that it was the Pelasgic part of the population which thus succumbed before the more active elements of Cretan society, and which continued in the manual occupation of husbandry, while war, policy, and maritime pursuits became the lot of their more fortunate competitors. For is it difficult to divine which were those more active elements, since Homer points out for us among the inhabitants of Crete at least two tribes, the Achæans and the Dorians, of Hellic origin. Bishop Thirlwall points also to a Phœnician element in Crete, and to Homer as indicating the Phœnician origin of Minos. This is suggested not only by his birth, and by his maritime preeminence, but by Homer’s placing Dædalus in Crete[319]. For that name directly establishes a connection with the arts that made Sidon and Phœnicia so famous. The later tradition, indeed, places Dædalus personally in relations with Minos, as having been pursued by him after he had fled to Sicily[320].

Elsewhere I have shown reason for supposing that a second of the five Cretan nations, namely, the Κύδωνες, was Pelasgian: and there is a curious tradition, which supports this hypothesis. According to Ephorus[321], there were solemn festivals of the slave population, during which freemen were not permitted to enter within the walls, while the slaves were supreme, and had the right of flogging the free; and these festivals were held in Cydonia, the city of these Κύδωνες.

Our belief in a Cretan empire of Minos, founded on the evidence of the Poems, and sustained by the statement of Thucydides, need not be impaired by the fact that we find little post-Homeric evidence directly available for its support. In early times the recollection of dynasties very much depended on the interest which their successors had in keeping it alive. Now the Minoan empire was already reduced to fragments at the time of the _Troica_. The supremacy over Greece was then in the hands of a family that held the throne of the Perseids and the Danaids, a throne older than that of Minos himself, though in his time probably less distinguished: a throne whose lustre would have been diminished by a lively tradition of his power and greatness. And it was from the Pelopids that the Dorian sovereigns of Sparta claimed to inherit. Therefore the great Greek sovereignty, from the _Troica_ onwards, had no interest in cherishing the recollection of this ancient part of history; on the contrary, their interest lay in depressing it; and under these circumstances we need not wonder that, until the inquiring age of Greek literature and philosophy, when Athens gained the predominance, the traces of it should have remained but faint. But the traces of Cretans have been found extensively dispersed both over the islands, and on the coasts of the Ægean[322].

_The Lycians._

To complete the statement of this part of the case, it is necessary to turn to another country, holding, with its inhabitants, a very peculiar position in the Iliad. The attentive reader of the poem must often inquire, with curiosity and wonder, why it is that Homer everywhere follows the Lycian name with favour so marked, that it may almost be called favouritism. At every turn, which brings that people into view, we are met by the clearest indications of it: and few of Homer’s indications, none of his marked indications, are without a cause and an aim.

Sarpedon, the Lycian commander in chief, performs the greatest military exploit on the Trojan side that is to be found throughout the poems[323]. That he does not obscure the eminence of Hector is only owing to the fact, that his share in the action of the poem is smaller, not to its being less distinguished. Everywhere he plays his part with a faultless valour, a valour set off by his modesty, and by his keen sense of public duty according to the strictest meaning of the term[324]; Jupiter, his father, sheds tears of blood for his coming death; and he is in truth the most perfect as well as the bravest man on the Trojan side. Glaucus, his second in command, is inferior to no Trojan warrior save Hector, though in the exchange of the arms with Diomed Homer has, as usual, reserved the superiority to the Grecian intellect.

The distinctions awarded to the Lycian people are in full proportion to those of their king Sarpedon. They formed one only among the eleven divisions of the auxiliary force, but the Lycian[325] name, and theirs only[326], evidently on account of their eminence, is often used to signify the entire body. In the great assault on the Greek trench and rampart, Sarpedon their leader commands all the allies, and chooses as his lieutenants Glaucus, and Asteropæus a Pæonian, but not the Pæonian general[327]. They are never mentioned with any epithet except of honour: and to them is applied the term ἀντίθεοι[328], which is given to no other tribe or nation in the Iliad, and in the Odyssey only to the Phæacians[329]; to these last it appertains doubtless on account of their relationship to the immortals. The Lycian attack in the Twelfth Book is the one really formidable to the Greeks[330], and in the rout of the Sixteenth Book we are told, that ‘not even the stalwart (ἴφθιμοι) Lycians’ held their ground after the death of Sarpedon[331]. They alone are appealed to in the name of that peculiar and sacred sentiment of military honour called αἰδὼς, which, with this single exception, seems to be the exclusive property of the Greeks[332].

It is difficult to account for this glowing representation, so consistently carried through the poem, except upon the supposition, that Homer regarded the Lycians as having some peculiar affinity or other relation with the Greeks; and that he on this account raised them out of what would otherwise more naturally have been a secondary position.

There are many signs of a specific kind, that this was actually his view of them.

1. To make Sarpedon the son of Jupiter was at once to establish some relationship with the Greek races.

2. The legend of Bellerophon, delivered on the field of battle, was not required, nor is it introduced, merely to fill up the time during which Hector goes from the camp to the city. It required no filling up: but Homer turns the interval to account by using it to give us this interesting chapter of archaic history, doubtless in order to illustrate, as all his other legends do, the beginnings and early relations of the Hellenic races. Accordingly we find that Antea, wife of Prœtus the Argive king, was a Lycian: that a familiar intercourse subsisted between the two courts, such as probably and strongly implies that the nations had other ties: and lastly that an Æolid line of sovereigns, descended through Sisyphus, were the actual governors of Lycia at the period of the _Troica_.

3. The very same ideas of kingship and its offices, which prevailed in Greece, are expressed by Sarpedon in his speech to Glaucus[333], and there is an indication of free institutions which enlarges the resemblance. The force of this circumstance will be more fully appreciated, when we shall have examined the Asiatic tinge which is perceptible in the institutions of Troy itself.

4. Besides the Æolid sovereignty, the etymology of the names of Lycian warriors connects itself not only with the Greek race, but with the Hellic element in that race[334].

5. On the other hand Apollo, whom we shall hereafter find to be the great Pelasgian, though also universal, god, is even, according to Homer, in close and peculiar connection with Lycia, although he is not localized there by Homer as he is in the later tradition. First as being λυκηγενής. Secondly as the great bowman: while Lycia was so eminent in this art, that Æneas, addressing Pandarus with a compliment on his skill, says no man before Troy can match him, and perhaps even in Lycia there may not be a better archer[335]. Thirdly, this Pandarus the archer, and son of Lycaon, received the gift of his bow from Apollo himself[336]: and says, that Apollo prompted or instructed him, as he came from Lycia[337]. It may, however, be reasonably questioned, whether we are here to understand the Lycia of the South, or the district of kindred name in Troas. In any case, Apollo in Lycia would be no more than the counterpart of Minerva in Pelasgian Athens.

6. The prevalence of that Lycian name in other quarters, such as Arcadia, of a marked Pelasgian character, further supports the supposition that Lycia had probably a Pelasgian race for the bulk of its population, holding the same subordinate relation to another race as we find in corresponding cases. In Arcadia[338] Pausanias reports a Lycaon son of Pelasgus; a Lycosura, the city he founded; Lyceon, the hill where it stood; and Lycea, the games he established.

All this evidence combines to show some correspondence between Lycia and Greece, as to the constituent elements of the population. The agreement could not have been perfect: for the records of the Lycian language, I believe, show a prevalence of other elements than the Greek. But we have thus a reason to suppose, that the community of architecture and other arts which has been found to subsist between the two countries, was not merely dependent on later colonisation, but was owing to an affinity of races and similarity of manners which dates from the heroic age.

Lastly, the fragments of Homeric evidence respecting the Lycians are combined by a later tradition, which links them to Crete, the main subject of our recent inquiry. According to this tradition, there was a Sarpedon earlier than the Sarpedon of the _Troica_, who, besides being son of Jupiter, was brother to Minos. He is said to have been expelled, with his adherents, by that sovereign from Crete; to have repaired to Lycia, and to have colonised that country, or a part of it. In the time of Herodotus, as we have seen, it retained laws of Cretan, that is to say of Greek, origin. And at two later periods of its history, far remote from Homer and from one another, its inhabitants signalised themselves by the most desperate valour in defence of Xanthus, its capital[339].

For the origin of the group of names, having Λύκος or some similar word for their root, it seems most natural to infer its identity with the Latin _lucus_, essentially the same with _lupus_, and to presume that it had a Pelasgic source, but that the word corresponding with it, probably Λύκος, meaning a wood or grove, had become obsolete in the later Hellenic tongue. There is every reason for a supposition of this kind, as these words, etymologically connected, evidently hang round some common centre, which centre has reference to primitive and to Pelasgic life, as well as to the somewhat specially Pelasgic deity Apollo. Nor is it strange that the root of a name associated with the Pelasgi should have been lost to the Greek tongue, while the name itself remains: we have another example in Larissa.

But if there was such a word, with such a meaning, the link, which may perhaps connect it with Pelasgic life, is evident. For the first agricultural settlers must often be, as such, in a greater or less degree, dwellers in woods. It may be said that in the United States, at the present day, the proper name for an agricultural settler is ‘backwoodsman.’ In British colonies of Australia, they, who pass beyond the limits of existing settlement, in order to extend it, are said to go into the bush. Thus the idea at the root of the Lycian name is in all probability twin, or rather elder brother, to that which properly would indicate the agricultural settler.

It is however plain, that we cannot look to any thing simply Pelasgian in the Lycian population, as supplying the motive which has induced Homer to give the Lycians a marked preference over other populations, themselves of a Pelasgian character. This preference must be due to the other element, which associates them especially with the Hellenic race. And we may not irrationally suppose it to be founded on any one of such causes as these: the special connection in the royal line between the two countries: a larger infusion of the more lordly blood into a subordinate Lelegian or Pelasgian body in Lycia, just as in Greece, than in Troas and Asia Minor generally: or lastly, a more palpable and near connection between the dominant caste in Lycia and those Persian highlanders, from among whom may have proceeded[340] the forefathers of the Hellenic tribes. Everywhere we see this race branching forth, and, by an intrinsic superiority, acquiring a predominance over the races in prior occupation. Whether the stock came to Lycia by land, or from the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, it may be hard even to conjecture: but there is one particular note of relationship to Persia, which Lycia retains more clearly than Greece, and that is the high estimation in which, to judge from the connection with Apollo and from Il. v. 172, the use of the bow was held in that country. The case was the same in Persia. According to Herodotus, one of the three essential articles of education in Persia was the use of the bow[341]; and he is not contradicted by Ctesias, who calls him in most things a liar and a fabulist[342]. We must not, indeed, rely too strongly upon a circumstance like this. Cyaxares the Median had the art taught to his sons by Nomad Scythians[343]. We may however observe that alike on the Trojan and the Grecian side we never hear of the bow except in the hands of highborn persons, such as Paris, Pandarus, Teucer: and, in the games, Meriones[344].

In passing, it may deserve remark, that the Lycians alone, of all tribes or nations on either side, appear not under two leaders merely, but two kings, in the strict sense. I do not however believe that this indicates a political peculiarity. The origin of it may probably be found in the legend of Bellerophon, to whom, after his high exploits and great services, the reigning sovereign gave half his kingdom[345]. Now that king is nowhere stated to have had a son: and if we suppose a failure of issue in his own direct line, and the succession of one of the two descendants of his daughter to each moiety of the realm, it at once accounts for the exceptional position of Sarpedon and Glaucus.

The suppositions then towards which we are led are, that Minos was of Phœnician origin, that he came to Crete and acquired the sovereignty, that he ruled over a mixed population of Cretans, Pelasgians, and Hellic tribes, that he organised the country and established an extended supremacy, especially maritime and insular, beyond its limits; which however we must not consider as involving the consistent maintenance of sovereignty according to modern ideas, and which is in no degree inconsistent with the rule of Danaids or Perseids in Peloponnesus. Lastly, that in giving form to his social institutions, he depressed the Pelasgian element of Cretan society, and laid, in political depression, the foundations of their subsequent servitude.

_Cyprus._

If this be so, it is worth while further to observe, that there are traces of a somewhat analogous history in Cyprus, another acknowledged stepping-stone, according to Homer[346], between Greece and the East.

In the Seventeenth Book of the Odyssey[347], Ulysses, in one of his fictitious narrations, states to the Suitors, that the Egyptians, who had taken him prisoner and reduced him to slavery, then made a present of him to their ξεῖνος Dmetor, a descendant of Iasus, who ruled ‘with might,’ that is, with considerable power over Cyprus (ὃς Κύπρου ἶφι ἄνασσεν); the same expression as he uses in the Eleventh Book with respect to Amphion, the Iasid, in Orchomenus. From all we know of the Iasian name[348], it may be inferred that this was a Pelasgian dynasty, and if so, then without doubt that it ruled over a Pelasgian people.

Ulysses does not mention the time of this transaction; and it must be remembered, that he spoke in the character of an aged person, so that the scene might be laid (so to speak) thirty or forty years back, and therefore long before the expedition to Troy.

But in the Eleventh Book of the Iliad[349], we find Agamemnon putting on a breastplate, which was evidently a marvel of workmanship, with its plates on plates of different metals, and its six dragons flashing forth the colours of the rainbow. Now we must observe, first, that this was evidently meant to be understood as a Sidonian or Phœnician work: secondly, that it was presented to Agamemnon by Cinyres of Cyprus, to conciliate his favour (--χαριζόμενος βασιλῆï, perhaps we might render it, to win the favour of _his_ king--) upon the occasion of his hearing that the king was collecting an armament against Troy. That is to say, it was to compound with him for not appearing in person to join the Greek forces. Here then we must infer that there was some vague allegiance, which was due, or which at least might be claimed, from Cyprus to Agamemnon, under the πολλῇσιν νήσοισι[350].

Now we know nothing of the Pelopids before the _Troica_ as conquerors: and especially, it would be difficult to apply the supposition that they were such in relation to a place so distant. Therefore the political connection, whatever it may have been, could probably rest upon an ethnical affinity alone; and, as we know nothing of any Hellic element in this quarter, that affinity seems to presume the Pelasgian character of the population. The inference, which may thus be drawn, coincides with that already suggested by the name of Iasus.

We may however justly be curious to learn what conditions they were which gave to Cinyres, and so far as we know to Cinyres alone, among princes, this very peculiar attitude at a critical juncture. It is obvious, that in proportion as his situation was remote from the Greek rendezvous, and from the scene of action, the service became more burdensome: but on the other hand, in proportion as he was distant from the centre of Achæan power, he was little likely to be coerced. How comes it then that Agamemnon had over Cinyres an influence which he does not seem to have possessed over the tribes of Macedonia and Thrace, though these lay nearer both to him, and to the way between him and the Troad, which he had to traverse by sea?

The hypothesis, that the population of Cyprus was purely or generally Pelasgian, appears to square remarkably with the facts. For then, upon the one hand, they would naturally be disinclined to interfere on behalf of the Greeks in a war where all purely Pelasgian sympathies would (as we must for the present take for granted) incline them towards Troy.

But further, we find among other notes of the Pelasgians this, that they were characterised by a want of nautical genius, while the more enterprising character of the Hellenes at once made them, and has kept them down to this very day, an eminently maritime people; and Homer himself, with his whole soul, evidently gloried and delighted in the sea. If then the population of Cyprus was Pelasgian, we can readily understand how, notwithstanding its sympathies and its remoteness, it might be worth the while of its ruler to propitiate Agamemnon by a valuable gift in order to avert a visit which his ships might otherwise be expected to pay; and how the Pelopid power over Cyprus, as an island, might be greater than over nearer tribes, which were continental.

It may aid us to comprehend the relation between Cyprus and Agamemnon, if we call to recollection the insular empire which Athens afterwards acquired.

There is another sign, which strongly tends to connect Cyprus with the Pelasgian races, especially those which belong to Asia. It is the worship of Venus, who had in that island her especial sanctuary, and who, upon her detection in the Odyssey[351], takes refuge there. In the war, she is keenly interested on the Trojan side: and the Trojan history is too plainly marked with the influence of the idea, that exalted her to Olympian rank. That Venus was known mythologically among the Hellenic tribes, we see from the lay of Demodocus. That she was worshipped among them, seems to be rendered extremely improbable by the fact, that Diomed wounds her in his ἀριστεῖα[352]. We must consider her as a peculiarly, and perhaps in Homer’s time almost exclusively Pelasgian deity; and her local abode at Paphos may be taken as a marked sign, accordingly, of the Pelasgianism of Cyprus.

We have already seen Agapenor, a stranger, placed by Agamemnon in command of the Pelasgian forces of Arcadia; and Minos, a stranger, acquire dominion over the partially, and perhaps mainly, Pelasgian population of Crete. It seems probable, that Cyprus in this too affords us a parallel. We have the following considerations to guide us in the question. First, the Pelasgians, not being a maritime, were consequently not a mercantile people. Secondly, from the description of the gift sent by Cinyres, we must understand it, on account of the preciousness of its materials and its ornaments, to have been a first rate example of the skill of the workers in metal of the period. Such things were not produced by Pelasgians; and we must, to be consistent with all the other Homeric indications, suppose this breastplate to have been of Sidonian or Phœnician workmanship. This supposition connects Cinyres himself with Phœnicia, while his people were Pelasgian. Again, on examining his name we find in it no Pelasgian characteristics; but it appears to be Asiatic, and to signify a musical instrument with strings, which was used in Asia[353]. All this makes it likely, upon Homeric presumptions, that he was a Phœnician, or a person of Phœnician connections, and that into his hands the old Pelasgic sovereignty of Minos had passed over from the Iasid family, which had reigned there shortly before the _Troica_.

The Homeric tradition with respect to Cinyres is supported to some extent from without[354]. Apollodorus so far agrees with it as to report, that Cinyres migrated from the neighbouring Asiatic continent into Cyprus with a body of followers, founded Paphos, and married the daughter of the king of the island. Apollodorus, Pindar, and Ovid, all treat Cinyres in a way which especially connects him with the worship of Venus, as though he had introduced it into the island; and it is observable, that the points at which we find this deity in contact with the race are all in Asia, or on the way from it, that is to say, Troas, Cyprus, and lastly, Cythera: as if it were not original to the Greeks, but engrafted, and gradually taking its hold. Sandacus was, according to Apollodorus, the father of Cinyres, and had come from Syria into Cilicia.

The process which we thus seem to see going forward in the Pelasgian countries, and which was probably further exemplified in the Greek migrations to the coast of Asia Minor, was grounded in the natural, if we mean by the natural the ordinary, course of things. In the last century, John Wesley said, that the religious and orderly habits of his followers would make them wealthy, and that then their wealth would destroy their religion. So in all likelihood it was the peaceful habits of the Pelasgians that made their settlements attractive to the spoiler. They thus invited aggression, which their political genius and organization were not strong enough to repel; and the power of their ancient but feeble sovereignties passed over into the hands of families or tribes more capable of permanently retaining it, and of wielding it with vigour and effect.

_Negative argument from Homer._

I must not, however, pass from the subject of Homeric testimony respecting the Pelasgi, without adverting to one important negative part of it.

It must be observed, that, as anterior to the three appellatives which he ordinarily applies to the Greeks of the Trojan war collectively, Homer uses no name whatever other than the Pelasgic, which is not of limited and local application. Neither Ἀχαιοὶ, Ἀργεῖοι, nor Δαναοὶ, bear any one sign of being the proper designation of the original settlers and inhabitants of all Greece: and if the name for them be not Πελασγοὶ, there certainly is no other name whatever which can compete for the honour, none which has the same marks at once of great antiquity, and of covering a wide range of the country. And if, as I trust, it shall hereafter be shown, that all these came from abroad as strangers into a country already occupied, there then will be a presumption of no mean force arising even out of this negative, to the effect that the Pelasgians were the original base of the Greek nation, while we are also entitled to affirm, upon the evidence of Homer, that their race extended beyond the limits of Greece.

Such is the supposition upon which we already begin to find that the testimony of the poems as a whole appears to converge. It is, I grant, indirect, and fragmentary, and much of it conjectural; we may greatly enlarge its quantity from sources not yet opened: but I wish to direct particular attention to its unity and harmony, to the multitude of indications which, though separate and individually slight, all coincide with the theory that the Pelasgi supplied the _substratum_ of the Greek population subsisting under dominant Hellic influences; and to the fact, I would almost venture to add, that they can coincide with nothing else.

_The Pelasgians; post-Homeric evidence._

We must proceed, however, to consider that portion of the evidence in the case, which is external to the Homeric Poems.

Besides what has been up to this point incidentally touched, there is a great mass of extra-Homeric testimony, which tends, when read in the light of Homer, to corroborate the views which have here been taken of the Pelasgi, as one of the main coefficients of the Greek nation.

In the first chapter of the able work of Bishop Marsh, entitled, _Horæ Pelasgicæ_[355], will be found an ample collection of passages from Greek writers, which, though many of them are in themselves slight, and any one if taken singly could be of little weight for the purpose of proof, yet collectively indicate that the possession of the entire country at the remotest period by the Pelasgi was little less than an universal and invariable tradition. I will here collect some portion of the evidence which may be cited to this effect.

Coming next to Homer in time and in authority, Hesiod supports him, as we have seen above[356], in associating Dodona both with the Pelasgic and with the Hellic races; placing it, just as Homer does, in the midst of the latter, and more distinctly than Homer indicating its foundation by the former. It may be observed that, in a Fragment, he questionably personifies Pelasgus[357].

Next we find the very ancient poet Asius, according to the quotation of Pausanias[358], assigning the very highest antiquity to the Pelasgian race, by making Pelasgus the father of men;

ἀντίθεον δὲ Πελασγὸν ἐν ὑψικόμοισιν ὄρεσσι γαῖα μέλαιν’ ἀνέδωκεν, ἵνα θνητῶν γένος εἴη.

Among the Greek writers, not being historians themselves, of the historic period, there is none whose testimony bears, to my perception, so much of the true archaic stamp, as Æschylus. It seems as if we could trace in him a greater piety towards Homer, and we certainly find a more careful regard both to his characters and his facts, than were afterwards commonly paid to them. Nay he excels in this respect the Cyclic poets. They were much nearer in date to the great master, but he, as it were, outran them, by a deeper and nobler sympathy. In him, too, the drama had not yet acquired the character, which effaces or impairs its claims to historical authority: which earned for it the ἐκτραγῳδεῖν of Aristotle[359] and Polybius[360], and on which was founded the declaration of Socrates in the Minos, Ἀττικὸν λέγεις μῦθον καὶ τραγικόν[361]. Even where he speaks allegorically, he seems to represent the first form of allegory, in which it is traceably moulded upon history, and serves for its key. It is not therefore unreasonable to attach importance to his rendering of the public tradition respecting the Pelasgi, which we find in a remarkable passage of the Supplices;

τοῦ γηγενοῦς γάρ εἰμ’ ἐγὼ Παλαίχθονος ἶνις Πελασγὸς, τῆσδε γῆς ἀρχηγέτης. ἐμοῦ δ’ ἄνακτος εὐλόγως ἐπώνυμον γένος Πελασγῶν τήνδε καρποῦται χθόνα[362].

Pelasgus, himself the speaker, then describes his dominions as reaching from Peloponnesus (χώρη Ἀπίη) in the south to the river Strymon in the north (πρὸς δύνοντος ἡλίου), and declares how Apis, coming from Acarnania, had fitted the country for the abode of man by clearing it of wild beasts. Acarnania marks the line of country, which formed the ordinary route from Thessaly to Peloponnesus. Taken literally, Pelasgus is the son of the Earthborn, and the name-giver of the Pelasgian race. What the passage signifies evidently is, that by ancient tradition the Pelasgians were the first occupants of the country, and that they reached from the north to the south of Greece. It is in the reign of this mythical Pelasgus, that Danaus reaches the Peloponnesus.

Of such an _eponymus_ Thessaly, Argos, and Arcadia had each their separate tradition in its appropriate dress. Pausanias reports the Arcadian one very fully: and according to its tenour Pelasgus taught the use of dwellings and clothes, and to eat chestnuts instead of roots, grass, and leaves[363]. The tomb of Pelasgus was pretended to be shown at Argos.

Herodotus states that the Hellas of his day was formerly called Πελασγία[364]: gives to the Peloponnesian women of the era of Danaus the name of Πελασγιωτίδες γυναῖκες[365]: he denominates the Arcadians Πελασγοὶ Ἀρκάδες[366], the people of what was afterwards Achaia Πελασγοὶ Αἰγιαλέες[367], the Athenians Πελασγοὶ Κραναοὶ[368], whom also he describes as autochthonic[369]: and he shows, that recollections of the Pelasgian worship were preserved in his day at Dodona[370]. He furthermore mentions the Πελασγικὸν τεῖχος[371] at Athens; and he places the Pelasgian race in Samothrace, and Lemnos, and mentions their settlements upon the Hellespont, named Placia and Scylace.

Thucydides describes the spot or building called Πελασγικὸν under the Acropolis at Athens, the very situation, in which the original town would in all likelihood be placed for safety. This historian also sustains, with the weight of his judgment, the opinion that in pre-Hellenic times the prevailing race and name in Greece were Pelasgic; κατὰ ἔθνη δὲ ἄλλα τε καὶ τὸ Πελασγικὸν ἐπὶ πλεῖστον[372].

It is true, that in another passage[373], among the races of the βάρβαροι, he enumerates the Pelasgi: but the epithet itself, which was wholly inapplicable to the heroic age, shows that he spoke with reference to the demarcation established in his own time, which made every thing barbarous that was not Greek, either geographically or by known derivation. Barbarian with him and his contemporaries meant simply foreign, with the addition of a strong dash of depreciation. The full-grown Hellenic character no longer owned kindred with the particular races, which nevertheless might have contributed, each in its own time and place, to the formation of that remarkable product. The relationship is, however, established by Thucydides himself; for he says these Pelasgi were of the same Tyrseni, who occupied Athens at an earlier period.

Theocritus, who flourished early in the third century B. C., has a passage where he distinguishes chronologically between different persons and races. He begins with the heroes of the Troica, and then goes back to the ἔτι πρότεροι, in which capacity he names the Lapithæ, the Deucalidæ, the Pelopids, and lastly the Ἄργεος ἄκρα Πελασγοί[374]. The word ἄκρα might mean either (1) the flower of Greece, or (2) the very oldest and earliest inhabitants of Greece[375]. Now as the Pelasgians were by no means the flower of Greece, we can only choose the latter meaning for this particular passage. The word Ἄργος is perhaps taken here in its largest sense[376].

Apollonius Rhodius, nearly a century later, adheres to part at least of the same tradition, and calls Thessaly the πολυλήïος αἶα Πελασγῶν[377]. The Scholiast on this passage adds an older testimony, stating that Sophocles, in the Inachus, declared that the Πελασγοὶ and Ἀργεῖοι were the same.

According to Strabo, the Pelasgi were the most ancient race which had held power in Greece: τῶν περὶ τὴν Ἑλλάδα δυναστευσάντων ἀρχαιότατοι[378]. In the same place he calls the oracle of Dodona Πελασγῶν ἵδρυμα, a Pelasgian foundation. He expressly supports the construction which has been given above to the Πελασγικὸν Ἄργος of Homer[379], in the words τὸ Πελασγικὸν Ἄργος ἡ Θετταλία λέγεται, and he defines the country by the Peneus, Pindus, and Thermopylæ. He traces the Pelasgi in a multitude of particular places, and, on the authority of Ephorus, mentions Πελασγία as a name of Peloponnesus. He also gives us that fragment of Euripides, which states, in harmony with the testimony of Æschylus, that Danaus came to Greece, founded the city of Inachus, and changed the name of the inhabitants from Pelasgiotes to Danaans.

Πελασγιώτας δ’ ὠνομασμένους τὸ πρὶν Δαναοὺς καλεῖσθαι νόμον ἔθηκ’ ἀν’ Ἑλλάδα.

And Strabo considers that both the Pelasgiote and the Danaan name, together with that of the Hellenes, were covered by the Argive or Argeian name on account of the fame, to which the city of Argos rose[380].

The writings of Dionysius of Halicarnassus probably represent all, that a sound judgment could gather from the records and traditions extant in his time[381]. He pronounces confidently, that the Pelasgian race was Hellenic; which I take to mean, that it was one of the component parts of the body afterwards called Hellenic, not that the early Pelasgi were included among the early Hellenes. He considers that the race came from Peloponnesus, where many believed it to be autochthonic, into Thessaly, under Achæus, Phthius, and Pelasgus. It was unfortunate, as in other respects, so in being driven to frequent migrations. This idea of the frequent displacement of the Pelasgians was probably the product in the main of the two facts, first, that traces of them were found at many widely separated points, and secondly, that, according to tradition, they had sunk into a position of inferiority.

K. O. Müller, proceeding chiefly on the post-Homeric tradition, has strongly summed up the evidence as to the Pelasgi, to the following effect.

They were the original inhabitants of the plains and flat bottoms of the valleys, any one of which the ancients called by the name Ἄργος, as we see by the plains of the Peneus, and of the Inachus. If, as Strabo holds, this use of the word was in his time modern, and Macedonian or Thessalian, it may still have been a revival of a primitive usage, even as the very old word Γραικὸς had come back into use with the Alexandrian poets, through the old common tongue of Macedonia.

Their oldest towns were the Larissæ[382], and the number of these points out the Pelasgians as a city-founding people, expert in raising considerable and durable structures. These Larissæ were upon alluvial soils by rivers, and the Pelasgians were early diggers of canals[383]. Their pursuits were agricultural; hence they occupy the richest soils: hence Pelasgus is the host of Ceres, and the inventor of bread: hence Tyrrhenian Pelasgi convert the stony ground by Hymettus into fruitful fields. The shepherd life of the Pelasgians is an Arcadian tradition, but Arcadia was not their only original seat, and, when displaced by Achæans and Dorians, they may have been driven to the hills. Such seats we find in Argos, Achaia, Peloponnesus generally, Thessalia, Epirus, and Attica, where they may be traced in the division of the tribes.

Treating as an error the tradition of their vagrant character, he conceives them to be generally and above all autochthonic. He quotes from Asius in Pausanias the lines which have already been quoted.

There is no record, he says, of their coming into Greece by colonization. They are a people distinct, he thinks, from Lelegians and Carians, as well as from the northern immigrants, Achæans, and Thessalians: and they are the basis and groundwork of the Greek nation[384].

In Niebuhr[385] will be found a comprehensive outline of the wide range of Pelasgian occupancy in Italy: and Cramer supplies a similar sketch for Asia Minor and for Greece[386].

I forbear to quote Latin authorities as to the Pelasgi of Greece. The strong Pelasgian character of Magna Græcia will of itself naturally account for the free use of the name by Romans to designate the Greek nation, and cannot therefore greatly serve to show even the later tradition concerning the ancient position of the Pelasgians in Greece, and their relations to its other inhabitants.

Marsh appears to assert too much, when he says that we may set down as peculiarly Pelasgian those places which retained the Pelasgian name in the historic ages. It does not follow from this retention, that Placia and Scylace were more genuinely Pelasgian than Thessaly, any more than we are entitled to say from Homer, that Thessaly was originally more Pelasgian than Attica or Peloponnesus, though it retained the name longer. The reason may have been, that no such powerful pressure from a superior race was brought to bear in the one class of cases, as in the other[387].

In holding that the Pelasgians were the base, so to speak, of the Greek nation, I mean to indicate it as a probable opinion, that they continued to form the mass of the inhabitants throughout all the changes of name which succeeded the period of their rule. But it would appear, that a succession of other more vigorous influences from the Hellic stock must have contributed far more powerfully in all respects, excepting as to numbers, to compose and shape the nationality of the people. The chief part of the Pelasgians of Attica may perhaps have lain among the 400,000 slaves, who formed the unheeded herd of its population; much as in Italy the serfs of the Greek colonists bore the Pelasgian name[388]. So large a body could scarcely have been formed in that limited territory, except out of the original inhabitants of the country. In early stages of society the bulk of society takes its impress from one, or from a few, of superior force: and the ruling families and tribes of a smaller, but more energetic and warlike race, finding for themselves a natural place at the head of societies already constituted, assume the undisputed direction of their fortunes, and become, by a spontaneous law, their sole representatives in the face of the world, and in the annals of its history.

_Language of the Pelasgians._

We may, however, find no inconsiderable proof of the presence of a strong Pelasgian element in the Greek nation, in that portion of the evidence upon the case which is supplied by language. Those numerous and important words in the Latin tongue, which correspond with the words belonging to the same ideas in Greek, could only have come from the Pelasgian ancestry common to both countries; and, if coming from them, must demonstrate in the one case, as in the other, the strong Pelasgian tincture of the nation.

And as the language of a country cannot be extensively impregnated in this manner, except either by numbers, or by political and social ascendancy (as was the case of the French tongue with the English), or by literary influence (as is now the case with us in respect to the Greek and Latin tongues), we must ask to which of these causes it was owing, that the Pelasgians so deeply marked the Greek language with the traces of their own tongue. It was not literary influence, for we may be sure that there existed none. It was not political ascendancy, for they were either enslaved, or at the least subordinate. It could only be the influence of their numbers, through which their manner of speech could in any measure hold its ground; and thus we arrive again at the conclusion, that they must have supplied the substratum of the nation.

It is true that Herodotus, as well as Thucydides, spoke of the Pelasgians as using a foreign tongue. So a German writer would naturally describe the English, and yet the English language, by one of its main ingredients, bears conclusive testimony to the Saxon element of the English nation, and also illustrates the relative positions, which the Saxon and Norman races are known in history to have occupied. The tongue of the Pelasgians had been subject within Greece to influence and admixture from the language of the Hellic tribes: beyond Greece it had received impressions from different sources; and naturally, after the consequences of this severance had worked for centuries, the speech of the Pelasgians would be barbarous in the eyes of the Greeks. Again, Marsh[389] observes that, in the very chapter where he distinguishes Pelasgic from Hellenic, Herodotus (i. 56) declares the Ionians to belong to one of these stocks, the Dorians to the other: both of which populations were in his time undoubtedly Greek. And the historian gives another strong proof that the Pelasgians were Greek, where he assigns to this parentage (ii. 52) the Greek name of the gods: θεοὺς δὲ προσωνόμασάν σφεας ἀπὸ τοῦ τοιούτου, ὅτι κόσμῳ θέντες τὰ πάντα πρήγματα κ.τ.λ.

Even if we suppose, as may have been the case, that the Pelasgi mentioned by Herodotus, and by Thucydides, spoke a tongue as far from the Greek actually known to either of them, as is German from the English language at the present day, yet by its affinities that tongue might still remain a conclusive proof, that the ancestors of those who spoke it must have formed an essential ingredient in the composition of the nation. The evidence, which we know to be good in the one case, might be equally valid in the other.

There is abundance of testimony among authors, both Greek and Roman, to establish the relation of the Pelasgi to the old forms of the language of both countries. It is enough for the present to refer to the Second Chapter of Bishop Marsh’s Horæ Pelasgicæ for a very able and satisfactory discussion of the question. I shall presently have to consider the particular complexion of the words which the Greek nation appear to have derived from Pelasgic sources, and the inferences which that complexion suggests. But this will best be done, when we have examined into the Homeric import of the Hellenic and Pelasgian proper names.

_Pelasgian route into Greece._

We have next to examine the question,

By what route is it most probable that this Pelasgian nation came into Greece?

On this subject there can hardly be any other than one of two suppositions: the first, that by Thrace, or by the islands of the north, they reached Thessaly: the other, that they crossed from Asia, to the south of the Ægean, by the islands which divide the spaces of that sea.

It is observed by Cramer[390], that the prevailing opinion among those ancient writers, who have discussed the subject, places the Pelasgians first in the Peloponnesus: this being maintained by Pherecydes, Ephorus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Pausanias, without any dissentients to oppose them. This tradition evidently favours the opinion of a passage by the south.

Dionysius, who may be regarded as summing up the general results of Greek tradition, says[391] it placed the Pelasgians first in the Peloponnesus as autochthons; and represented them as having migrated to Thessaly in the sixth generation. In six generations more, they were, he conceives, expelled by the Ætolians and Locrians, then called Curetes and Leleges, and were dispersed into various quarters: indeed, here the tradition seems to become wholly vague or mythical, and to have gathered into one mass most of the places in which there appeared signs of Pelasgic occupancy: it includes the report of a great migration to Italy.

Marsh[392] considers Thrace as the original seat in Europe of the Pelasgi; but the _data_ on which he proceeds are too narrow; they have reference only to the islands of Lemnus, Imbrus, and Samothrace. There is no evidence of Pelasgians on the Continent to the north of the Ægean except what places them at a distance from Troy (τῆλε Hom. Il. xvii. 301), and if so, at a point which they may have reached from those islands, more probably, than by the continental route. It is on the whole more likely, however, that Pelasgians may have found their way into Greece both by the north (and if so, probably through the islands), and also by the south.

Homer affords no materials for conclusively determining the question. He gives us the Pelasgic name established in Thessaly, which favours our supposing the one passage, and likewise in Crete, which favours the other. He gives us the Pelasgic Jove of Dodona (a very weighty piece of testimony), and the τέμενος of Ceres in Thessaly, telling rather for the first; and he likewise gives us a perceptible connection between Ceres and Crete, and between Jupiter and king Minos, verging to the latter. But it is to be observed that, with the exception of Attica, the chief Homeric tokens of Pelasgianism lie in Northern and in Southern, but not in Middle, Greece: which favours the opinion, that there may have been a double line of entry.

The extra-Homeric tradition is on the whole most favourable to the supposition of a southern route. Hesiod makes Dodona in Thessaly Pelasgian, but distinctly associates Ceres with Crete: and the Theogony (479, 80) sends Jupiter as an infant to be reared in Crete. The Hymn to Ceres, as we have seen, brings her from thence to Eleusis; and the popular mythology in general treats that island as the cradle of Jupiter, therefore manifestly as the place from which the Greeks derived his worship. More than this; the tradition makes Peloponnesus the seat and centre of Pelasgic power, as we see from Æschylus, who makes Pelasgus reside in Peloponnesus, but rule as far as Macedonia. So likewise the names both of Ἀπίη γαῖα and of Ἰασὸν Ἄργος connect themselves originally with this part of Greece: especially when we consider that Apis in Egypt is the sacred bull, and that agriculture, the characteristic pursuit of the Pelasgians, was also the business of oxen. Again, Herodotus[393] reports that the local tradition of Dodona assigned to that oracle an Egyptian origin; and as Dodona was Pelasgic, this tradition somewhat favours the hypothesis of entry by the south.

There are several allusions in Homer to Crete, to Cyprus, or to both, as marking the route between Greece and Asia. Menelaus, after quitting Troy, and nearing Crete (Od. iii. 285-92), sailed afar

Κύπρον Φοινίκην τε καὶ Αἰγυπτίους ἐπαληθεῖς[394].

The pseudo-Ulysses sails from Crete to Egypt[395], and returns thence to Phœnicia, in one tale, and afterwards starts for Libya by Crete; in another legend, he is given over from Egypt to Cyprus; and Antinous[396], in the Seventeenth Odyssey, replying to the supposed beggar-man, says, Get out of the way,

μὴ τάχα πικρὴν Αἴγυπτον καὶ Κύπρον ἵκηαι.

We already know the connection of Crete with Greece from the Iliad: and thus it appears as on the high road from Greece to Phœnicia, and by Phœnicia to Egypt. The unexampled populousness of that island would, as a matter of course, beget migration; and, of all the tracts lying to the west of the Ægean, the Thessalian plain would, from its extent, offer perhaps the greatest encouragement to agricultural settlers. The traditions reported by Herodotus from Dodona connect that place closely with Egypt and the East, and the route now supposed by Crete establishes that connection in what is probably the simplest and most obvious line.

The continental country from Thessaly to the north and east was held as it would appear to a great extent by a martial and highland race Θρῇκες and Θρηίκιοι. It is not likely that the Pelasgians had much in common with that people, or could make their way to Greece either with or in despite of them. Perhaps the coast where we find Cicones and Pæones apart from the Thracians, may have afforded a route, and we must remember the traditional traces of them both on the coast of the Hellespont and in the islands[397].

This may be the place most convenient for observing, that there can be little hesitation in regarding the northern route as that by which the Hellic tribes came into Greece. They, a highland people, came along a mountain country. They left their name upon the Hellespont, the sea of Helle, which means not the mere strait so called in later times, but the whole northern Ægean[398]; and upon the river Selleeis, which discharges itself into the sea of Marmora. We first hear of them in Homer at the extreme north of Thessaly: then we find them giving their name, Hellas, to that country, or to some part of it. The people of Hellas, when their connection with their sires of the mountain had become faint in comparison with their relation to the territory they occupied, called themselves Hellenes, from the region they inhabited; and lost sight, as it were, of the ruder parent tribe. In the meantime, they had struck out offshoots through Greece, and the name Hellas had, as will be seen[399], probably come, even in the time of Homer, to be applied in a secondary and comprehensive sense to the whole northern and central parts of it.

_Peloponnesus the seat of power._

It is remarkable and undeniable, with reference both to Pelasgic and to Hellenic times, that in whatever part of the country ruling tribes or families might first make their appearance, the permanent seat of power for Greece was uniformly in the Peloponnesus. Every movement of political importance appears to direct itself thither, and there to rest in equilibrium. The old tradition of Pelasgus, the dynasties of Danaids, Perseids, and Pelopids, the great Heraclid and Doric invasion, evidently aiming at laying hold on the centre of dominion, and yet more, that Spartan primacy (ἡγεμονία), which endured for so many centuries, all tell the same tale; finally the train of evidence is crowned by the strong local sympathies of Juno. It was only in the fifth century before the Christian era that Athens acquired the lead: nor did she keep it long. Her sway, after an interval, was followed by another shortlived ascendancy, that of Thebes, in the fourth century. But Greece ended as she had begun: and the last splendours of her national sentiment and military courage were flung from its pristine seats in Peloponnesus: from Lacedæmon, and Achaia. The old Amphictyonic Union alone remained, throughout the historic times of Greece, to bear witness to the fact that it was in the north of the Isthmus, and above all in Thessaly, that the Hellic tribes first organised themselves as distinct political integers, united in substance, if not in form, in respect of their common religious worship, and their common blood.

It was probably greater security, which gave this advantage, in early times, to Southern over Northern and Midland Greece. Only one narrow neck of land led into the Peloponnesus, and that passage was so circuitous, or dangerous, or both, that it was not the highway of immigrant tribes, who seem usually to have crossed the Corinthian gulf into Elis. This tract of land had not indeed the whole, but it had much, of the advantage enjoyed by England. It was not quite, but it was almost,

A precious stone, set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house[400].

When reached, it was the highway to nothing. The fat lands of Bœotia were a road onwards for all who came from Thessaly: there was here a choice between barrenness and poverty, on the one hand, like those of Attica in early times, and insecurity of tenure in the rich soils, which were the object of desire to each tribe as it went upon its march. The Peloponnesus was richer than the one, far more secure than the other: it throve accordingly; and in the Trojan war this small territory supplied four hundred and thirty ships, probably including the greatest number of large vessels, while the other two divisions of continental Greece together gave no more than five hundred and thirty. And it seems to have had altogether a more vigorous and concentrated political organisation; for while the five hundred and thirty were in fifteen divisions, under twenty-six leaders, the Peloponnesian force was in six divisions, under nine leaders only, and of the six three at least, namely, those of Mycenæ, Lacedæmon, and Arcadia, were virtually under the direct command of Agamemnon.

_Derivation of the Pelasgian name._

Various derivations have been suggested for the name of the Pelasgi. Some will have it to come from Peleg, mentioned in the tenth chapter of Genesis, whose name, said to mean division, is taken to allude to the partition of the earth’s surface among the various tribes of the human race. Marsh well observes, that this amounts to no more than possibility: that the meaning of the word will not serve to attach it to the Pelasgi in particular, as in the early ages of the world migration, with partition and repartition, was a continuous process: and that, even if true, it tells us nothing of them antecedent to their European settlement[401]: nothing, that is to say, of a material kind, except what we know independently of it, viz. their being, in common with all other races, of eastern origin. Clinton gives other reasons for rejecting this etymology[402], while he sees force in the reference of the names of Iapetus and Ion to Japheth and Javan respectively. It seems plain that we could not safely build upon even a complete similarity of name, in a case where the interval of time that separates Peleg and Pelasgi, the terms we are to compare, is so vast and so obscure.

So also the name πελαργοὶ, meaning storks, has been taken to be the foundation of Πελασγοί; and the explanation has been given, that the stork is a migratory bird, and that the Pelasgi were called after it on account of their wanderings.

This explanation, which seems worse than the former, rests in part upon a statement of Herodotus misconstrued. He calls the Dorians ἔθνος πουλυπλάνητον κάρτα[403], and this has been erroneously applied to the Pelasgians, of whom, on the contrary, he says, οὐδαμῆ κω ἐξεχώρησε. This statement from a writer of the age of Herodotus, fully neutralises the statement of Dionysius, who describes them as itinerant, and never securely settled[404]. He may, indeed, mean no more than Thucydides means, when he says (i. 2), that the occupants of good soils were the most liable to dispossession. But does this idea of itinerancy correspond with the migrations of the stork, which seem to have reference to the steady periodical variations of climate, and to be as far as possible from the idea implied in ‘much-roving?’

It appears to have been the understood characteristic of that bird, to draw to and dwell about the settled habitations of men. It seems highly improbable, and without precedent, that a widely spread nation should take its name from a bird: but may not the bird have taken its name from the nation? If it were a nation emphatically of settlers, as opposed to pirates, robbers, nomads, and rovers of all kinds, dwelling with comfort in fixed abodes, as opposed to the ἀνιπτόποδες χαμαίευναι[405], might not birds, which seemed to share these settlements, be reasonably named after the people?

It by no means appears as if Aristophanes, in the passage where he uses the term, intended a mere pun. It is in the comedy of the Birds[406], and is an allusion to that law of the Athenians, evidently here signified under the name of storks, which required children to provide for their parents[407]. The passage is clearly a testimony to the Pelasgic origin of the Athenians: and it may be based upon the belief, that the storks took their name from the Pelasgi, and that the similarity lay in their habit of settling on the roofs of houses and the like, almost as if inhabitants, in the villages of which the Pelasgi were the first Greek founders. It also gives room for the conjecture that Πελαργοὶ may have been the old form of the name. The stork, it may be remembered, was one of the sacred birds of the Egyptians.

Again, the word πέλαγος has been suggested as supplying the true derivation of the Pelasgian name. Marsh[408] rejects it, because he conceives it is founded upon the hypothesis that the Pelasgi came across the Ægean, which he thinks improbable. But the evidence appears to be in favour of their having come principally by the islands, if not at once across the Ægean. It may also be questioned, whether the etymology must rest on this hypothesis exclusively. For, in the first place, the more natural construction would be, not that they came by sea, but that they came _from beyond sea_, an idea which might very well attach to any people of Asiatic origin. So it was that the too famous Pelagius, who is known to have been a Welshman, came by his classical name; a name bearing that very signification[409]. But is it not also possible, that πέλαγος may at one time have had the meaning of a plain? It properly signifies a wide open level surface, corresponding with the Latin _æquor_, and with our _main_. Hence Homer never attaches to the word πέλαγος any of his usual epithets for the sea, such as οἴνοψ, ἠχηεὶς, μεγακήτης, ἀτρύγετος, πολύφλοισβος; but only μέγα, great: and he uses the phrase ἅλος ἐν πελάγεσσι[410], which would be mere tautology, if πέλαγος properly and directly meant the sea. So Pindar has πόντιον πέλαγος, Æschylus ἃλς πελαγία, and Apollonius Rhodius πέλαγος θαλάσσης[411]. There were in Macedonia, as we learn from Strabo, a people called Pelagones[412], and in Homer we find the names Πελάγων and Πηλέγων. Again, we have in Hesychius, among the meanings of πελαγίζειν, ψεύδεσθαι μεγάλα, and for πέλαγος he gives μέγεθος, πλῆθος, βύθος; as well as πλάτος θαλάσσης. It seems not impossible that the Pelasgi may owe their name to the word πέλαγος, in its primary sense of plain and open surface: as the word Θρῇξ, in this view its exact counterpart, was derived from τρῆχυς, and at one time meant simply the inhabitant of a rough and rocky place, a mountaineer or highlander.

There is, however, another mode in which Πελασγοὶ may bear the sense of inhabitants of the plain, or rather (for it is in this that the word will most comprehensively apply to them, and most closely keep to its proper meaning), of the cultivable country, which would include valleys as well as plains properly so called: and indeed this derivation, suggested by K. O. Müller, is the simplest possible, if only we can clear the first step, which _assumes_ the identity of Πελασγοὶ and Πελαργοί. He says it is compounded of πέλω and ἄργος. The first meaning of πέλω seems to imply motion with repetition or custom. Afterwards it is _to be_, and especially _to be wont to be_. Thus it will, while yet very near its fountain, have the sense, _to frequent_ or _inhabit_. To the same origin he refers πόλις, πολέω; and also the πελώρια, the harvest feast of Thessaly, taken as the feast of inhabitation[413] or settlement.

The subject of this name will again come into view, when the later name of Ἀργεῖοι is examined. In the mean time, let it be observed, that if the Pelasgi were thus called from being, or if only they in fact were, inhabitants of the plains, we find in this some further explanation of the tradition, which can hardly have been an unmixed error, of their vagrant character. For the plains contained the most fertile soils: and, especially as they were of limited extent, their inhabitants could not but rapidly increase, so as to require more space for the support of their population. Further, these rich tracts offered a prize to all the tribes who were in want of settlements; according to the just observation of Thucydides[414], already quoted, that the most fertile parts of Greece, namely, Bœotia, Thessaly, and much of Peloponnesus, most frequently changed hands. This would be more and more applicable to a given people, in proportion as it might be more addicted to peaceful pursuits. Manifestly, it is as inhabitants of the plains, or the cultivable country, that Homer especially marks the Pelasgi: both by calling the great plain of Thessaly Pelasgic, and by the epithet ἐριβώλαξ which he applies (Il. ii. 841, and xvii. 301), to their Larissa, on the only two occasions when he mentions it. And the etymological inquiry seems, upon the whole, to direct us, although the particular path be somewhat uncertain, towards a similar conclusion.

FOOTNOTES:

[276] Il. xiv. 321.

[277] Od. xix. 178.

[278] Od. xi. 568-71.

[279] Cf. Il. i. 238. ii. 205.

[280] Il. xviii. 501. xxiii. 436.

[281] Æn. vi. 566.

[282] Il. iii. 365.

[283] Nägelsbach, Homerische Theologie, p. 83; and Vid. inf. sect. iv. pp. 120, 124.

[284] Höck’s Creta, ii. 142, n.

[285] Il. xiii. 450. Od. xix. 179.

[286] Od. xix. 181-98.

[287] Höck’s Creta, ii. 182.

[288] Od. xvii. 523.

[289] Od. xiv. 199. Il. xiii. 453. Il. ii. 649.

[290] Od. xix. 172.

[291] Il. xi. 712.

[292] Il. vii. 133, 5.

[293] Od. xvii. 442.

[294] Od. xi. 321.

[295] Il. i. 260-5.

[296] Od. xi. 631.

[297] Ibid. 322-5.

[298] Il. xiii. 450-3.

[299] Fragm. xi. Strabo vii. p. 332.

[300] Il. xiii. 681.

[301] Il. xiv. 322.

[302] Od. iv. 564.

[303] Od. vii. 317-26.

[304] Od. xi. 580.

[305] Æsch. Suppl. 262.

[306] Thucyd. i. 4.

[307] Minos, 16, 17.

[308] Pol. ii. 10. 4.

[309] For a lucid sketch of the position of Minos as defined by tradition, see Thirlwall’s Greece, vol. i. ch. 5.

[310] Herod. iii. 122.

[311] Herod. i. 173.

[312] Müller’s Dorians, ii. 11. 8; Eurip. Fragm. i.

[313] Creta ii. 87.

[314] Pol. ii. 10.

[315] Ibid. ii. 10. 2.

[316] Minos 11-17.

[317] Athen. vi. p. 263.

[318] Ibid. p. 267.

[319] Il. xviii. 592.

[320] Paus. x. 17. 4.

[321] Ath. vi. p. 263.

[322] Höck’s Creta, b. ii. sect. 4. (ii. 222 and seqq.)

[323] Il. xii. 397.

[324] See particularly his speech Il. xii. 310-28.

[325] There were also Lycians of Troas, with whom Pandarus was connected: and it is possible that these may be the persons meant. (Schol. on Il. v. 105.)

[326] For the question whether the Leleges on one single occasion form an exception, see sup. p. 162.

[327] Il. xvii. 350, 1. ii. 848.

[328] Il. xii. 408. xvi. 421.

[329] Od. vi. 241.

[330] Il. xii. 397.

[331] Il. xvi. 659.

[332] Il. xvi. 422. xvii. 426.

[333] Il. xii. 310.

[334] Vid. inf. sect. vii.

[335] Il. v. 172.

[336] Il. ii. 827.

[337] Il. v. 105.

[338] Paus. viii. 2. 1.

[339] Grote, Hist. Greece, iv. 280.

[340] Vid. inf. sect. x.

[341] Herod. i. 136.

[342] Photii Bibliotheca 72. p. 107.

[343] Herod. i. 73.

[344] Il. xxiii. 860.

[345] Il. vi. 193.

[346] Od. xvii. 442, 8.

[347] Ibid. 440-4.

[348] Vid. sup. p. 125.

[349] Il. xi. 19-28.

[350] Il. ii. 108.

[351] Od. viii. 362.

[352] See inf. Religion and Morals, Sect. iii.

[353] Gr. κινύρα, Hebr. kinnûr. Liddell and Scott, in voc.

[354] Apollod. Bibl. iii. 14. 3. Pind. Pyth. ii. 26. Ov. Met. x. 310.

[355] Cambridge, 1815.

[356] Sup. p. 108.

[357] Hist. Fragm. x. 2.

[358] Paus. viii. 1. 2.

[359] Rhet.

[360] Hist. vi. 56, 8.

[361] Minos 10.

[362] Æsch. Suppl. 256.

[363] Paus. viii. 2. 2.

[364] Herod. ii. 56.

[365] ii. 171.

[366] i. 146.

[367] vii. 94.

[368] i. 56.

[369] viii. 44.

[370] ii. 52.

[371] v. 64.

[372] Thuc. i. 3.

[373] Thuc. v. 109.

[374] Theocr. Idyll. xv. 136-40.

[375] Pind. Pyth. xi. 18. Soph. Aj. 285.

[376] See inf. sect. viii.

[377] Argonaut. i. 580, and Schol. Paris.

[378] Strabo vii. p. 327.

[379] Ibid. v. p. 221.

[380] Ibid.

[381] i. 17.

[382] See however p. 114 above.

[383] So the ὀχετηγὸς ἀνὴρ already exists, as apart from the common labourer, in the time of Homer; Il. xxi. 257.

[384] K. O. Müller, Orchomenos, 119-22.

[385] Chap. iii.

[386] Cramer’s Geogr. Ancient Greece, vol. i. p. 15.

[387] The tradition that the Pelasgians were the original inhabitants of the Greek Peninsula appears to have been adopted into the literature of modern Greece. See Πετρίδης--Ἱστορία τῆς παλαίας Ἑλλάδος ἀπὸ τοὺς ἀρχαιοτάτους χρόνους, Κερκύρα, 1830, chap. i. p. 2. Also that Pelasgi and Hellenes were the two factors (μέρη) of the Greek nation. Ibid. p. 3.

[388] Niebuhr, ibid.

[389] Horæ Pelasg. ch. ii. p. 28.

[390] Cramer’s Greece i. 17.

[391] Antiq. Rom. i. 17, 18.

[392] Horæ Pelasg. pp. 12-15.

[393] Herod. ii. 54-7.

[394] Od. iv. 83.

[395] Ibid. xiv. 246-58, 290, 293-300.

[396] Ibid. v. 442, 7, 8.

[397] Perhaps the use of the word ἤπειρος for mainland may suggest, that it is due to an insular people, who would appropriately describe a continent as the unlimited (land). It is derived from α and πέρας, an end or stop; consider also περάω, to pass over, ἀντιπέραια, Il. ii. 635, and πέρην ἱερῆς Εὐβοίης, ibid. 535.

[398] See inf. sect. vi.

[399] Inf. sect. vi.

[400] Richard II., act ii., sc. 1.

[401] Horæ Pelasg. ch. i. sub fin.

[402] Clinton, Fast. Hell. i. p. 97.

[403] Herod. i. 56.

[404] Dion. Hal. i. 17.

[405] Il. xvi. 235.

[406] Ὄρνιθες, v. 1359.

[407] Potter’s Antiq., b. i. ch. 26.

[408] Horæ Pelasg. ch. i. p. 17.

[409] See Hey’s Norrisian Lectures, vol. iii. p. 142.

[410] Od. v. 335.

[411] Ol. vii. 104; Persæ 427; Scott and Liddell in πέλαγος. I venture to suggest πελάζω as the root, and ‘accessible,’ ‘easily travelled,’ ‘open’ (compare εὐρυαγυῖα) as the meaning.

[412] Strabo, p. 327, 331.

[413] Orchomenos, p. 119 and n.

[414] Thuc. i. 2.

SECT. IV.

_On the Phœnicians, and the Outer Geography of the Odyssey._

_The Phœnicians._

The text of Homer appears to afford presumptions, if not of close affinity between the Phœnician and Hellenic races, yet of close congeniality, and of great capacity for amalgamation; although the former were of Semitic origin.

The Phœnician name, as may be seen from Strabo, was widely spread through Greece: even in Homer we find the word Φοίνιξ already used, (1) for a Phœnician, (2) for a Greek proper name, (3) for purple, and (4) for the palm tree (Od. v. 163).

We find the ancient family of Cadmus established as a dynasty in Bœotia, about the same time, according to the common opinion, with the earliest appearances of the Hellenic race in the Greek peninsula. We have no reason to suppose that they were themselves of Hellic extraction: but we find them invested with the same marks of political superiority as the Hellenic families, and figuring among the Greek sovereigns in successive generations. They must have ejected previous occupants: for Amphion and Zethus first settled and fortified Thebes, and they were the sons of Jupiter and Antiope[415].

Ino Leucothee, the daughter of Cadmus, was already a deity in the time of Homer. She appears in that capacity to Ulysses, when he is tossed upon the waters between Ogygia and Phæacia; that is to say, when he was still beyond the limits of the Greek or Homeric world, and within the circle of those traditions, lying in the unknown distance, which the Greeks could only derive from the most experienced and daring navigators of the time; namely, the Phœnicians. This appears to mark Ino herself, and therefore her father Cadmus, as of Phœnician birth. And accordingly we may set down the position of this family in Greece, as the earliest token of relations between Phœnicia and Greece.

It is followed by one more significant still, and more clearly attested in Homer. Minos, a Phœnician, appears in Crete and founds an empire: he marries his daughter Ariadne to the Athenian hero Theseus; and so quickly does this empire assume the national character, that in the time of the _Troica_, Hellenic races are established in the island, the Cretan troops are numbered without distinction among the followers of Agamemnon; and Idomeneus, only the grandson of Minos, appears to be as Grecian as any of the other chiefs of the army. The grandfather himself is appointed to act as judge over the shades of Greeks in the nether world[416]: and his brother Rhadamanthus has a post of great dignity, if of inferior responsibility, in being intrusted with the police of Elysium[417].

Nowhere is Homer’s precision more remarkable, than in the numerous passages where he appears before us as a real geographer or topographer. Indeed, by virtue of this accuracy, he enables us to define with considerable confidence the sphere of his knowledge and experience; by which I mean not only the countries and places he had visited, but those with respect to which he had habitual information from his countrymen, and unrestricted opportunities of correcting error. In the direction of the west, it seems plain that he knew nothing except the coast of Greece and the coastward islands. Phæacia hangs doubtfully upon his horizon, and it is probable that he had only a very general and vague idea of its position. Towards the north, there is nothing to imply, that his experimental knowledge reached beyond the Thracian coast and, at the farthest, the Sea of Marmora. He speaks of Ida, as if its roots and spurs comprised the whole district, of which in that quarter he could speak with confidence[418]. To the east, he probably knew no region beyond Lycia on the coast of Asia Minor, and to the south Crete was probably his boundary: though he was aware, by name at least, of the leading geographical points of a maritime passage, not wholly unfrequented, to the almost unknown regions of Cyprus, Phœnicia, and Egypt. The apparent inconsistency however of his statements[419] respecting the voyage to Egypt, affords proof that it lay beyond the geographical circle, within which we are to consider that his familiar knowledge and that of his nation lay.

While he is within that circle, he is studious alike of the distances between places, the forms of country, and the physical character of different districts: but, when he passes beyond it, he emancipates himself from the laws of space. The points touched in the voyage of Ulysses are wholly irreconcilable with actual geography, though national partialities have endeavoured to identify them with a view to particular appropriation. Some of them, indeed, we may conceive that he mentally associated with places that had been described to him: nay, he may have intended it in all: but the dislocated knowledge, which alone even the navigators of the age would possess, has suffered, by intent or accident, such further derangement in its transfer to the mind of Homer, that it is hopeless to adjust his geography otherwise than by a free and large infusion of fictitious drawing. This outer sphere is, however, peopled with imagery of deep interest. For the purposes of the poem, the whole wanderings both of Menelaus and Ulysses lie within it, and beyond the limits of ordinary Greek experience. And throughout these wanderings the language of Homer is that of a poet who, as to facts, was at the mercy of unsifted information; of information which he must either receive from a source not liable to check or scrutiny, or else not receive at all: and who wisely availed himself of that character of the marvellous with which the whole was overspread, to work it up into pictures of the imagination, which were to fill both his contemporaries and all succeeding generations with emotions of interest and wonder.

_Limits of Greek navigation._

In Homer we find that Greek navigation already extends, yet it is very slightly, beyond the limits of Greek settlement. The Pseudo-Ulysses of the Fourteenth Odyssey made nine voyages[420], ἀνδρὰς ἐς ἀλλοδάπους; and at length, inspired as he says by a wild impulse from on high, he planned and executed a voyage to Egypt. But he is represented as a Cretan, and the early fame of Crete in navigation is probably due to its connection through Minos with Phœnicia. Here too the representation is, that he is a Cretan of the highest class, the colleague of Idomeneus in his command[421], and thus, according to the law of poetical likelihood, to be understood as probably of a family belonging to the Phœnician train of Minos. The Thesprotian ship of the Fourteenth Odyssey trades for corn to Dulichium only. The Taphians, indeed, who from the xenial relation of their lord, Mentes[422], to Ulysses, must in all likelihood have lived in the neighbourhood of Ithaca, are represented as making voyages not only to an unknown Temese, which was in foreign parts (ἐπ’ ἀλλοθρόους ἀνθρώπους[423]), but likewise to Phœnicia; the latter voyage, however, is only mentioned in connection with the purpose of piracy[424]. But these Taphians appear to have formed an insignificant exception to the general rule: we do not hear any thing of them in the great armament of the Iliad. Speaking generally, we may say that the Achæans had no foreign navigation: it was in the hands of the Phœnicians.

_The Outer Geography Phœnician._

It is to that people that we must look as the established merchants, hardiest navigators, and furthest explorers, of those days. To them alone as a body, in the whole Homeric world of flesh and blood, does Homer give the distinctive epithet of ναυσικλυτοὶ ἄνδρες[425]. He accords it indeed to the airy Phæacians, but in all probability that element of their character is borrowed from the Phœnicians[426], and if so, the reason of the derivation can only be, that the Phœnicians were for that age the type of a nautical people. To them only does he assign the epithets, which belong to the knavery of trade, namely, πολυπαίπαλοι and τρωκταί. When we hear of their ships in Egypt or in Greece, the circumstance is mentioned as if their coming was in the usual course of their commercial operations. Some force also, in respect to national history, may be assigned to the general tradition, which almost makes the Mediterranean of the heroic age ‘a Phœnician lake:’ to their settlements in Spain, and the strong hold they took upon that country; and to the indirect Homeric testimony, as well as the judgment of Thucydides, respecting the maritime character of the Minoan empire.

Again, Homer knew of a class of merchants whom he calls πρηκτῆρες in the Eighth Odyssey (v. 152). But where Eumæus enumerates the δημιόεργοι, or ‘trades and professions’ of a Greek community, there are no πρηκτῆρες among them[427]. Again, as the poet knew of the existence of this class on earth, so he introduced them into his Olympian heaven, where gain and increase had their representative in Mercury. From whence could the prototype have been derived, except from intercourse with the Phœnicians?

But the imaginative geography of the Odyssey goes far beyond the points, with which Homer has so much at least of substantive acquaintance, as to associate them historically with the commerce or politics of the age. The habitations of the Cyclops, the Læstrygones, the Lotophagi, of Æolus, the Sirens, Calypso, and Circe, may have had no ‘whereabout,’ no actual site, outside the fancy of Homer; still they must have been imagined as repositories in which to lodge traditions which had reached him, and which, however fabulously given, purported to be local. Again, with respect to the tradition of Atlas, it is scarcely possible to refuse to it a local character. He knows the depths of every sea, and he holds or keeps the pillars that hold heaven and earth apart. This must not be confounded with the later representations of Atlas carrying the globe, or with his more purely geographical character, as representing the mountain ranges of Northern Africa. Here he appears[428] as the keeper of the great gate of the outer waters, namely, of the Straits of Gibraltar: that great gate being probably the point of connection with the ocean, and that outer sea being frequented exclusively by the Phœnicians, who in all likelihood obtained from Cornwall the tin used in making the Shield of Agamemnon, or in any of the metal manufactures of the period. Rocks rising on each side of a channel at the extreme point of the world, as it was known to Greek experience, or painted in maritime narrative, could not be represented more naturally than as the pillars which hold up the sky. This figure follows the analogy of the pillars and walls of a house, supporting the roof, and placed at the extremities of the interior of its great apartment[429]. With equal propriety, those who are believed alone to have reached this remote quarter, and to frequent it, would be said to hold those pillars[430].

Even in a less imaginative age than that of Homer, the love of the marvellous, both by the givers and by the receivers of information, would act powerfully in colouring all narratives, of which the scene was laid in tracts unknown except to the narrator. But a more powerful motive might be found in that spirit of monopoly, which is so highly characteristic of the earlier stages, in particular, of the development of commerce[431]. To clothe their relations in mystery and awe, by the aid both of natural and supernatural wonders, would be, for a people possessed of an exclusive navigation, a powerful means of deterring competitors, and of maintaining secure hold upon profits either legitimate or piratical.

We have before us these facts in evidence: on the one hand, a people who in maritime enterprise had far surpassed all others, and had a virtual monopoly of the knowledge of the waters and countries lying beyond a certain narrow circle. Then, on the other hand, we have a multitude of adventures laid by Homer in this outer sphere, and associated wholly with the persons and places that belong to it. Upon these grounds it seems hardly possible to avoid the conclusion, that the Phœnicians must have been the people from whom Homer drew, whether directly or mediately, his information respecting the outer circle of the geography of the Odyssey. Such is the judgment of Strabo. He says τοὺς δὲ Φοίνικας λέγω μηνυτάς; he considers that even before the time of Homer they were masters of the choice parts of Spain and Africa: and it appears that the traces of their colonization remained until his day[432].

_Traditions of the Outer Geography._

But further; the traditions themselves bear other unequivocal marks, besides their lying in parts known to Phœnicians only, of a Phœnician character; and whether these marks were attached by Homer, or came ready made into his hands, has no bearing upon the present argument.

I have spoken of the tradition of Atlas; and of the likelihood that the Phœnicians would cast a veil over the regions of which they knew the profitable secrets. In conformity with these ideas, the island of Ogygia is the island of Calypso, the Concealer: and this Calypso is the daughter of Atlas.

Phæacia is, in the Odyssey, the geographical middle term between the discovered and the undiscovered world; Ogygia is the stage beyond it, and the stage on this side of it is Ithaca. I do not understand the Phæacians to be a portrait of the Phœnicians[433]: but the very resemblance of name is enough to show that Homer had this people in his eye when he endowed his ethereal islanders with the double gift, first, of unrivalled nautical excellence, and, secondly, of forming the medium of communication between the interior space bounded by the Greek horizon, and the parts which lay beyond it.

_Minos the ὀλοόφρων._

But in many instances we find Homer’s peculiar and characteristic use of epithets the surest guide to his meaning. Now in Minos we have, according to Homer, a firmly grounded point of contact with Phœnicia. Of Minos, as the friend of Jupiter, and the Judge of the defunct, we must from the poems form a favourable impression. Yet is Ariadne Μίνωος θυγάτηρ ὀλοόφρονος. What is the meaning of the word ὀλοόφρων? I think an examination of the use of kindred words will show, that in the mind of Homer it does not mean anything actually wicked or criminal, but hard, rigid, inexorable; or astute, formidable to cope with, one who takes merciless advantage, who holds those with whom he deals to the letter of the bond; and, in consequence, often entails on them heavy detriment.

In this view, it would be an epithet natural and appropriate for a people, who represented commerce at a time when it so frequently partook of the characters of unscrupulous adventure, war, and plunder; and an epithet which might pass to Minos as one of the great figures in their history, or as a conqueror. Again, it is worth while to review Homer’s use of the adjective ὀλοός. This epithet is applied by him to the lion, the boar, and the water-snake[434]. Achilles, when complaining of Apollo for having drawn him away from the Trojan wall, calls him θεῶν ὀλοώτατε πάντων[435]. Menelaus, combating with Paris, when his sword breaks in his hand, complains of Jupiter that no god is ὀλοώτερος[436]. Philætius, in the Twentieth Odyssey, astonished that Jupiter does not take better care of good men, uses the same words[437]. And Menelaus applies the same epithet to Antilochus, who has stolen an advantage over him in the chariot-race[438]. In the positive degree, it is applied to old age, fire, fate, night, battle, to Charybdis (Od. xii. 113), and even to the hostile intentions of a god, such as the ὀλοὰ φρονέων of Apollo (Il. xvi. 701), and in θεῶν ὀλοὰς διὰ βουλὰς (Od. xi. 275).

But the characteristic force of the epithet applied to Minos becomes most clear, and its effect in stamping a Phœnician character upon certain traditions undeniable, when we examine the remaining instances of its use; and likewise that of the cognate, indeed nearly synonymous, phrase ὀλοφώïα εἰδώς.

Only two persons besides Minos receive in Homer the epithet ὀλοόφρων[439]. One of them is Atlas, the father of Calypso: the other is Æetes, the brother of Circe. Again, the phrase ὀλοφώïα εἰδὼς is applied to Proteus[440]; and it is used nowhere else except by Melanthius, where he means to describe Eumæus as a person dangerous and to be suspected[441]. Again, the ὀλοφώïα of Proteus are his tricks[442]: and moreover we have the ὀλοφώïα δήνεα of Circe[443]. Thus it would appear that Homer virtually confines these epithets within one particular circle of traditions; for Proteus, Æetes, Circe, Atlas, all belong to the Outer Geography of the Odyssey[444]: and the use of one of them for Minos, with his already presumable Phœnician extraction[445], leads us, in concurrence with many other signs, to conclude that the epithet is strictly characteristic, and the circle of traditions Phœnician. One of the slightest, is also perhaps one of the most curious and satisfactory signs of the Phœnicianism of the whole scheme. Tiresias is employed in the Eleventh Odyssey to predict to Ulysses his coming fortunes: and in doing it he uses many of the very lines, which are afterwards prophetically spoken by Circe. Now why is Tiresias made the informant of Ulysses? He is nowhere else mentioned in the poems; yet he is introduced here, in possession of the only gift of prophecy permitted in the nether world. Why have we not rather Amphiaraus, or Polupheides, those Seers at the top of all mortal renown[446]? Surely there can be but one reason; namely, that Tiresias was a Theban, a native of the only Greek State, except Crete, where he could have been the subject of a Phœnician dynasty[447]. It was doubtless this Phœnician connection, which qualified him to speak of regions, of which a Greek Seer would, in right of his nation, have possessed no knowledge.

Nor is it only upon the epithets that we may rely; but upon the characters, too, of those to whom they are appropriated. They are full of the elements of cunning and deception. Proteus, Circe, Calypso, the Sirens, the Læstrygones, the Cyclopes, all partake of this element, while in some it is joined with violence, and in others with refinement or sensuality. In all of these we recognise so many variations of the one Phœnician type.

It has been observed, that Virgil seems to recognise Proteus as an eastern counterpart of Atlas, in the lines

Atrides Protei Menelaus ad usque columnas, &c.

This is a recognition by Virgil of the Phœnician character of the tradition: but I see no evidence that Homer meant to place Proteus and Atlas in relations to one another as representing the East and West of the Mediterranean, though this theory is adopted by Nägelsbach[448] and others.

The office of the god Mercury, and his relationship to Calypso, will be found to confirm these conclusions[449].

_Commercial aptitude of modern Greeks._

The moral signs of the Greek character, though not identical with those of the Phœnician, yet establish a resemblance between them; in so far that both possessed vigour, hardihood, and daring, and that the intelligence, which directed and sustained these great qualities, was susceptible of alliance with craft. In the censure upon the πρηκτῆρες, which Homer has conveyed through the mouth of Euryalus, we may read a genuine effusion of his own nature: but the gifts of Mercury to Autolycus appear to show, that the Phœnician character easily amalgamated with the Greek by its cunning, as well as by its strength. And certainly we may well marvel at the tenacity of tissue, with which these characters were formed, when we find that still, after the lapse of three thousand years, one race is distinguished beyond all others for aptitude and energy in prosecuting the pursuits of honourable commerce; that in England, now the centre of the trade of the whole world, the Greeks of the present day alike excel all other foreigners who frequent her great emporia, and the children of her own energetic and persevering people; themselves perhaps the offspring of the Thesprotians, who went for corn to Dulichium; of the Taphians, who carried swarthy iron to Temese; of the Cretans, who made much money in Egypt; and of the Lemnians, who obtained metals, hides, captives, and even oxen, in return for their wine, from the jovial Greeks of the army before Troy.

The more we attempt an examination of the geography of the Odyssey, the more we find that, impossible as it is to reconcile with the actual distribution of earth and sea, it has marks of being derived from the nation, who navigated in the remote waters where its scenes are laid. The fundamental article of the whole is the circumscription of the known seas by the great river Ocean, which, alike in the Iliad and the Odyssey, flows round and round the earth, returning upon itself, ἀψόρροος[450], like what is called an endless rope. And the two keys, as I believe, to the comprehension of it are to be found in the double hypothesis,

(1) That Homer placed to the northward of Thrace, Epirus, and the Italian peninsula, an expanse, not of land, but of sea, communicating with the Euxine. Or, to express myself in other words, that he greatly extended the Euxine westwards, perhaps also shortening it towards the east; and that he made it communicate, by the Gulfs of Genoa and Venice, with the southern Mediterranean.

(2) That he compounded into one two sets of Phœnician traditions respecting the Ocean-mouth, and fixed the site of them in the North East.

It would carry us too far from the line of ethnological inquiry, were I now to examine the extensive question with which these propositions are connected. I will only observe in this place, that all the features of this outer geography, when viewed at large, are of such a nature as to favour, or perhaps rather to compel, the supposition, that it was founded on foreign, that is to say, on Phœnician information. Its extended range, its reach, by the routes of Menelaus on the one side, and of Ulysses on the other, over all the points of the compass, its vague, indeterminate, and ungeographical character as to distances and directions, and yet its frequent, though inconsistent and confused, resemblances at almost every point to some actual prototype, of which the poet may have had possibly or probably a vision in his eye;--all this agrees with the belief, that it represents a highly manufactured work, made up from Phœnician materials, and can scarcely agree with any thing else.

Reserving this much agitated subject for a fuller separate discussion, I will here only proceed to consider that limited portion of it which bears upon ethnology; I mean the evidence afforded us by Homer in the Odyssey, and particularly in connection with the Wanderings, as to the site and character (1) of the Siceli and of Sicania: (2) of the Thesprotians and Epirus: and (3) with respect to the family of Cadmus, which general tradition connects immediately with Phœnicia in the person of its founder, and which Homer, by indirect testimony, I think, justifies us in considering as derived from that source.

_The Siceli and Sicania._

Notwithstanding his use of the name Thrinacie, the poet appears to have had no geographical knowledge of Sicily, at least beyond its shape; for I think it may be shown that he places the site of the island in the immediate neighbourhood of the Bosphorus. But he might still have heard of the eastern coast of Italy immediately adjoining, afterwards the country of the Bruttii, which forms the sole of the foot rudely described by the configuration of southern Italy. For this coast is much nearer to Greece; it probably would be taken by mariners on their way from Greece to Sicily, and might be visited by them before they had pushed their explorations to the more distant point. The Athenian fleet in the Peloponnesian war touched first at the Iapygian promontory, and then coasted all the way[451]. This possibility grows nearly into a certainty, when we find that Homer speaks of a race, evidently as transmarine, which from history would appear probably to have inhabited that region at some early period.

I venture to argue that this Bruttian coast, the sole of the Italian foot, reaching from the gulf of Tarentum down to Rhegium, is the country which appears to us in the Odyssey under the name of Sicania.

In the fabulous account which Ulysses gives of himself to his father Laertes before the Recognition, he speaks as follows:

εἶμι μὲν ἐξ Ἀλύβαντος, ὅθι κλυτὰ δώματα ναίω, υἷος Ἀφείδαντος Πολυπημονίδαο ἄνακτος· αὐτὰρ ἐμοί γ’ ὄνομ’ ἐστὶν Ἐπήριτος· ἀλλά με δαίμων πλάγξ’ ἀπὸ Σικανίης δεῦρ’ ἐλθέμεν οὐκ ἐθέλοντα· νηὺς δέ μοι ἥδ’ ἕστηκεν ἐπ’ ἀγροῦ νόσφι πόληος[452].

In this passage Ulysses represents himself as a mariner, driven by some cross wind out of his course into Ithaca. Now this implies that his point of departure should be one from which by a single change of wind he could easily be driven upon Ithaca. Again, Sicania must have been a region known to the Ithacans, or else, instead of merely naming it, he would have described it to Laertes, as he describes Crete to Penelope[453].

Now, to fulfil these conditions, no other country than the one I have named is available. It has only an open sea between it and Greece, and a passage of some two hundred or two hundred and fifty miles, so that a wind driving him from his course might readily carry him across. And there is no other tract on the western side of the Adriatic, which is so likely to have been intended by Homer. Iapygia, beyond the Tarentine gulf, lies northward even of Scheria; and, like Scheria, so Iapygia was, we may be assured, in the Outer or unknown sphere of geography for Homer.

On the other hand, the Bruttian coast might well be known in Greece, though by dim rumour, yet better than Sicily: first, because it was nearer; and secondly, inasmuch as it did not in the same manner present the appearance of an island, its bearings would be more easily determined, and therefore its site was less likely to be mistaken. Lastly, history assures us that the Sicanian name prevailed in Italy, before it passed over into Sicily. Therefore the country of the Bruttii is in all likelihood the Homeric Sicania.

But again, we hear in Homer of Σικελοὶ, though not of a Σικελία. The Suitors advise Telemachus to send his guests to the Σικελοὶ[454] for sale: adding that a good price, a renumerating price (ἄξιον), would thus be obtained for them. On the other hand, a Sicelian female slave is the wife of Dolios, and looks after Laertes in his old age[455].

From these passages we may infer,

1. That the country of the Σικελοὶ was within the remoter knowledge of Ithacan seamen.

2. That they were a rich people; since they were able to pay a good price for slaves.

The first point, as we have seen, would make the Σικελοὶ suitable inhabitants of Sicania.

But likewise as to the second, Homer has given us some indications of their wealth: (_a_) in the name Ἀφείδας (the open-handed) ascribed by Ulysses to his father; (_b_) in that of Ἐπήριτος (object of contention) assumed for himself; (_c_) perhaps also in the name Ἀλύβας, akin to that of Ἀλύβη[456], where there was silver, and to that of Ἀρύβας a rich Sidonian[457]. This name probably indicates the possession of metallic mines, which for that period we may consider as a special sign of advancement and opulence.

Then if we turn for a moment to the historic period, it is in this very country that we find planted the great and luxurious cities of Sybaris and Crotona[458].

Now as the people called Siceli, and the country called Sicania, are thus placed in relations of proximity by Homer, so they continue throughout all antiquity. The reports collected by Thucydides represent the Sicanians as giving their name to Sicily, and displacing the former name Trinacria, which is identical with the Homeric Thrinacie. At a later time, the Sicilians passed from Italy into Sicily, and, as was said, upon rafts; that is to say, across the strait, and consequently from the country which, as I contend, is the Homeric Sicania. These Siceli were rumoured to have overcome the Sicani, and to have again changed the name of the island to Sicily. It is yet more material to note, that Thucydides says there were still Siceli in Italy when he himself lived: and he adds the tradition that Italus, a king of theirs, gave his name to the Peninsula[459].

To these reports, which form a part of the account given by Thucydides, we may add the statement of Dionysius, that the Σικελοὶ were the oldest inhabitants of Latium, and were displaced by the Pelasgi[460]. This implies their movement southward, and makes it probable that we should meet them in Bruttium, on their way to Sicily, perhaps pressing, in that region, upon the Sicani.

Such an hypothesis would be in entire agreement with Homer, who evidently represents the Sicanian as older than the Sicelian name: for the first had become territorial, when the latter was only tribal or national. And all this is in agreement with Thucydides in the essential point, that he makes the Sicanians precede the Siceli: while, though the tradition he reports brings the Sicani from Spain under pressure from the Ligures[461], he need not mean to exclude the supposition, that they may have come by land down the Italian peninsula. Though it is probably wrong to confound the Siceli with the Sicani[462], it would thus on all hands appear, that they were but successive waves of the tide of immigration advancing southward.

There is a further evidence that Homer meant to place Sicania within the Greek maritime world, and not beyond it. It is this. In his fabulous narrative to Laertes, Ulysses apprises the old man, that he had seen his son five years before in Sicania, hopeful of reaching his home[463]. Now this is a proof that the place was in the Inner or known sphere of geography: for in the outer circle, as for instance at Æolia, he never has any knowledge or reckoning of his own as to the power of reaching home: it was Æolus who gave him the Zephyr to take him home, not he who knew that if he got a Zephyr he would reach home. And in like manner he is supplied with express directions by Calypso: while Menelaus, not being absolutely beyond the known world, has no instructions for his voyage from Proteus, who plays for him the part of divine informant.

Thus then it appears, that Homer knew something of that part of the Italian continent, which we may term the sole of the foot. Again, if we look onward to the heel, Iapygia or Apulia, and observe its proximity to Corcyra or Scheria, we shall perceive that mariners in the time of Homer might take the route, which was afterwards pursued by the Athenian fleet under Nicias and his colleagues. But this is conjectural; and as Scheria was so faintly known, we must suppose Apulia to have been still more faintly conceived. Beyond Apulia Homer gives no sign of any acquaintance whatever with Italy. It therefore at once appears possible that he had no idea of the junction by land between the Greek and Italian peninsulas, and that he had imaged to the northward only an expanse of sea. I postpone, however, the further discussion of this subject.

_Epirus and the Thesproti._

_Epirus in Homer._

The Ithacan Suitors threaten to send Irus (Od. xviii. 84, 115), and again Ulysses (Od. xxi. 307), to a certain lawless and cruel king named Echetus; and in the two first passages we have the additional indication ἤπειρόνδε. This expression used in Ithaca can refer to no other mainland than that of the Greek Peninsula: of which even the nearer parts[464] pass by that name.

As on the one hand Echetus is savage, and evidently foreign (for we never find a Greek sold by Greeks as a slave to a Greek), he must be beyond the Greek limit: doubtless beyond the Thesproti, who were allies (ἄρθμιοι, Od. xvi. 427) of Ithaca. On the other hand, he could not be remote, or the Suitors would not have spoken so glibly of sending persons there. Hence we can hardly doubt, that this Echetus was a sovereign in the region of Epirus, between Scheria and the Thesproti: and the territorial name Ἤπειρος may thus be at least as ancient as the Poet.

In like manner we find in the Sixth Odyssey a female slave named Eurymedusa, in the household of Alcinous, the old nurse of Nausicaa. She was brought by sea Ἀπείρηθεν, and is described as γρηῢς Ἀπειραίη[465]. This is probably meant to indicate some part of the same region.

Thus Epirus would appear to form, along with Scheria and Sicania, Homer’s line of vanishing points, or extreme limits of actual geography, towards the north-west and west of Greece. To trace these vanishing points all round the circuit of his horizon, whenever it can be done, is most useful towards establishing the fundamental distinction between his Inner and Outer, his practical and poetical geography. In order to mark that distinction more forcibly, I would, if I might venture it, even call the former of these alone Geography, and the latter his territorial Skiagraphy.

More nearly within the circle of every day intercourse with Greece than the barbarous Echetus and his Epirus, and yet hovering near the verge of it, are the Thesprotians of the Odyssey.

Ulysses, in the Fourteenth Book, in the course of his fabulous narrative to Eumæus, relates that, when he was on his way from Crete to Libya, the ship in which he was sailing foundered, but that, by the favour of Jupiter, he floated on the mast for nine days, and, on the tenth, reached the land of the Thesprotians.

_Thesproti in Homer._

This statement suffices to fix that people to the north of the gulf of Ambracia (Arta). For had they lain to the south of that gulf, this would not have been the first land for him to make, as it would have been covered by the islands.

The narrative which follows is very curious. The Thesprotian king Pheidon, according to the tale of Ulysses, took good care of him without making him a slave (ἐκομίσσατο ἀπριάτην); which, as he was cast helpless on the shore, common usage would apparently have justified, and even suggested. The king’s son, who found him in his destitute condition, had his share in this great kindness; for he took him home, like Nausicaa, and clothed him. Here, says the tale, he heard news of Ulysses, who had proceeded from thence to Dodona to inquire about his fate, and had left much valuable property in trust with these hospitable and worthy people. But he goes on to relate, still in the assumed character, that, instead of keeping him to wait for Ulysses, the Thesprotian king took advantage of the opportunity afforded by a Thesprotian ship about to sail to Dulichium for corn, and dispatched him by it as a passenger to his home. The crew, however, infected with the kidnapping propensities of navigators, maltreated and bound him, with the intention of selling him for a slave: but, when they landed on the Ithacan beach to make a meal, he took advantage of the opportunity, and made his escape[466].

This ingenious fable is referred to, and in part repeated in subsequent passages of the poem[467], with no material addition, except that the country is called (πίων δῆμος xix. 271) a rich one.

But another passage[468], quite independent of all the former, adds a highly characteristic incident. Antinous, the insolent leader of the Suitors, is sharply rebuked by Penelope, and is reminded that his father Eupeithes had come to the palace as a fugitive from the Ithacan people, dependent on Ulysses for deliverance from their wrath. The reason of their exasperation was, that Eupeithes had joined the buccaneering Taphians in a piratical expedition against the Thesprotians, who were allies of Ithaca.

We have here a very remarkable assemblage of characteristics, which all tend to prove, and I think very sufficiently prove, the Pelasgianism of the Thesprotians. The humane and genial reception of the stranded sea-farer is in exact accordance with the behaviour of the Egyptian king[469], and his people to him on a previous occasion. The fact that he was not enslaved, suggests it as most probable, that there were no slaves in the Thesprotian country: which would entirely accord with the position of the Pelasgians, as themselves not the conquerors of a race that had preceded them, but the first inhabitants of the spots they occupied in the Greek peninsula. The richness of their country is further in harmony with the account of Egypt, and with their addiction to agricultural pursuits. The feigned deposit by Ulysses of his metallic stores with them proves, that they were not a predatory, and therefore proves, for that period, that they were not a poor people. The name Pheidon, or thrifty, given to the king, agrees with the character which, as we shall elsewhere find, attaches in a marked manner to Pelasgian proper names. And lastly, they were the subject of attack by Taphian buccaneers; which tends to show their unoffending and unaggressive character.

On the other side, we find them trading by sea to Dulichium: and we find the crew of the trader attempting to kidnap Ulysses. But as the Pelasgians were not in general navigators, it may very well have happened that the trade of the country had fallen into the hands of some distinct, possibly some Lelegian, or even some Hellenic race, which may have settled there for the purpose of carrying on a congenial employment, and which, like other traders of the time, would be ready upon occasion to do a turn in the way of piracy. It is to be remembered that there was a Thesprotian[470] Ephyre; which proves, as I believe, an early infusion of some race connected with the Hellenic stem.

I conclude, therefore, from Homer, that the Thesprotians were Pelasgian. And this conclusion is strongly sustained by the extra-Homeric tradition. Herodotus states, that they were the parent stock from whence descended the Thessalians[471], a report which I only follow to the extent of its signifying an affinity between the early settlers on the two sides of Mount Pindus. And Dionysius[472] appears to imply the opinion, that they were Thesprotian Pelasgians who settled in Italy.

I have already stated, that I can hardly think Homer points out to us more than one Dodona in the Iliad and Odyssey respectively. At the same time, if the supposition of two Dodonas be admissible, the circumstances suggested by him would help to account for it. For the Dodona of the Iliad is described as Pelasgic and also Hellic: that is, as we must I think suppose, having been Pelasgic, it had become Hellic. The Dodona of the Odyssey (on this supposition) is Thesprotian, that is to say Pelasgic, only. The solution would then be, that the Pelasgians of the original Dodona, when displaced, claimed to have carried their oracle along with them, while the Hellic intruders in like manner set up a counter-claim to have retained it in its original seat. The history of Christendom supplies us with cases bearing no remote analogy to this, in connection with the removal of a great seat of ecclesiastical power.

_Cadmeans._

_Cadmeans in Homer._

We have seen that the name of Ino Leucothee is sufficiently identified with a circle of Phœnician and outer-world traditions. And, as her name and position give us directly, or by suggestion, the principal testimony borne by Homer to Cadmus her father, this will be the most convenient place for considering his connection with Greece.

We are justified, I think, in at once assuming, first, from his relation to Ino, that he was Phœnician; secondly, from the deification of his daughter, that he was a ruler or prince. And thirdly, Ino appears to Ulysses in his distress as a protecting deity. Now as, when mortal, she had been Phœnician by extraction, and as she thus shows her sympathies with the Hellenic race, we must assume a link between these two facts. They would be associated in an appropriate manner, if the family of Cadmus her father had become naturalized in the possession of a Greek sovereignty.

Diodorus Siculus has handed down a tradition respecting Cadmus[473], which is important from its combination with circumstantial evidence; and which is in harmony with Homer, as it appears to represent the Phœnician immigrant at a well known and natural resting-place on his way towards Greece. It is to the effect, that Cadmus put into Rhodes, built there a temple of Neptune (and here we should remember the worship, and, as some think, the temple of Neptune[474] in Scheria), established a line of hereditary priests, and deposited offerings to Minerva of Lindos. Among these, there remained in after-times a finely wrought kettle or caldron, executed in an antique style of art, and bearing an inscription in the Phœnician character.

In connection with the name of Cadmus, we have the Homeric designations of Καδμεῖοι and Καδμείωνες. They appear to be synonymous: but the patronymical form of the latter corroborates the opinion that there was an individual Cadmus from whom the names proceeded, that they were properly dynastic, and not names taken from a nation or extended race.

We have next to inquire as to the period within which this race of Cadmeans held sway in Bœotia, the district where alone we hear of them. When did they begin, and when did they close?

The extra-Homeric tradition would throw Cadmus back to one of the very earliest periods, which would appear to be included within Homer’s knowledge upwards. The generations are arranged as follows:

1. Cadmus. 2. Polydorus. 3. Labdacus. 4. Laius. 5. Œdipus. 6. Eteocles and Polynices.

The last-named brothers are contemporaries of Tydeus. It follows that Cadmus is placed seven generations before the Trojan war; he is made contemporary with Dardanus, and he appears in Greece about three and a half generations before Minos came to Crete.

Now this is not the presumption, to which the Homeric text would give rise. For it does not seem likely that, if a family of an active race like the Phœnicians made their way into Greece, and managed to establish a sovereignty within it seven generations before the _Troica_, upwards of a century should elapse before any other adventurer was found to repeat so advantageous a process.

Further, the Cadmeans were in Thebes. But Cadmus was not its founder. It was founded, as we are told in the Eleventh Odyssey[475], by Zethus and Amphion, sons of Jupiter and of Antiope, daughter of Asopus: two persons who have thus, on both sides of their parentage, the signs of being the first known of their own race in the country. From the appearance of Antiope in the Νεκυΐα, where none but Hellenic and naturalized Shades are admitted, we may infer that Amphion and Zethus were not Pelasgian but Hellene. Again, as they _first_ founded and fortified Thebes, they must have preceded Cadmus there. What then was their probable date?

In the Νεκυΐα, so far as regards the women, Homer gives some appearance of meaning to introduce the persons and groups in chronological order.

The first of them all is Tyro[476], who seems to have been of the family of Æolus, and to have lived about four generations before the _Troica_.

The next is Antiope, mother of Amphion and Zethus.

After her come (1) Alcmene, mother of Hercules,

(2) Epicaste, mother of Œdipus, and

(3) Chloris, mother of Nestor.

All of whom belong to a period three generations before the war.

After these follow Leda and Ariadne, with others whose epoch the text of Homer does not enable us to fix. But Ariadne, the bride of Theseus, and aunt of Idomeneus (the μεσαιπόλιος), stands at about one generation and a half before the war: and Leda, as the mother of Castor and Pollux who were dead, and of Helen whose marriageable age dated from so many years before the action of the Iliad, as well as of Clytemnestra, belongs to about the same date.

On the whole therefore it would appear, from the signs of chronological order, that Antiope can hardly have been older than Tyro, and therefore can only have been about four, and her sons about three generations before the War. We have no vestiges of their race in Homeric history, except that, in the Nineteenth Odyssey[477], there is recorded the death of Itylus, the son of Zethus, in his boyhood. The Amphion Iasides of Od. xi. 283, must be another person. But, if this reasoning be sound, Cadmus, who succeeds to them in Thebes, was probably much more recent than the later tradition makes him, and may have come into Greece only a short time before Minos.

His name appears to have been given as a dynastic name to his subjects, or the ruling class of them, and to have continued such under his descendants. For not only does it appear to have begun with him, but with the fall of the family it at once disappears.

In five different places of the poems, Homer has occasion to refer to occurrences, which took place at Thebes under the Cadmean dynasty, in the time of Œdipus and of his sons: and in these five passages he employs the names Καδμεῖοι and Καδμείωνες no less than eight times for the people, while he never calls them by any other name[478].

But when we come down to the time of the war, this dynasty has disappeared with Eteocles and Polynices: the country of Bœotia, which it had once governed, seems to have lost its cohesion, and its troops are led by a body of no less than five chiefs. And now, whenever Homer has occasion to refer to the inhabitants of the country, they are never Καδμεῖοι or Καδμείωνες, but they are Βοιωτοί. The words Βοιωτὸς and Βοιώτιος are found nine times in the Iliad.

Nations called by a name which is derived from a national source, are likely to retain it longer than those which are designated dynastically from the head of a ruling family: as they must change their dynasties more frequently than they can receive new infusions of race and blood, powerful enough to acquire a predominance over the old.

Strabo indeed says[479], that Homer calls the Cadmeans of the Troic war by the name of Minyæ. But no Minyæ are named in Homer at all, although he speaks of the Ὀρχόμενος Μινυήïος, and of the ποταμὸς Μινυήïος in Peloponnesus, and though there was perhaps there also a Minyan Orchomenos. Even if Minyæ were named in Homer as a race, it would be strange that Homer should without a reason alter, for the period of the war, that use of the Cadmean name, to which he adheres elsewhere so strictly, as to show that he is acting on a rule. Whereas the transition to Βοιωτοὶ is not only intelligible, but politically descriptive.

Upon the foregoing facts we may found several observations:

1. The Cadmean name would seem to be strictly dynastic: as it makes its first appearance on the spot where Cadmus has reigned, and disappears at the same point, along with the extinction of his family.

2. The use of the Cadmean name by Homer, compared with his departure from it, each having appropriate reference to the circumstances of different epochs, appears to be a marked example of a careful and historic manner of handling local names with reference to the exact circumstances of place, time, and persons, and not in the loose manner of later poetry.

3. Our whole view of Cadmus and the Cadmeans from Homer has been attained by circuitous inference: and, presuming it to be a just one, we have here a very singular example of the poet’s reticence with respect to all infusion of foreign blood and influence into his country.

FOOTNOTES:

[415] Od. xi. 260.

[416] Od. xi. 568.

[417] Od. iv. 564.

[418] Il. ii. 824; and xii. 19.

[419] Od. iii. 320-2; and xiv. 257.

[420] Od. xiv. 231, 243-8.

[421] Od. xiv. 237; Il. xiv. 321.

[422] Od. i. 105; ii. 180.

[423] Od. i. 183.

[424] Od. xv. 425.

[425] Od. xv. 415.

[426] See Wood on Homer, p. 48.

[427] Od. xvii. 383.

[428] Nägelsbach, Homerische Theologie 80-3.

[429] There were columns outside the doors, for example, of the palace of Ulysses in Ithaca. Od. xvii. 29. This construction of the metaphor would come nearly to the same point, by making it mean the doors of Ocean.

[430] Hermann Opusc. vii. 253. Nägelsbach, ii. 9, note.

[431] Blakesley’s Introduction to Herodotus, p. xiv.

[432] Strabo iii. 2. 13, 14. pp. 149, 50.

[433] Mure, Greek Literature, i. 510.

[434] Il. xv. 630. xvii. 21. ii. 723.

[435] Il. xxii. 15.

[436] Il. iii. 365.

[437] Od. xx. 201.

[438] Il. xxiii. 439.

[439] Od. i. 52 and x. 137.

[440] Od. iv. 460.

[441] Od. xvii. 248.

[442] Od. iv. 410.

[443] Od. x. 289.

[444] As perhaps does Amphitrite, mentioned four times in the Odyssey, never in the Iliad.

[445] I shall consider further the construction of Il. xiv. 321, as it bears on the connection of Minos with Phœnicia, in treating the subject of the Outer Geography.

[446] Od. xv. 252, 3.

[447] Od. x. 492.

[448] Nägelsbach ii. 9.

[449] See Studies on Religion, sect. iii.

[450] I have given the accepted, and perhaps the more probable meaning; but the word is also well adapted to signify the _tidal_ Ocean. In the Mediterranean, as is well known, the tidal action is not perceived.

[451] Thucyd. vi. 42, 44.

[452] Od. xxiv. 304-8.

[453] Od. xix. 172.

[454] Od. xx. 383.

[455] Od. xxiv. 211, 366, 389.

[456] Il. ii. 857. Schönemann Geog. Hom. p. 31.

[457] Od. xv. 426.

[458] Cramer’s Italy, ii. pp. 354, 391.

[459] Thucyd. vi. 2.

[460] Dionys. i. 9.

[461] Thuc. ibid.

[462] Cramer’s Italy, ii. p. 2.

[463] Od. xxiv. 309.

[464] Od. xiv. 93.

[465] Od. vi. 7-12.

[466] Od. xiv. 293-359.

[467] Od. xvi. 65. xvii. 525, and xix. 269-99.

[468] Od. xvi. 424-30.

[469] Od. xiv. 278-86.

[470] Strabo vii. p. 324.

[471] Herod. vii. 176.

[472] Dion. Hal. i. 18.

[473] Diod. Sic. v. 58.

[474] Od. vi. 266.

[475] 260-5.

[476] See inf. sect. viii.

[477] Od. xix. 522.

[478] Il. iv. 385, 388, 391. v. 804. 7. x. 208. xxiii. 680. Od. xi. 275.

[479] ix. p. 401.

SECT. V.

_On the Catalogue._

The Catalogue in the Second Book belongs more properly to the Geography, than to the Ethnology of the poems. But I advert to it here on account both of the historic matter it contains, and of the manner in which it illustrates the general historic designs of the Poet.

It is perhaps, in its own way, nearly as characteristic and remarkable a performance, as any among the loftier parts of the poem. Considered as a portion of the Iliad, it would be more justly termed the Array than the Catalogue; for it is a review, and not a mere enumeration. Considered with respect to history, its value can scarcely be overrated: it contains the highest title-deeds of whatever ancient honour the several States might claim, and is in truth the Doomsday Book of Greece.

We may consider the Greek Catalogue in three parts:

First, the Invocation or Preface.

Secondly, the Catalogue Proper.

Thirdly, the Postscript, so to call it, 761-779.

Before and after, he has graced the work with splendid similes. When all is concluded and, as it were, marked off, he proceeds to append to it the Trojan Catalogue; a work of less extent and difficulty, as also of less penetrating interest to his hearers, but yet constructed with much of care, and with various descriptive embellishments.

The Preface contains the most formal invocation of the Muses among the few which are to be found in the poems. The others are,

Il. i. 1. Introduction to the Iliad: addressed to Θεά.

Il. ii. 761. In the Postscript to the Catalogue.

Il. xi. 218. Before the recital of the persons who were slain by Agamemnon.

Il. xiv. 508. Before the recital of the Greek chiefs, who, on the turn of the battle, slew various Trojans.

Il. xvi. 112. Before proceeding to relate, how the Trojans hurled the firebrands at the Grecian ships.

Od. i. 1. Introduction to the Odyssey: addressed to Μοῦσα.

In the cases of the Eleventh and Fourteenth Books, the invocation of the Muse stands in connection with a particular effort of memory; for the recitals prefaced by it consist of names not connected by any natural tie one with the other. But it is here that the Poet’s appeal to the Muse most deserves attention.

If Homer was composing a written poem, the invocation is ill-timed and unmeaning. He has already, by a series of fine similes, elevated the subject to a proper level. Considered as a mere written Catalogue, it does not deserve or account for the prayer for aid: in this point of view, it was of necessity among the _sermoni propiora_, and was one of the easiest parts of the poem to compose. But if we consider the poem as a recitation, then the Catalogue was very difficult; because of the great multitude of details which are included in it, and which are not in themselves connected together by any natural or obvious link.

It is true that he begs the Muses to inform him, because they were omnipresent and omniscient, whereas he is dependent on report only (κλέος) for information. Now this was equally true of the whole material of the poem: but the reason why he introduces the statement of this truth in so marked a manner, must be from the arduous nature of the task he was beginning; nor could it be arduous in any other way, than as an effort of memory.

The invocation contains another proof that the poems were composed for recitation in the words (vv. 489, 90)

οὐδ’ εἴ μοι δέκα μὲν γλῶσσαι, δέκα δὲ στόματ’ εἶεν φωνὴ δ’ ἄρρηκτος, χαλκέον δέ μοι ἦτορ ἐνείη.

Nothing can be more proper than to refer to the insufficient ability of the bodily organs of recitation, if he were about to recite: but nothing less proper, if he were engaged on a written poem. It has been a fashion however with poets to copy Homer in this passage, although the reason and circumstances on which it is founded had become wholly inapplicable: and their abusive imitation has blinded us to the significance of the passage as it stands in the Iliad.

Now as regards the list itself.

_The Greek Array._

In this Catalogue, he had to go through the different States of Greece, furnishing twenty-nine contingents of various strengths, all indicated by the number of ships, to the army. These contingents are under forty-five leaders, many of them with genealogies, and coming from one hundred and seventy-one Greek towns. The proper names of the Greek Catalogue, strictly so called, are three hundred and ninety-six, and those of the Trojan one hundred and five, making in all five hundred and one. These must have been a selection from a larger number, for there were Greek towns (for example Φηραὶ of the Peloponnesus, Od. iii. 488, and the various towns named Ἐφύρη) not named in the Catalogue; and this again increased the difficulty of keeping by memory to the list throughout. Again, it was difficult to adopt any arrangement that should not be wholly arbitrary, in displaying to us the parts of an army which comprised so many divisions, and which was drawn from sources so numerous, and dispersed over a territory of such extremely irregular formation.

_The principle of arrangement._

Homer has however with great ingenuity adopted a geographical arrangement in the Greek Catalogue, which, so far as the various divisions were concerned, has enabled him to combine them into a kind of whole.

The territory, which supplied the army, consisted partly of continent, and partly of islands: and the islands again were partly such as, lying about the coast of the mainland, might be most conveniently remembered in conjunction with it, partly such as formed a group of themselves.

If we take the continent and islands together, we shall find that they form part of a curvilinear figure, not indeed circular, but elliptical, and more nearly approaching a circle than that group of islands in the Ægean, which afterwards obtained the name of Cyclades. This name, taken from the rude approximation to a geometrical figure, may possibly have been at first suggested to the Greeks by Homer’s geometrical arrangement in the Catalogue. I speak of Homer’s arrangement as geometrical, because the principle he has adopted is that of mental figure drawing: it is of course of the rudest kind, and he perhaps did not even know the correct mode of constructing a circle.

The proportion of the figure formed by the mainland and islands is about two-thirds of a complete circumference: the ends of the curve being Thessaly to the north, and Calydnæ, with the other small islands, in the south-east.

Let us now proceed to notice, firstly, the primary division of the Catalogue into principal parts, and secondly, the subdivision in each of those parts.

It is worth while to remark, that the Poet has not adopted the mode of enumeration which might have been thought most obvious: namely, to begin at one of the extremities of this semicircle (so to call it), and then proceed towards the other. If the territorial subdivisions had been regular, this would have been convenient: but from their utter irregularity it would in this case have been wholly useless.

Again, he might have begun with Agamemnon, his immediate forces and dominion; and might then proceed through the States according to the political importance of their respective contingents. But to this course there were two objections. First, their order could not on this principle have been easily decided, especially after passing a few of the most considerable. But, secondly, he appears to have avoided, with a fixed purpose and with an extraordinary skill, both here and elsewhere, whatever could have excited feelings of jealousy as between the several States of Greece. Of course I do not refer to the admitted supremacy of Agamemnon: but if he had attempted to place the forces of Nestor, Diomed, Menelaus, of the Athenians, the Arcadians, the Phthians, in an order thus regulated, it would have been at variance with obvious prudence, and with his uniform rule of action. Perhaps, however, we may rightly consider, that if Homer had been writing his poems, he could not have failed to give Agamemnon the first place in this description. He has not then followed the general form of the territory, nor has he begun with the chief political member of the armament. Nor, lastly, has he even treated the Peloponnesus as a separate division of Greece: but he has introduced it, though it was the most important part of the country, between the eastern parts (Bœotia, with six other States) and the western parts (Ætolia, with two other States) of Middle Greece.

There are therefore various modes of arrangement, which either politically or geographically might be termed obvious, but which the Poet has passed by. Why has he passed them by? and why has he begun the Catalogue with the Bœotians? who were neither powerful, nor ancient, nor distinguished in a remarkable degree; nor did they lie at any one of the geographical extremities of the country.

Again, it might be asked, why has he not either divided all the islands from Continental Greece, or none? Instead of that, he reckons Eubœa, Cephallenia, Zacynthus, and Ithaca, in the same division with Continental Greece, but begins a new division with Crete.

Let us now carefully note what he has done, and see whether it does not suggest the reasons.

The three principal divisions of the Catalogue would appear to lie as follows:

I. Continental Greece south of mount Œta, including the Middle and the Southern division, with the islands immediately adjacent. This section furnishes sixteen contingents. (Il. ii. 494-644.)

II. Insular Greece, from Crete to Calydnæ: these islands furnish four contingents. (645-680.)

III. Thessalian Greece, from Œta and Othrys in the south, to Olympus in the north: which furnishes nine contingents. (681-759.)

These three divisions completely sever the line of the semicircular curve. It follows that in recitation he would be able to dispose of each part severally, as each forms a compact figure of itself: and this he could not have done, had he followed the seemingly more natural division into continent and islands. At the interval between the first and the second, he makes a spring from Ætolia to Crete: and another between the second and the third, from the Calydnæ to Thessaly.

The _desideratum_ obviously was, to assist memory by such a geographical disposition, that the different parts might be made by association each to suggest that which was immediately to follow. So distributed, they would supply a kind of _memoria technica_.

We see how he prepares for this operation by his distribution in chief, which gives him the three sections of Greece, as they succeed one another on the line of the (completed) figure.

And, though we may not yet have in view a reason for his beginning with the Bœotians, we seem now at least to have a reason before us for his beginning with the middle section instead of one of the extremes; namely, that it was the principal one, as it not only supplied the largest number of ships and men, and nearly all the greater commanders, but also as it contains the seat of sovereignty, and supplied the forces of the Chief of the army.

Having the three sections before us, let us now observe the manner in which he manages the sub-distribution, so as to make each district of territory lead him on to the next.

And here he seems evidently to proceed upon these two rules: first, never to pass over an intervening territory, though he may cross a strait or gulf.

And secondly, to throw the several States into rude circles or other figures, round the arc or along the line of which his recollection moves from point to point.

His first figure may be called a circle, being elliptical[480]; and it includes nine contingents.

1. Bœotia. 2. Minyeian Orchomenus. 3. Phocis. 4. Locris. 5. Eubœa. 6. Attica. 7. Salamis. 8. Argolis. 9. Mycenæ.

His second is a zigzag, and includes seven contingents[481].

1. Lacedæmon. 2. Pylus. 3. Arcadia. 4. Elis. 5. The Dulichians. 6. The Cephallenians. 7. Ætolia.

We now part with the first section.

His third figure embraces the second section, or insular division of the Catalogue, and is again part of a rude circle or ellipse[482].

1. Crete.

2. Rhodes.

3. Syme.

4. Cos and other islands. Carpathus is included, which lay between Crete and Rhodes; being apparently in political union with Cos and the Calydnæ, and contributing to the same contingent, it could not but stand with them. Strabo observes that this principle of political division, according to what he terms δυνάστειαι[483], has been adopted by the Poet in his account of the Thessalian contingents.

By reference to the rude maps annexed, which mark the several contingents by figures, the nature of this contrivance will be clearly seen.

_The order for Thessaly._

It is more difficult to trace Homer’s method of proceeding with respect to Thessaly.

This country furnishes nine contingents, which may best be described by the names of their leaders. There is no difficulty as to the first four, except that some of the boundaries are indeterminate. They form, like the last or insular group, an incomplete circle[484]. The leaders are;

I. Achilles (681-94).

II. Protesilaus (695-710).

III. Eumelus (711-15).

IV. Philoctetes (716-28).

There is more difficulty in describing the arrangement of the remainder. Strabo, who has followed the Catalogue in Thessaly with great minuteness, seems to have noticed the circular arrangement: at least he speaks of the κύκλος τῆς Θετταλίας, and the περιόδεια τῆς χώρας[485]. But when he comes to the sixth division, that of Eurypylus, he appears to find it impossible to fix with any confidence the site of Ormenium: and says, καὶ ἄλλα δ’ ἐστὶν ἃ λέγοι τις ἂν, ἀλλ’ οὖν ὀκνῶ διατρίβειν ἐπὶ πλέον[486]. And further on he observes, that the displacements and changes of cities, and mixtures of races, have confounded the names and tribes[487], so as to make them in part unintelligible to men of his day: where we are anew reminded of the passage of Thucydides, in which he tells us, that the most fertile tracts underwent the most frequent changes of population[488].

The δυναστεία of Eurypylus is in our maps commonly placed on the sea coast, but as it appears, with little authority of any kind: while, after all the proof we have seen of continuous arrangement, it seems incredible that, in this instance alone, Homer could have followed an order such that the δυναστεία should not march either with that which precedes, or that which follows, but should be severed from them by a line of territories intervening, which he has already disposed of.

To judge from analogy with the otherwise uniform rule of the Catalogue, the dominions of Eurypylus must have been somewhere conterminous both with those of the Asclepiads, and with those of Polypœtes. Waiving however any effort to fix positively their site, we find the other four remaining contingents connected by a zigzag line[489], like that which was used in southern Greece. The leaders are as follows:

I. Podaleirius and Machaon (729-33). (Eurypylus 734-7, omitted.)

II. Polypœtes (738-47).

III. Gouneus (Enienes, Perrhæbi, and Dodona, 748-55).

IV. Prothous (the Magnesians, 756-9).

In this view Homer appears to subdivide Thessaly into two figures, as he had done Southern Greece: and in both cases one of them is curvilinear, in which the eastern parts are arranged: the other a zigzag, which includes the western portions.

I have described this geometrical arrangement, as of great interest in connection with the question, whether the poems were written or recited; and also as it seems to be in itself highly ingenious.

It seems to distribute in rude but real symmetry before the eye of the mind, an assemblage of objects between which it would at first sight appear almost impossible to frame any link of connection.

But in Homer, though there is much that is ingenious, there is nothing that is far-fetched: and the order he has followed might well, as to many parts at least of Greece, have been that of his own itinerancy as a minstrel. And, though complex in other respects, yet if it reduces a complex physical arrangement to the form, in which it becomes practically more manageable than in any other way for his purposes, it is evidently the one which may best be justified on the principles of common sense.

_Fresh proofs of historical intention._

The Greek Catalogue is also full of proofs of the historical intention of Homer.

In the first place, such proof is afforded by the immense amount of its details, which are _prima facie_ a load upon his verse, and which Homer seems to have so regarded, from the care he has taken to relieve the subject by the cluster of similes at the beginning. He must have had a purpose in facing this disadvantage. It is quite at variance with his own spirit, and the spirit of his age, to suppose that this purpose was merely to flatter the vanity of hearers by wholesale fiction.

The use of supernatural machinery is agreeable to the genius of the poet and his age, but not so the vulgar falsification of plain terrestrial facts. If the supposition of wholesale fiction cannot be maintained, there is no other alternative but that of an historical purpose.

Viewed at large, the Catalogue is an answer to that normal question, which expresses the anxiety of every Greek to make the acquaintance of a man first of all through what are colloquially termed his ‘belongings.’

Τίς; πόθεν εἶς ἀνδρῶν; πόθι τοι πόλις; ἠδὲ τοκῆες[490];

The chief indication of departure from this purpose is in the case of Nireus[491]. This paltry leader is almost the only person of legitimate birth, both of whose parents are named: and while he is evidently introduced for his beauty only, it is most suspicious that his father should be named Χάροψ, and likewise his mother Ἀγλαΐη. This savours of the names Δημόδοκος and Τερπιάδης, which Homer has given to his Bards in the Odyssey. And again of his Phronius, son of Noemon, whom he introduces to play the part of a considerate and serviceable Ithacan citizen[492]. With the insignificant island of Syme Homer might, for a special object, well take this liberty. And we may observe here, as elsewhere, that what is probably a departure from literal truth, may also be in a higher view historical: for doubtless his object is to commemorate impressively the wonderful beauty of Nireus, and this he does by inventing appropriate accessories.

Again, though an accurate geography would not of itself have proved the personal parts of the narrative to be historical, it is scarcely conceivable that he would have adopted one so minute and elaborate, as well as exact, if he had meant to combine with it a string of merely fictitious personalities.

_Genealogies of the Catalogue._

Thirdly, besides many simple patronymics, there are found thirteen minor genealogies in the Catalogue, ten of them Greek, and three foreign. They are of three generations only in every case, with the single exception of the Orchomenian leaders, who have four: and in every case they attach to secondary heroes, who are thus treated in a mass, while provision is made in other parts of the poem for making known to us the descent (with the exception of Ajax) of all the greater heroes, as occasion serves to state it for each of them singly. Now it is inconceivable, even on general grounds, that the poet should have invented this mass of names; for they could surely have excited no sort of interest among his hearers, except upon one ground. They must have been true genealogical records of persons, who had played a part in the great national drama; one not perhaps of high importance, yet sufficient to be the basis of such traditions, as are justly deemed worthy of local record among a people eminently strong in their municipal, as well as their general patriotism. Over and above this, many points of these minor genealogies coincide with, and illustrate other historical notices in other parts of the poem.

Again, there are in all eight cases in the Catalogue, where the name of a mother is mentioned. These are,

1. Astyoche, mother of Ascalaphus and Ialmenus, Mars being the father, v. 513.

2. Aroura mother of Erechtheus, no father being mentioned, v. 548.

3. Astyochea mother of Tlepolemus, Hercules being the father, v. 658.

4. Aglaie mother of Nireus, Charops the father, v. 672.

5. Alcestis mother of Eumelus, Admetus the father, v. 715.

6. Rhene mother of Medon, Oileus the father, v. 728.

7. Hippodamia mother of Polypœtes, Pirithous the father, v. 742.

8. Venus is mentioned as the mother of Æneas, Anchises being the father, v. 820.

The second of these cases, if we are to regard the passage containing it as Homeric, must not be considered as an account of parentage, but simply as a mode of asserting autochthonism. Again, the parents of Nireus, whether true persons or not, are evidently named with reference to the consideration of beauty only, which is the key to the whole passage.

And the parentage of Æneas may also perhaps be named for the sole purpose of embellishment.

Described by the words θεὰ βροτῷ εὐνηθεῖσα, it does not appear to stand in the same class, or to be susceptible of the same explanations, as those Greek cases where Greek chieftains born out of wedlock have gods for their fathers; nor is there any case, among the Greeks, of illegitimate birth from a goddess. Of the five other cases three (1, 3, and 6), are obviously illegitimate births, one at least of them with a fabulous father. This raises the presumption that the name of the mother was mentioned as the only remaining means of recording the descent: inasmuch as the persons would otherwise have been οὐτίδανοι. It may reasonably be conjectured, that all these births were out of wedlock.

The epithets of the Catalogue are so accurately descriptive of the country, that they have always been used as tests of the traditions respecting the situations of the places to which they refer. They are not less exactly in harmony with the descriptions in other parts of the poem, and this in minor cases, where purposed fiction can hardly be supposed, not less than in the greater ones. For instance, the Arcadians of Il. vii. 134, are ἐγχεσίμωροι: those of the Catalogue are ἀγχιμάχηται (604), and ἐπιστάμενοι πολεμίζειν (611). The Pelasgi of Il. x. 429 are δῖοι, those of the Catalogue (840) are ἐγχεσίμωροι. The Cephallenians of the Catalogue are μεγάθυμοι (631), those of Il. iv. 330 are στίχες οὐκ ἀλαπαδναί. The Crete of the Odyssey (xix. 174) has ἐννήκοντα πόληες, the Crete of the Catalogue (v. 649) is ἑκατόμπολις[493].

Single commands are in every instance assigned to those who in the rest of the poem appear as chiefs of the first order. In the case of Idomeneus alone is this in any way obscured; as the passage (645-51) runs: ‘Idomeneus led the Cretans.... Idomeneus led them, with Meriones.’ But it is very remarkable that Meriones holds just this sort of ambiguous relation to Idomeneus in the poem at large: sometimes he is called his θεράπων (xxiii. 113 _et alibi_), and his ὀπάων (x. 58 _et alibi_), while he stands among the nine first warriors of the army, who (vii. 161), volunteer for single combat with Hector; and when Idomeneus leads the van, he manages the rear (iv. 251-4). Again, though the opportunities afforded by the Catalogue are of necessity narrow, yet Homer has contrived within its limits to mark distinctly the character and position of nearly every great chieftain: certainly of Agamemnon, Achilles, Menelaus, Telamonian Ajax (v. 668), and Ulysses.

_The Epilogue._

The third portion, or epilogue, appears to be ascribable chiefly to the genial love of Homer for the horse. His arrangement of the army according to the number of ships, which conveyed each division, had shut out the mention of the chariots and the coursers who drew them, and he appears to have devised this closing invocation for the purpose of supplying the defect. It was certainly not necessary in order to fix the position of Achilles in the army, which the First Book had completely developed; and the passage is chiefly occupied with the horses of Eumelus, together with those of Achilles and his force.

It contains, however, two remarkable notes of historical veracity. The horses of Eumelus, a Thessalian, are proclaimed to have been by far the best (μέγ’ ἄρισται): and the Myrmidons, again a Thessalian contingent, are here spoken of as having a number of separate chariots and horses; we are told (773), ‘the soldiers played at games.... The horses stood feeding, each near his own chariot, and the chariots were in their sheds.’ This is never said of any other contingent in the army. In strict harmony with this picture, Thessaly was conspicuous throughout the historic times of Greece, for the excellence of its breeds of horses, and the high character of its cavalry.

If all this be so, we cannot wonder at the high estimation in which the Catalogue of Homer was held by the Greeks of after-ages, as the great and only systematic record of the national claims of the respective states.

This was not merely literary or private estimation: the Catalogue had the place of an authoritative public document. Under the laws of Solon, for example, it received the honour of public recitation on solemn occasions. It was also quoted for the decision of controversies. In the critical moment, which preceded the first Persian war, the Athenian and Spartan envoys apply on the part of Greece to Gelon for his aid. He claims the command. In resisting this claim and urging their own right to lead the fleet, unless that post be claimed by the Lacedæmonians, the Athenians found their pretensions on the magnitude of their fleet, their autochthonism, and, finally, the testimony of Homer to the merits of Menestheus[494].

_The Trojan Catalogue._

The Trojan Catalogue has less of organic connection than the Greek with the structure of the poem at large.

In proceeding to this portion of his work, the poet does not renew his ornamental similes, or his invocation to the Muse. He evidently meant to lower the tone of his strain: and moreover he was not about to tax memory as he had done in the former operation, the proper names being only about one fourth in number of those used for the Greeks, and none of them being arranged in long strings like the towns of Bœotia.

He now begins in what may be called a natural order: taking first that section of the army, which was supplied by the Troic sovereignties, principal and subordinate; and among these giving the first place to the troops of Ilion itself, as the most considerable, and as those chiefly concerned. The next is given to the Dardan forces, which were connected with the original seat of the race, and the following ones to the contingents supplied by the subordinate sovereigns of the rest of Troas.

His pursuit of this order reminds us, that the geographical distribution was in the case of the Trojan list simple, and did not require the aid of mental geometry, as he had only to follow, almost throughout, a single line of States along the European and Asiatic coasts. It also strengthens the presumption that, when Homer chose an order so different, and so much less natural and obvious, in the case of the Greeks, he must have been governed by some peculiar reason.

It will be observed that, of the eleven divisions of the Allies, the two first are the Pelasgians and the Thracians. As the blood of these two races flowed likewise in the veins of the Greeks, the precedence given to them may have been founded on this relationship. But this presumption is qualified by our finding that, doubtless on the ground of geographical order, the Lycian contingent, which had, at any rate, strong Greek affinities, comes last of all.

For a reason given elsewhere, we must consider the numbers assigned to the Greek contingents as approximate representations of their respective force: but the omission to particularize numbers at all in the Trojan Catalogue is itself an evidence of its historical character. The Trojan army was of a miscellaneous character: we also know that the allied contingents went and came, and that their absence from home, not prompted by the same powerful motives as that of the Greeks, was shortened by reliefs. Thus we find Rhesus with his Thracians just arrived in the Tenth Book[495]: Memnon comes to Troy after the death of Hector[496]: and we are told of the sons of Hippotion (Il. xiii. 792), who ἦλθον ἀμοιβοί, had come as reliefs, on the preceding day. An army thus collected piecemeal, and thus fluctuating in its composition, could not leave behind it the same accessible traditions. Again, the destruction of Troy itself obliterated what alone could have been their depository; nor had Homer, as a Greek bard, either the same motives or the same means for gathering detailed information, as he would naturally possess with reference to his own countrymen.

Hence, as the Trojan Catalogue is shorter, so also its scope is more limited. It contains no specification of forces: no anecdotes going farther back than the existing generation: scarcely any of what may be called specialties of character or position as to the chiefs. It shows a good deal of knowledge of the geography and products of the countries, but this knowledge is of a much more general and vague character, than that which he has displayed in almost every portion of the Greek Array. He gives here very few lists of towns at all, and never uses epithets requiring us to believe that he had a personal knowledge of their site and character. Only Ariste is δῖα, and Larissa is ἐριβώλαξ. In two or three cases he speaks of commercial products; a characteristic which it is obvious that he might have learned without any personal experience of the countries. He does not use this particular kind of sign at all in the descriptions of the Greek Catalogue: and we may perhaps correctly interpret it, where it appears, as a token of his want of vivid and experimental knowledge.

He also occasionally names a mountain or a river. But there is a general avoidance of particular and characteristic epithets, such as, (to refer to the Bœotian list alone,) πετρήεσσα given to Aulis, πολύκνημος to Eteonos, εὐρύχορος to Mycalesos, ἐϋκτίμενον to Medeon and Hypothebæ, πολυτρήρων to Thisbe, ποιήεις to Haliartos, πολυστάφυλος to Arne, ἐσχατόωσα to Anthedon, with perhaps one or two other cases.

Another material inference is suggested by the very different texture of the Trojan Catalogue.

Upon the whole, this vagueness of description cannot, I think, but be regarded as much in conflict with the belief that Homer was a Greek of Asia Minor, if at least his comparative knowledge of the two countries on the opposite sides of the Ægean is to be taken as a sign, either positive or negative, of his nativity.

FOOTNOTES:

[480] Fig. i. in Map.

[481] Fig. ii. in Map.

[482] Fig. iii. in Map.

[483] ix. 5. p. 430.

[484] Fig. iv. in Map.

[485] Strabo ix. p. 435.

[486] Ibid. p. 439.

[487] Ibid. p. 442.

[488] Thuc. i. 2.

[489] Fig. v. in Map.

[490] Od. i. 170, _et alibi_.

[491] I am not prepared to contend that the numbers of the ships are to be taken as literally correct: but this subject will be discussed in conjunction with his general mode of using number, in the ‘Studies on Poetry,’ sect. iii.

[492] Od. ii. 386.

[493] The reasons for treating this as a coincidence will be found in a paper on Homer’s use of number. (Studies on Poetry, sect. iii.)

[494] Herod. vii. 161.

[495] Il. x. 434.

[496] Od. xi. 521.

SECT. VI.

_On the Hellenes of Homer; and with them_,

Hellas; Panhellenes; Cephallenes; Helli or Selli.

_The Hellas of Homer._

We have next to inquire into the force of the Hellenic name in the poems of Homer.

It meets us not, like the Pelasgic, in a single form, but in a group of words; among which, the principal are as follows:

1. Ἕλληνες, Il. ii. 684. } 2. Πανέλληνες, ibid. 530. } National or tribal names. 3. Σελλοὶ, Il. xvi. 234. }

And, lastly, the territorial name of

4. Ἕλλας.

Observing the order of derivation as it has been pointed out by Mure[497], we shall naturally look to the word Ἕλλας as a guide to the meaning of its derivatives, Ἕλληνες and Πανέλληνες. It is itself drawn from Ἑλλοὶ or Σελλοί: but as that name is only once used in the Poems, and as by far the largest body of evidence tells upon the word Ἕλλας, the decision upon the whole group of words will turn mainly upon the inquiry we shall have to make into the use of that word by Homer. With it therefore we shall commence. Is there, we have to ask, clear proof, that it went beyond the dominions of Peleus? If it went beyond them, how far did it go? and did it include that division of Greece, in which Locris lay, whose inhabitants a particular line of the Catalogue classes with the Panhellenes? For no suspicion of spuriousness can justly arise out of the fact (if it be one), that Homer calls by the name of Hellenes the inhabitants of any country, which was itself within the scope of the territorial name Hellas: inasmuch as this is little more than, the word Yorkshire being given, to make use also of the word Yorkshiremen.

At the outset, however, it is essential to observe, that a certain elasticity in the use of geographical as well as political names could not but belong to the age, in which Homer lived: first, because of the successive movements of tribes, like wave on wave, so that the use of any such name would ordinarily be either growing or declining, but not stationary: secondly, because of the indeterminate forms which political authority assumed, as resting on a mixture, in unknown proportions, of the various elements of custom, compact, reverence, and force: and, thirdly, because of the want of well-defined geographical boundaries.

We are not entitled to assume that the territory, which we call Greece, was, in Homer’s time, subdivided with precision between a given number of territorial names. We hear of Phthia, Ægialus, Elis, Arcadia: but these seem to be the exceptions rather than the rule. For many parts of it there are no local names whatever; and we must not look for any thing resembling the manner in which England is made up of its counties, France of its departments, or the later Greece of its individual states.

The passages in which the word Hellas is used by Homer stand as follows in the order of the Poems:

1. A verse in the Catalogue, Il. ii. 683:

οἵ τ’ εἶχον Φθίην ἠδ’ Ἑλλάδα καλλιγυναῖκα.

2. (Achilles _loquitur_), ix. 395:

πολλαὶ Ἀχαΐιδές εἰσιν ἀν’ Ἑλλάδα τε Φθίην τε.

3. (Phœnix _loq._), ibid. 447:

οἷον ὅτε πρῶτον λίπον Ἑλλάδα καλλιγυναῖκα.

4. (Phœnix _loq._), ibid. 478:

φεῦγον ἔπειτ’ ἀπάνευθε δι’ Ἑλλάδος εὐρυχόροιο, Φθίην δ’ ἐξικόμην ἐριβώλακα.

5. (In the narrative), Il. xvi. 595:

Χάλκωνος φίλον υἱὸν, ὃς Ἑλλάδι οἴκια ναίων ὄλβῳ τε πλούτῳ τε μετέπρεπε Μυρμιδόνεσσιν.

6. (Penelope _loq._), Od. i. 344:

μεμνημένη αἰεὶ ἀνδρὸς, τοῦ κλέος εὐρὺ καθ’ Ἑλλάδα καὶ μέσον Ἄργος.

7. (Penelope _loq._), Od. iv. 724:

ἣ πρὶν μὲν πόσιν ἐσθλὸν ἀπώλεσα θυμολέοντα, παντοίῃς ἀρέτῃσι κεκασμένον ἐν Δαναοῖσι, ἐσθλὸν, τοῦ κλέος εὐρὺ καθ’ Ἑλλάδα καὶ μέσον Ἄργος.

8. Penelope repeats the same lines, Od. iv. 814-16.

9. (Achilles _loq._), Od. xi. 494:

εἶπε δέ μοι, Πηλῆος ἀμύμονος εἴ τι πέπυσσαι· ἢ ἐτ’ ἔχει τιμὴν πολέσιν μετὰ Μυρμιδόνεσσιν ἤ μιν ἀτιμάζουσιν ἀν’ Ἑλλάδα τε Φθίην τε.

10. (Menelaus _loq._), to Telemachus, Od. xv. 80:

εἰ δ’ ἐθέλεις τραφθῆναι ἀν’ Ἑλλάδα καὶ μέσον Ἄργος, ὄφρα τοι αὐτὸς ἕπωμαι, ὑποζεύξω δέ τοι ἵππους, ἄστεα δ’ ἀνθρώπων ἡγήσομαι.

Of these passages, there are some which admit for the word Hellas the contracted sense of the dominions of Peleus, or even of a simple portion of them. Namely the following:

In (1) we are reading part of the description of the country, from which the force of Achilles was drawn. Beginning from the line which precedes it, we may translate thus: ‘the inhabitants of Alos, and of Alope, and of Trachin, and those who occupied Phthia, and the Hellas of fair women.’ It is clear, on the face of the passage, that, whatever it may mean, the sense does not require it to mean more in this place than a particular district, forming part of the dominions of Peleus.

In (2), where Achilles says, there are many Achæan maids through Hellas and Phthia, any one of whom he can have for a wife.

In (5), where we are told that Bathycles, son of Chalcon, dwelt in Hellas, preeminent among the Myrmidons in prosperity and wealth.

And in (9), where the shade of Achilles asks whether his father Peleus is still in the enjoyment of kingly power in the populous country of the Myrmidons, or whether he is deprived and despised through the range of Hellas and Phthia.

But among these four passages there is a distinction. In (1), (5), and (9) Hellas is combined with Phthia. Now we have seen, that there were Phthians beyond the dominions of Peleus: if the territorial name Phthia was similarly extended, then the presumption would arise that Hellas also might mean something more than lay within those dominions. But there are many passages where Phthia is used without Hellas; and in them all it is used to express the district where Peleus reigned. It is not unlikely therefore, at first sight, that Hellas has the limited sense of a part of the kingdom in these passages. And in the passage relating to Bathycles, the son of Chalcon, the limited sense is yet more strongly suggested; yet, as we may hereafter see more clearly, it is by no means positively required either in that or in any of these four places.

And it is abundantly clear, from the remainder of the passages, that the name Hellas had already, in Homer’s time, begun to bear a more extended sense.

In proof of this, let us take, firstly, the two passages in which it stands alone. In Il. ix. 444-8, Phœnix tells us that nothing would induce him to quit Achilles; no, not even if the gods, brushing off his old age, were to make him young and vigorous again, such as he was when first he left Hellas, the land of fair women, flying from his feud with his father Amyntor. Now this passage absolutely proves that the word Hellas was used by Homer, at least occasionally, for some limited district, and not (as in after times) for the entire country; inasmuch as Phœnix could not otherwise have said he _left_ Hellas on this occasion. But on the other hand it demonstrates, that the limits of Hellas were not so narrow, as the passages heretofore considered might permit us to suppose. For Phœnix goes on to describe the cause of quarrel; and (478-80) says he took his course _through_ broad open Hellas, and came _into_ fertile Phthia, to Peleus the king. The supposition most consistent with the wording of these passages is, that Phthia comprised the principal district of the dominions of Peleus, while a portion of them may have fallen (as we elsewhere see was perhaps the case) under the name of Hellas: but they absolutely place the abode of Amyntor outside the realm of Peleus; and therefore, in saying that Phœnix left Hellas, and that he fled from his home through Hellas, they imply necessarily that Hellas, the region from which he fled, was, in part at least, outside of that realm to which he fled.

But these passages will harmonise perfectly with each other, and with those formerly examined, if we suppose that Hellas meant the whole of Northern Greece generally, but that a particular portion of it had been more definitely stamped with the name of Phthia, as the chief seat of Peleus and the Myrmidons. For then the original abode of Phœnix might be in Hellas, as he says (in ix. 447) that it was: and yet he would pursue his way through Hellas, as he says (ibid. 478) that he did: and he would also leave Hellas, namely by coming into Phthia: and moreover the dominions of Peleus might go beyond what was commonly known by the particular designation of Phthia, and might include some portion of Hellas, as, from Il. ii. 683, they evidently did.

This supposition is recommended to us, not only by its conforming to all the requisite conditions, and furnishing a convenient construction for all the passages we have examined, but by the fact that Phthia, and Phthia alone, is commonly mentioned in the poem as the home of Achilles and the Myrmidons: which shows that they had a more special relation to the territory known by that name, than to Hellas.

If any thing be still wanting, the proof is brought to completeness by two other passages: the one (Il. x. 261-7), which tells us that this Amyntor, son of Ormenus, dwelt in Eleon; dwelt there permanently, since Autolycus stole from him an helmet, by breaking into his substantial well-built house,

πύκινον δόμον ἀντιτορήσας[498]:

and the other the verse of the Catalogue[499], which places Eleon in Bœotia. These passages therefore clearly appear to carry the name Hellas as far as Bœotia, and to make it reach continuously from thence to Phthia. And if Hellas comes down to Bœotia, then it includes Locris; and the various tribes of these regions may be included in the general name of Hellenes, though to all appearance they were not as yet familiarly and ordinarily so called. And if Locris and Bœotia, with part of Southern Thessaly (the dominions of Peleus), are included within the range of the name Hellas, we can have no difficulty in supposing that it included Northern Thessaly also, which must have been the pathway of the Helli to the South.

But we find Ἕλλας in another combination besides that with Phthia, in the four passages of the Odyssey, (one of them being a simple repetition of another,) which we have still to examine.

Now the line Od. iv. 726, repeated 816, is under suspicion, of which it is not worth while to scrutinise the justice: as the idea and force of it is just the same with that of Od. i. 344,

Ἀνδρὸς, τοῦ κλέος εὐρὺ καθ’ Ἑλλάδα καὶ μέσον Ἄργος.

This passage describes the fame of Ulysses as spread through the breadth of Hellas and mid-Argos; (or, from the heart of Argos to its extremities, right through or _all over_ Argos.) And again in Od.